Mike Oldfield – Five Miles Out

80-gram pressing, gatefold jacket

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 rock-pop electronica style. Not wishing to stray too far from his conceptual roots, the first track on Five Miles Out, an album based around the crash of an airplane of which Oldfield was the pilot, is the epic 'Taurus II', an unrestrained 25-minute track tinged with hints towards Oldfield's creative past — including the use of uilleann pipes and a chorus made up of female vocals. Says Oldfield "To write lyrics you've got to have something to write about. Well, this time I had something to write about: my airplane theme. That's what the album's all about. Every time I go up in a small plane something terrible happens. One engine stops, we go into a thunderstorm or snowstorm, or we're surrounded by fog."

He continued "It's just me. It relates to hundreds of different sorts of music in different ways, every little bit of music that ever made me think, 'Oh, I like that' — English blues, English hard rock, a bit of bluegrass, Irish music, synthesizer music, classical music, even nursery rhymes and children's music."