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‘A song of sorrow and grieving’: Mike Oldfield, John Lennon and the myth of Moonlight Shadow

Mike Oldfield in 1993 - Redferns
Mike Oldfield in 1993 - Redferns

On the night of December 8 1980 an English rock star was making his way through the mad rush of Manhattan when the unthinkable happened. Mike Oldfield had just arrived at Virgin Records’s HQ at Perry Street in the West Village when terrible news arrived from uptown. John Lennon had been shot dead at 10.50pm entering his apartment at The Dakota building, on Central Park West.

Like anyone who loved music, Oldfield was devastated. The Beatles may not have been a particularly discernible influence on his dense and intellectual prog-pop. They were, however, still The Beatles. And Lennon was a 40-year-old husband and father, cruelly cutdown by a madman.

And then, a few years later, Oldfield wrote a song about it. Or did he? The urban myth that Moonlight Shadow, his haunting hit from May 1983, is a retelling of Lennon’s death took root almost from the start. It has persisted ever since.

Moonlight Shadow is clearly about somebody getting shot. And, as conveyed via Scottish singer Maggie Reilly’s heartbreaking vocals, the events are relayed from the perspective of a woman. The belief was that Oldfield was channeling the inner voice of Yoko Ono, who watched helplessly as Mark Chapman gunned down her husband, six hours after having Lennon autograph a copy of his Double Fantasy LP.  “He was shot six times by a man on the run,” sings Reilly. “And she couldn't find how to push through.”

True, the details don’t match entirely. Lennon was shot four times, rather than six. And he was killed on a Monday whereas Moonlight Shadow takes place on a Saturday. Those, though, are mere minutiae. The song otherwise crackles with verisimilitude. It feels it’s about a real event. Lennon’s assassination was the obvious candidate. Moonlight Shadow conveys the tragedy, the confusion, the sheer bolt-from-the-blue weirdness of the murder.

“We never discussed it,” says Simon Phillips, the legendary drummer and producer who played on Moonlight Shadow and toiled at the mixing desk with Oldham on the accompanying album, Crises (released May 27, 1983). “I don’t think he’d been writing lyrics that long.”

“He [Oldfield] was fairly new to lyrics. I’m not much of a wordsmith. But I do have a feeling for how they sound in a song. What I do remember is that they sound great when Maggie Reilly sings. He [Oldfield] was at the console when she was singing. He knew exactly how he wanted every line to be read.”

Oldfield himself went back and forth on the provenance of Moonlight Shadow, which topped the charts around Europe and remains a staple of drive-time radio (try to think of somebody you know who doesn’t like Moonlight Shadow – it’s a short list, isn’t it?). He didn’t consciously write it about Lennon’s death, he said. But that wasn’t to say it wasn’t, at some level, a commentary on the killing.

“Not really... well, perhaps, when I look back on it, maybe it was,” he told journalist Gareth Randell in 1995. “I actually arrived in New York that awful evening when he was shot and I was staying at the Virgin Records house in Perry Street, which was just a few blocks down the road from the Dakota Building where it happened, so it probably sank into my subconscious.

“It was originally inspired by a film I loved – Houdini  starring Tony Curtis which was about attempts to contact Houdini after he'd died, through spiritualism... it was originally a song influenced by that, but a lot of other things must have crept in there without me realising it.”

Mike Oldfield in 1989 - PA
Mike Oldfield in 1989 - PA

He expanded on the thought in his 2007 autobiography, Changeling, where he revealed he had attempted an earlier version, with different words and with punk star Hazel O’Connor singing. Dissatisfied, he stayed up late with a bottle of wine and tried again.

“A lot of the lyrics happened by accident as one word would rhyme with another, then a gun got in there somewhere and then got a bit West Side Story-ish,” he wrote.

“Some people suggested it may have had something to do with John Lennon – I never meant there to be, but as it happened I had been in New York the night he was murdered. Perhaps there was something that crept into my subconscious about it.

Moonlight Shadow is at one level an unlikely hit. The subject matter is bleak – the song radiates mournfulness. Thirty-seven years on it still packs a melancholy punch. It’s a tune that makes you stop whatever you’re doing – drinking coffee, staring out the bus window – and fold into yourself a little.

The irony, though, is that Oldfield wrote it partially with the charts in mind, He certainly understood Moonlight Shadow had the potential to zoom up the top 10, and get Virgin Records boss Richard Branson off his back.

“Mike says … ‘Now we're going to record a single’,” recalled Phil Spalding, the bassist from the sessions, in an essay on his website. “Now I'm thinking … “How does he know it's going to be a single ??? Does he have a crystal ball or something?” I’d NEVER heard anyone say in advance that a certain song was definitely going to be a single.”

