Five Miles Out is the seventh record album by Mike Oldfield, released in 1982, at a time when his music was moving away from large-scale symphonic pieces towards a more accessible pop style. It is one of the very few albums on which Oldfield sings lead vocals, as he is noted for not having any confidence in his voice’s qualities. The album uses the Fairlight CMI as a main instrument and produced two singles. “Five Miles Out” was also released as a single. Despite being less than five minutes long, it had an unusually complex structure, with multiple vocal parts. The lyrics concerned Oldfield’s experience of a near-tragic aeroplane flight. Reilly sings with a clean voice while Oldfield uses vocoder most of time himself. The song features the same guitar riff that appears in the beginning of “Taurus II”.
[via Anika Holla-Lori]
New Music United 