Mike Oldfield 'Moonlight Shadow'

Chart peak: 4

YouTube

Let's get the obvious thing out of the way first, shall we? "4am in the morning." Of course it's in the morning! That sort of phrasing has always annoyed me, and it's worse than usual in this case because it's not even necessary for scansion. "Four O'clock in the morning" would be less jarring and is anything a little bit folkier.

Anyway, now I've got that out of the way, I can write about the rest of the song. When this was a current record (I have some memory of hearing it in the end-of-year chart for 1983) I had no idea who Mike Oldfield actually was, or what sort of music he might ordinarily be expected to make. Anyway, this was the first single from his album Crises, possibly his most successful one without the word "Tubular" in the title, and (I now know) much more conventional a pop song than the sort of epic multi-layered pieces with which he first made his name. Indeed, the video seems to present it as a sort of wintertime, folksy singalong around the fire, and perhaps that's how Oldfield himself perceived it; in reality, of course, it's still a very produced-sounding record, clearly the result of a lot of studio time which can make it sound a little bit heavy-handed to these ears. On the positive side though, Maggie Reilly's vocal adds some humanity to the process and I've got to concede that even though Mike Oldfield is the sort of musician I tend to dislike (and by some accounts not a particularly appealing person either) he's managed to create a decent record, though nowhere near as important a one as I suspect he thinks this is.

Incidentally, I'd never thought of this until I read it on Wikipedia, but apparently at the time some people thought the lyrics were somehow alluding to the death of John Lennon, presumably because they contain the word "gun". Of course, this comparison falls apart after even the most cursory examination: Lennon wasn't shot six times by a man on the run, it wasn't a Saturday night, and it certainly wasn't 4 am in the morning...

Available on:Crises [MP3 download]