Mike Oldfield's hit album Tubular Bells
Mike Oldfield's hit album Tubular Bells

Oldfield was approaching 30 and fabulously wealthy following the international breakthrough a decade earlier of his first LP, Tubular Bells. That project had been recorded in a week on a 16-track tape machine, becoming the surprise debut hit for fledgling Branson’s Virgin Records.

Branson and Oldfield had a testy relationship from the outset. In 1973 Oldfield had despaired, for instance, as Branson pushed for Tubular Bells to be called Breakfast In Bed. “He had a photo of a boiled egg with blood dripping out, which he thought would look good as a cover,” Oldfield remembered. “I hated it, but when I said Tubular Bells, he said he still preferred Breakfast In Bed. I almost had to beg.”

The lesson he had taken from the incident was that if you didn’t stand up to Branson you risked being steamrolled. That remained the case 10 years on. Virgin wanted another hit on the scale of the 15-million selling Tubular Bells. Oldfield didn’t object in theory, but he was also determined to push himself artistically.

The solution he came up with was Crises, recorded at the luxury Tilehouse Studios he had built adjoining his house in Denham, Buckinghamshire. The a-side was entirely devoted to the proggy title track, featuring a rare lead vocal from Oldfield (who didn’t rate himself as a singer). The b-side was given over to catchier pop numbers, starting with Moonlight Shadow and including Yes’s Jon Anderson on In High Places and r&b vocalist Roger Chapman on Shadow on the Wall.

“One side is very commercial, full of singles, while the other is more the material I want to do for personal satisfaction,” Oldfield would say when promoting Crises. “It’s a case of keeping everybody happy.”

Mike Oldfield and Richard Branson in 1987 - Nils Jorgensen/Shutterstock
Mike Oldfield and Richard Branson in 1987 - Nils Jorgensen/Shutterstock

“Moonlight Shadow was very different from everything else on the album,’ says Phillips, who was surprised to be asked to co-produce with Oldfield. “It was a tune very close to his heart. He always wanted a lot of control over it.”

He remembers Oldfield as shy, almost introverted. But with a steely side. “He rang me up and said ‘ah, you produce too– do you fancy coming to produce me?’. We did a trial week. I knew I needed an engineer so I called someone from Air Studios [the famous London complex operated by George Martin].

“We turned up the next Monday morning. We did one day. On Tuesday, I turned up and… no engineer. He [Oldfield] said, “oh I fired him – you can be engineer now” . He came back with the thickest manual I had ever seen [for Oldfield’s state of the art Neve 8108 mixing console], plonked it on down and said “I’ll be back at three hours”. I was chucked in at the deep end.”

Oldfield was clean living by the standards of the time, Phil Spalding remembered. A keg of Guinness has been installed at Tilehouse. While Spalding and a few of the other musicians smoked weed from Afghanistan, Oldfield restricted himself to a few contemplative sups. He saved the eye-swirling excess for his songs.

Office hours were kept. Moonlight Shadow might have been a deeply eerie single but the circumstances in which it was creating were businesslike. There was an early start and the musicians would work past tea-time

“He was very introverted, doesn’t really smile,” says Phillips, recalling an early, getting-to-know meeting with Oldfield at a rib joint in New York. “Really reserved.”

Moonlight Shadow was a soft-rock blockbuster and not just in the UK. It peaked at four in the British charts and went to number one in Italy, Spain, Switzerland and Sweden. As is often the way in pop, however, this would prove as much curse as blessing. Having had a vision of Mike Oldfield: Chart Star, Richard Branson wanted more

“I was at somebody's birthday party just after Moonlight Shadow had been a big hit and of course they all thought, 'Wow, big hit – got to do them all exactly like that then!' which was a blinkered mentality, and unluckily I followed that advice and wrote a lot of songs, most of which weren't very good,” Oldfield said. “You can't force things like that. All you can do is what is right for you at the time.”

Simon Phillips recalls his own run-in with Branson regarding Oldfield. He was about to fly to America for recording sessions (the name of the artist escapes him all these years later). Branson called demanding he work with Oldfield on his next album Five Miles Out (the 1982 predecessor to Crises).

“Richard was not taking 'no' for an answer. He never does,” says Phillips (who later drummed with The Who and Toto). “I said, “Richard I’m leaving on a plane tomorrow. This was before Virgin Airlines – he couldn’t just put me on another flight. I said, “I’m really sorry Richard”. He just slammed the phone down.”