Five Miles Out takes its name from a flight that nearly went terribly wrong. In 1982 Mike Oldfield — by then a keen amateur pilot — flew into a fierce storm that came close to bringing his aircraft down, then came home and turned the experience into a song. That song gave the album both its title and its cover image, a small plane climbing out of the clouds, and it closes a record that swings between a twenty-five-minute instrumental epic and some of the most direct pop Oldfield ever put on tape.

The short version

Five Miles Out (1982) is Mike Oldfield’s seventh studio album, recorded between the autumn of 1981 and early 1982 in Denham, just outside London, with the touring band he had assembled for the road. Like the two records before it, it splits into a long instrumental suite and a set of shorter songs: side one is filled by the twenty-five-minute Taurus II, while side two runs from the pop single Family Man to the storm-tossed title track. It reached number seven in the UK — his best-selling album to that point, and his first to crack the top ten since Ommadawn in 1975.

Out of the storm

The story behind the title is true, and Oldfield rarely tired of telling it. During the QE2 tour, on a flight between Barcelona and San Sebastian, his light aircraft ran into a storm that a faulty forecast had failed to warn of. For a few minutes it was far from certain the plane would make it; it came through, and Oldfield — shaken but safe — poured the whole episode into the title track, an urgent, aviation-themed rocker whose very name borrows the language of the cockpit, a pilot’s call of his position on the approach. The cover completes the picture: a Beechcraft 18 breaking clear of a bank of cloud, and, inside the gatefold, the actual studio track sheet for Taurus II, its instruments mapped across all twenty-four tracks of the tape.

The sound

For all the drama around it, Five Miles Out is at heart a band record, and it sounds tougher and more electric than the pastoral Oldfield of the 1970s. His touring musicians — among them Maggie Reilly, whose voice is everywhere on the album — give it muscle and drive, while Oldfield folds the newer keyboard technology of the day into his layered guitars, banks of small bells and the uilleann pipes that lend Taurus II its Irish colour. Even the epic is rockier than before: the old long-form patience is still there, but standard rock instruments now carry the weight.

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The songs

Taurus II fills the whole of side one, twenty-five minutes that pick up the thread of Taurus I from QE2 and run it through hard rock, folk, gentle vocal passages and sudden reprises, including a foretaste of themes that return later on the record. Side two opens with Family Man, a taut pop-rock song sung by Reilly about a family man who resists temptation and stays true to his wife and children; Oldfield wrote and recorded it first, though it became far better known when Hall & Oates covered it and rode it into the American top ten. Orabidoo is the other long piece, thirteen restless minutes that reprise a Taurus II theme and feature Oldfield’s own heavily processed vocal before a tender closing passage. Mount Teidi is a bright instrumental named after the volcano on Tenerife, driven by the drumming of Carl Palmer of Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Then the title track brings the record home: just over four minutes of pure momentum, with Oldfield and Reilly trading the vocal.

Reception and legacy

Five Miles Out restored Oldfield’s commercial standing. It reached number seven in Britain, his highest placing since the mid-1970s, went gold at home and in Germany and platinum in Spain, and launched what became the largest tour of his career. It also set the template he would follow to even greater success the very next year: a side-long instrumental for himself, a handful of sharp songs for everyone else, and a strong voice out front. On Crises that formula would hand him Moonlight Shadow; here it gave him Family Man and a storm story he would be dining out on for decades.

The verdict

Five Miles Out is the moment Oldfield the album artist and Oldfield the hitmaker learned to share a record, and it holds up better than that description might suggest. Taurus II is one of his strongest long pieces of the decade; Family Man and the title track prove he could write for the singles chart without embarrassment; and the whole thing is bound together by a real event and a constant forward drive. It is not the place to start with Mike Oldfield — Tubular Bells and Ommadawn come first — but it is one of the most enjoyable albums of his early-1980s run, and the clearest signpost to the hits that followed.

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