Ommadawn
The following year Mike Oldfield went to work hard on his third album. Annoyed by the bad reviews of Hergest Ridge, he asked Richard Branson to bring a complete recording studio to his house so he could use it at his leisure. No sooner said than done, he set up the studio in a bedroom at The Beacon. At the beginning of the year his mother had died, and Mike thought of a record with a "Celtic" sound as a tribute to the Irish origins of his mother, who was born in Dublin.
Mike Oldfield surrounded himself with very diverse musicians and filled his third album with surprising instruments from musical traditions as diverse as rock, classical music, Greek folklore, Celtic Irish music or African percussion. At the request of our musician, the Irish singer Clodagh Simonds wrote some verses in Gaelic where the word Amadàn (crazy, stupid) appeared. Oldfield liked this word so much that he adapted it as the title of the album, which would eventually be called Ommadawn (1975). Mike Oldfield has stated that he worked on both Ommadawn and Tubular Bells, and that in fact it is one of the albums with which he feels most satisfied. Some surveys reveal that for the majority of his followers it is the best album of his career along with his debut.
Ommadawn, Cover photo by David Binsley
The critical and commercial success of Ommadawn was instant and gave Mike Oldfield an undisputed reputation as a young musical genius. All this earned him a period of peace that he took advantage of to move. That year he had been looking for a large house in which to build his own studio, and he found it in a small village called Bisley, in the county of Gloucestershire. The mansion, dating back to the 16th century, is called Througham Slad, and in the barn he installed a first-class recording studio.
Ommadawn, Group Photo taken at The Manor
Ommadawn represents, in our opinion, the stage of musical maturity of Mike Oldfield. The experiments of Hergest Ridge were consolidated giving way to a much more homogeneous sound. The structure of the album is also more coherent, with the right number of repetitions of each part and a great balance between dramatic, lyrical and humorous passages. The sound of the electric guitar becomes more dramatic, acquiring "cosmic" resonances. In relation to this instrument we find several virtuosic passages that would make a fortune in his career: the solo of sixes in the first part, the dramatic final solo, also of the first part, which he recorded - according to the author himself - in the middle of a lightning storm and the final solo of the second part of the album.
There has been a lot of talk about the genesis of the term "Ommadawn". The composer himself, in a 2017 interview about Return to Ommadawn, explained to us that the Gaelic term Amadàn, which appears in the text written by Simonds, means “fool”, or “stupid”. It seems that he liked the word so much that he adapted it to his taste. For Oldfield, this “fool” would be the classic “touched by divinity” character, which is present in many traditional cultures. His qualities would make others see him as a madman, even if in reality he was a kind of shaman, healer or visionary.
The truth is that Amadàn is an ancient character in Gaelic poetry. In the medieval poem Eachtra an Amadáin Mhóir (The Adventure of the Great Fool), of which several manuscripts have been preserved, this character appears as a replica of Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval. It is known that Perceval was the knight of King Arthur who conquered the Holy Grail, which he was able to do thanks to his innocence and rusticity, as he was the only one of the knights of the Round Table “pure in heart and body”. Friedrich Nietzsche ridiculed Richard Wagner’s Parsifal among other things because, in his opinion, the term Parsifal meant “idiot”.
Text: Xavier Alern