manintherain
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Posted: April 03 2007, 08:57 |
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Why does a rock star with a GBP 20m fortune need to take out a lonely
Evening Standard (London), Jul 29, 1999 by Patrick Sawer
AT THE AGE of 15, sitting in a humble bed-sit, he composed an album that would sell eight million copies, stay at No 1 for 15 months and launch him on his way to a GBP 20 million fortune.
Twenty six years on, Mike Oldfield, the seemingly self-destructive composer of Tubular Bells, is reduced to advertising for girlfriends in a Swedish lonely hearts column.
His latest attempt to find happiness follows numerous failed relationships and years of seeking solace in drink, drugs and hedonistic revelry on Ibiza.
While he was preparing for a concert in Stockholm this week, the following free advert was placed in the tabloid paper Expressen: "Man seeks woman.
Forty-six-year-old nice, good-looking, successful musician with tidy finances seeks you - a faithful, wonderful woman aged 25-35 for a romantic life together." The most important thing was that any potential partner should be nice.
This is not the first time Oldfield has sought love through the small ads.
As he confessed to Expressen, two similar appeals in the Sunday Times, in October and November last year, failed to bring lasting romance - but did throw light on his tortured personal life. Oldfield, cutting his age by three years, described himself as "fun-loving with occasional artistic moods". A third advert followed in January.
When he placed the first he was still living with his German girlfriend of four years, Miriam. One woman who responded soon discovered that Oldfield's controlled musical compositions belied his volatile character. Chicago-born jewellery designer Amy Lauer, 31, said Oldfield would rage at her if anything interrupted his routine; she was not allowed to speak to him during his morning "creative time" and she was not allowed to listen to any music other than his own.
"It made me feel worthless," Ms Lauer said in an interview earlier this year. "Michael is a spoiled brat so he has no friends. I've never given so much respect to another. I gave him chance after chance to change and show me the same respect."
During their five-month affair the couple spent time at Atlantis the GBP 1.7 million six-bedroom home built into rocky cliffs on Ibiza which Oldfield is now trying to sell - where Ms Lauer claimed he drank heavily, took cocaine and one evening collapsed in the road.
Ibiza was the musician's playground, where he could indulge every whim and excess.
"There's something about it which brings out the best and worst in people," he said in a rare newspaper interview last summer.
"In summer the place turns into Bacchanalian madness. I tried to keep away from the club scene but was drawn back each time. Once, around 6am, I remember stumbling out of Pasha, my favourite club, out of my head, screaming and waving my hands around.
"I also crashed my car after being way over the limit and was banned for a year. Mostly, though, the drugs and alcohol would make me aggressive and depressed. The comedown was awful. I'd have a hangover for three months." How could it go so terribly wrong for someone who in 1973 seemed to have the world at his feet? Tubular Bells made Oldfield rich and launched Richard Branson's fledgling record label Virgin. While Branson went from one successful venture to another, Oldfield could never surpass his first precocious hit, despite producing more than 30 albums over the next 2 1/2 decades.
Some blame his troubled childhood. Oldfield's mother Maureen was a nurse, who became an alcoholic and manic depressive and spent 15 years in and out of mental institutions. As a boy Oldfield escaped into music, picking up a guitar at six and playing in folk concerts by the time he was 13.
He left school at 15 and, after a spell with a band, spent a year working on Tubular Bells. Months after the album's triumph his mother committed suicide. Oldfield turned to alcohol and LSD, at one point describing himself as "halfway down the corridor to madness".
Seeking salvation in the re-birthing course Exegesis, he met and six weeks later married course-leader Diane Fuller.
After a month they split up. Old-field went on to have a long relationship with PR girl Sally Cooper, with whom he had three children, and then with Norwegian singer Anita Hegerland, who bore him a daughter.
Explaining why he left, he said: "I was scared of them developing into repeats of my family."
While still seeing Ms Lauer he began an affair with actress Emma Rolph, 31, who replied to his January advert. The latest advert would suggest that too ended in failure.
"He said he always picked women he could save because he was trying to recreate his childhood relationship with his mother," said Ms Lauer. "I think he feels guilty he couldn't save her."
Can it be that, after so much inner turmoil, there is an Expressen reader out there waiting to save Oldfield?
Copyright 1999
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.
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