Mike Oldfield – Magic Touch
1988 · Directed by Alex Proyas
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Best comments
1.“Always loved this song back in the day but never knew its title or singer. It was my very first internet search. Thanks, AltaVista!”
More comments
- 2.“Curious fact: this video was directed by Alex Proyas, director of The Crow, I, Robot and Dark City.”Translated from Spanish
- 3.“Fun fact: this song is from 1988. Yeah, I know... stylistically, it shows.”
The story
Six years before The Crow, Alex Proyas was shooting music videos – Crowded House, INXS, and this one. Magic Touch was Mike Oldfield's pop-rock shot at American radio, the first single from his 1987 album Islands, co-produced with Geoff Downes. The video is European chateaus and rolling waves, and it was part of The Wind Chimes, a video album where every track on Islands got its own clip, mixing what passed for cutting-edge computer graphics in 1988 with real footage.
The voice is its own little saga. Max Bacon sang the original, but he was still under contract to Arista, so he couldn't appear on the European releases. Jim Price sang the UK version, and that's the one here. Bacon's take went to America, where the song hit number ten on Billboard's Album Rock Tracks chart and sat there four weeks, with more than 150 rock stations playing it by early 1988.
This copy is a fan upload from 2008, not an official channel.
