Day Three hundred and thirty five - Moonlight shadow

You know how sometimes artists - and I'm referring to musicians here - or bands only are really important to you in a very specific period of your life? Granted, there will always be those bands that come into your life and, whenever that may have been, they will remain with you for as long as you live. But there will always be some that remain tied to that one part of your life, and you don't necessarily know their discography that well - maybe you only listened to a couple of tracks here and there, and they resonated deeply with you, and you thought why not try and listen to the whole album, and is turns out to be not that great. But that does not hinder your love for those songs, and neither does it move you to want to listen to more by whichever band it was. Right? Well, for me - out of many examples I could produce - the guilty party is one Mike Oldfield. According to Wikipedia, Mike is a multi-instrumentalist who plays progressive rock / world / folk / classical / ambient / new-age / pop / experimental / minimalist music. And all that may be true - I wouldn't know. He already had a fairly large discography by the time I first learned about his music, and back never since then have I had any real interest in exploring his body of work since I first listened to one of his songs. Though retroactively I've come to learn that in fact, even younger, I'd listened to one of his songs - his most famous, quite likely - when I saw the trailer for a little known horror movie called 'The Exorcist' and the song featured prominently in it. But let's go to a little later, shall we? Let's go to 1983.

It's 1983, and I am starting to develop a love for music. There always was music in my house, mainly of the pop variety, but then there were also stuff like Santana - whose 'Abraxas' had a cover that scared the bejesus out of me - as well as Pink Floyd, and Genesis, and Dire Straits, and Queen, and to be fair, all of that was pop to me. I hadn't yet learned that there were different genres of music. But I was devouring everything I could get my hands on, and on saturdays there was this show on TV that listed the top selling records for that week, and some of those would have videos for the songs. It was a ritual for me and my family to always watch that show, usually after lunch, and on one of those magical afternoons, I saw the video for a song called 'Moonlight Shadow' for the first time. It was love at first sight. It was love at first listen. I immediately wanted to listen to the song on repeat, but I'd only be able to catch the song occasionally on the radio - we didn't have a tape recorder yet, or a stereo system - or sometimes the video would play again. And I burned that video in my brain - or so I thought. Maybe about a year or so later, maybe a bit more, I started seeing the posters for a movie called 'Amadeus', and that poster scared the living shit out of me, for some reason I still can't understand today. And in my mind, the video for 'Moonlight Shadow' involved a shadowy, masked figure shooting someone - perhaps in a duel. The truth is that the video does involver someone shooting someone else, indeed in a duel. But no masked figure, of which I could've sworn I could vividly remember multiple different shots of. And what with the advent of the internet, of course I had to look up the video - it contains no such shots, and there are no alternate cuts to it, other than an edit that omits a verse. I've watched the video countless times since then, and while I can see where my young mind might've superimposed imagery from 'Amadeus' and maybe other sources, what I had pictured for so long had never been there.

But the song itself has remained with me, all these long years. I'd be lying, though, if I said it's my favourite of his. Then again... to the best of my knowledge, I've only listened to three other songs of his. And I say this with a caveat : I did have one album of his - 'Crises', where 'Moonlight Shadow' was featured, and eh, I didn't love it. I never felt that urge to return to it, and eventually I'd just end up recording the song by itself on a mixtape or the other. And it was probably through those mixtapes - we'd by then gotten a crappy stereo system, of which only the turntable still exists - that I got to know some more of his songs. These songs are called 'To France', 'Five Miles Out' and 'Islands', this one with the great Bonnie Tyler on vocals. And I love these songs to death, they're still featured in one of my playlists. I don't listen to them daily, or that often really, but every now and then I put them on, and I'm taken back to that era between '83 and maybe '86 or '87, where they were my favourite songs. They'd soon be losing their prominence in my listening habits, though. It would be around this time that Iron Maiden would come to dominate my imagination. Still, I hold these songs in such high regard. And I do know that Mike Oldfield has a legendary and celebrated career, and there's a bit of me that wonders if I'll ever have the patience and the time to get to know that discography.