Five Miles Out
Oh my my my. Mike Oldfield's 'Five Miles Out' has just come on the iTunes! Now that's a song to pull a curtain back on a standout moment.

A few weeks ago we put out a new Mike Oldfield Best Of and I just never got round to playing it. I was loading it onto the computer there imagining that I might want to hear it some day and that track popped on and (it was instantaneous) I slipped right down the memory drain.

Haha. Let me have my 'Stand By Me' moment. *Morgan Freeman voice* It was 1982, and I'd left school that June. Maybe I'd started Sixth Form, but maybe not quite yet. Anyway, a few of us lads went to a party thrown by an older brother of Simon, a vague friend on the fringes of our gang. His dad was a millionaire - he dealt in posh cars like Jaguars and BMWs but the whole family were hippies basically. The sort of hippies with money and businesses of their own, like Branson or Chris Blackwell. There were a lot of them about in Surrey in the early 1980s. There was a definite type.

The Men: open-necked white shirts, copies of Playboy strewn over the place, Eric Clapton LP's. The Women: Bebe Buell suntans, sitting in kitchens flicking through interiors magazines, often hungover behind dark glasses. As a pair: well, they were nice mostly, although you found out that one or both always seemed to be having affairs. Or rowing, going hard at each other, even in front of you when you were round there. They often ended up divorced. I suppose I sort of admired them and judged them at the same time. They were certainly a different class. Mum and Dad and their friends Anne and Vic and Brian and Wendy and Wendy and Dave and Pat and Dave were certainly nothing like that. Titbits rather than Playboy, Vauxhall Vivas over BMWs.

Anyway, this particular family had bought a derelict mansion in the middle of some woods near... Guidlford was it? Deepdene it was called and I mean it really was derelict - there were plants growing in through the windows, great sagging vaulted ceilings, missing stairs on the staircase. I don't think it had any doors, even; it was just this big shell hidden in a dell. Looking back it closely resembled Big and Little Edie's gaff in 'Grey Gardens', although nobody was actually living there. Because I never visited again, I've often wondered if they finished doing it up and moved in proper.

We were the only really young people at the party - Simon, my best friend Michael and Elwyn Leak (I swear I'm not making that last name up). The rest were Simon's brother's friends and to a man also posh hippies but of the more dropout, Art School variety. Sheepskin coats, languid voices, the lot - to us they were just like Neil and his friends at that party in The Young Ones. Julie is the one actual name I remember because Michael and I did a mean impression of her for years afterwards. We used to shake pretend long blonde hair and go, "Make LOVE!" in a posh, slow voice, although it's really doubtful she ever said anything of the sort.

Parts of the house had electricity, run off a generator, so there were coloured lightbulbs strung about and Fleetwood Mac, Lindisfarne and, inevitably, Pink Floyd on the stereo. Very strong herbal smell in the air. Simon got a lump of hash off his brother and we all shared a joint - it was my first time - and it wasn't long before we were all in hysterics, probably making jokes about 'Make Love' Julie. I remember Michael asking if Simon's brother if he had any decent music i.e. the Birthday Party (the answer was no, obviously) and me requesting Shalamar's 'Friends' LP (even more obviously a no).

But something very strange started happening. The tuneless, dirge music (Gong?) actually started sounding quite good and then got even better when somebody put on 'Five Miles Out'. I swear at the time I'd never even heard 'Tubular Bells' by Mike Oldfield, just 'Portsmouth' and 'In Dulce Jubilo' which Legs & Co always danced to on Top Of The Pops because, it was widely known, Mike Oldfield was a recluse and lived like a wild man in the middle of nowhere. Soon I'd inched myself even closer to the speaker. I couldn't believe how all the component parts of the music - the vocoder vocal, the guitar, the woman - sounded so separate and distinct with all this air and space and echo round them. It was amazing, a real revelation. When the different voices all came in about half way through I thought I might actually have a nervo. It was all a bit too real, knowworrImean?

I don't think any of us made it to the end of Mike's album though. Zonked right out. I woke up, freezing, on the floor in the grey of dawn. One of the hippies had put a coat over me. The four of us went downstairs to the half-exposed kitchen where like savages we ate handfuls of dry cornflakes and cream from one of those aerosol things. I remember a cup of nasty black tea. Then we went noodled our way off to the station and that was that. Like I say, I never went to Deepdene again and can't have seen Simon since he dropped out of Sixth Form sometime during that first term. Funny how you grow apart.

I was actually going to write something about iMacs and iPhones but oh well.