Another country
Taking flight: Mike Oldfield prepares to launch his glider, Hergest Ridge, Herefordshire, 1974.
Rest, relaxation and panic attacks revisited. By Andrew Male.
Michael Putland/Getty Images
Mike Oldfield ★★★★
Hergest Ridge 50th Anniversary
ISLAND/UNIVERSAL. BR/CD/DL/LP
WHEN HERGEST Ridge first appeared in 1974, Mike Oldfield was a mess. Eight months on from the release of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, which used the opening theme of Oldfield’s debut LP, Tubular Bells, to underpin the film’s mood of supernatural disquiet, the lifelong introvert had become a reluctant music superstar. Tubular Bells was Number 1 around the world and Virgin’s Richard Branson was desperate for another chart-topping follow-up but Oldfield, refusing to tour, drinking too much, retreated to a small country house in Kington, Herefordshire, where he spent time flying home-made model gliders on a nearby peak, Hergest Ridge, that traversed the England/Wales border. “I was covering the telephone with a pillow,” writes Oldfield in his autobiography, Changeling. “I just wanted to be left alone.”