WHY EXILE MIKE STAYS ALL AT SEA
GONE SAILINGL Mike with his wife Fanny
By Adam Helliker
SO DISILLUSIONED is multi- millionaire composer Mike Oldfi eld with Britain that he has rejected a formal education for his children and is teaching them himself while he sails his family on a yacht around the Caribbean.
The Berkshire-born musician, whose haunting 1973 album Tubular Bells made him £30million, views the UK as being “ludicrously restrictive” and wants to give his son Jake, six, and daughter Eugenie, two, more freedom.
“Unless you want to be a nuclear physicist there is nothing you can’t teach yourself on the internet,” Oldfi eld tells me from his yacht moored off the Virgin Islands. “My children are getting a wonderful education learning all about sea life and meeting other children who sail into the harbour.
“I’m teaching Jake economics. He gets a dollar when he does a job for me and I tell him to save and then he can buy a toy. He’s already started to negotiate and now wants $2 .
“I don’t want them to go to the same sort of prep school I went to where I couldn’t wait to leave. There is an addiction to education in Britain with far too many rules. You have to go to college and get a degree, then emerge at 24 still not knowing what you want to do, in debt and not having a clue about paying bills.” Oldfi eld, 56, left Britain three years ago, selling his £3million house in Gloucestershire and moving to Mallorca. He says what fi nally drove him away was being caught in the 2007 fl oods, which nearly washed away the van he was driving on the M5.
“That was it for me. What with the ban on smoking as well, I went in search of a better climate. I felt the UK had become too strict and intrusive, with its health and safety culture. Now I have total freedom to go where
I wish. What better life can I give my children?” For the past 10 months Oldfi eld and his third wife Fanny have been cruising the Virgin Islands on their yacht, Sea Dragon.
“I avoid the British islands because they have tobacco enforcement police; I nearly got arrested on Tortola [a British Virgin Island] for smoking on an open terrace a couple of weeks ago. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.”
Although he has made 20 other albums, it was Tubular Bells that made Oldfi eld a star and helped establish Richard Branson’s Virgin Records. His back catalogue is currently being remastered.
Returning to the bridge of the Sea Dragon, the composer says decisively: “It’s just a fact that the old Great Britain is gone. Nothing would induce me to go back to the UK.”
