Monday, August 31, 2020

Mike Oldfield - Moonlight Shadow



I have been listening to Mike Oldfield’s “Moonlight Shadow” and other songs of his for well over a decade now, and it dawns on me, I barely know anything about the man. For example, I had no idea he had twenty studio albums, and has been consistently releasing new music since 1973. This stunned me, because it meant that I know at most, 5% of his music. This is great news, as it means I will be discovering songs I like by Oldfield for years to come.

Oldfield is a true wanderer of music. He has changed and explored a wide variety of styles throughout his long career. Impressively there are no gaps in his resume; he has produced new, often very new, music every few years or so. Few have that kind of creative drive or lasting endurance to maintain that sort of schedule. Naturally a trick to Oldfield’s variety is his use of many different instruments, but also, he has used a high number of different singers. What drew me to his music was all this, but it was his principle focus on the guitar which for me was the greatest appeal.

Like a lot of people, I am very partial to Oldfield’s “Moonlight Shadow.” From what I can gather this is his mostpopular and most well-known song. By far Oldfield’s biggest single, “Moonlight Shadow” hit number one on multiple charts through out Europe in 1983. Most of Oldfield’s music is very experimental resulting in ten, and twenty, minute songs, and “Moonlight Shadow” is the only song of his with a shortened radio edit that I know of.

Oldfield occasional sang, but he usually recruited singers, often female, to sing on his songs. “Moonlight Shadow” has Scottish singer Maggie Reilly, who I do not know very much about outside of this track.

One of the first “live” version of “Moonlight Shadow,” I ever watched, was on a German TV show where a black woman, possible Pepsi DeMacque (who is awesome on “Man in the Rain”), performed the vocals, whoever she was, she was clearly not Maggie Reilly, but it sounded just like Reilly. In fact, the entire live performance sounded identical to the studio version. It was a lip sync, which I thought was really strange, because no one was upset by it. It did not make any sense, Mike Oldfield was there with a guitar, why not just perform the song live? Obviously, this would be the part of the review where I post the video, but I cannot find it anymore. I am pretty sure I did not imagine it during a fever dream.

This is not especially important at the moment, but there will be more on lip syncing in future reviews.

In the many years I have been listening to “Moonlight Shadow” the lyrics have always had divided meaning to me, as I am unsure if the fallen individual taken away by the moonlight shadow has succumbed to a threat of nature of man. “Lost in a river” and “the trees that whisper” make me think of someone falling prey to the forces of nature, but the lines about being “shot six times by a man on the run,” is very descriptive, and does not leave a lot of room for interpretation. Perhaps multiple tales of people being taken away are being described.

I heard once that John Lennon’s assassination was the inspiration for “Moonlight Shadow” but that never made a lot of sense to me given the lyrical content. In some interview Oldfield explained that the song is mostly inspired by the movie “Houdini” which is not making perfect sense to me, but I have not seen that movie, so maybe it does.

This is the part of the review where I introduce my introduction to “Moonlight Shadow.” I do not live in Europe and I was born in late 1983, so I never really heard Mike Oldfield on the radio, at all. As a man with many hobbies, it was an AMV that introduced me to “Moonlight Shadow” and not the original version of the song.

Vampire Hunter D - Moonlight Shadow

The AMV uses the Missing Heart electric remix. I tend to hate remixes, but I like this one.

The “A” in this AMV is the second Vampire Hunter D movie “Bloodlust.” “Vampire Hunter D – Bloodlust” is based on the third book “Demon Deathcase,” the story, D is hired to return a girl abducted by a vampire; you could say she was taken away by a moonlight shadow. The early twist is that she was not taken against her will, the vampire and the human girl are in love and they are running away together. So, what does the ice-cold vampire hunter do? Watch the movie and find out, it is really good.

It might be considered cheesy to interpret lyrics literally, and the Vampire Hunter D AMV does so constantly with its chosen visuals. However, they manage to match visuals with lyrics perfectly throughout, to the point, where it is such a perfect pair that is so impressive that it cannot be cheesy. Like, “I watched your vision forming” is matched with the werewolf transformation sequence; or “the trees that whisper in the evening” being matched with the forest nymph controlling the trees to attack D, or “star was light in a silvery sky” we see the raining of Borgoff’s silver arrows falling on the undead ghouls Meier left behind as a trap; also “he was shot six times by a man on the run” we have Borgoff shooting Meier with silver arrows, I mean technically Borgoff shot him four times, once in each limp, but close enough. Every time the lyrics “caught in the middle of a desperate fight” they show a fight scene, my favorite choice being when they show the panning shot of the mutant mercenary group the Barbarois. Not to mention the literal full moon as the opening shot and Charlotte being taken by Meier accompanying the first utterance of being taken away by a moonlight shadow.

It is a perfect AMV, and I think it works better with the Missing Heart remix of “Moonlight Shadow” because of the more frantic pacing, and that is probably the key reason I do not hate it, but instead really like this version of the song.

The last two reviews, I gushed on about Daft Punk and Sturgill Simpson’s full Japanese animated albums, so I guess my mind is now thinking about AMVs, and when it came to discovering a cool song which led to learning about a very talented musician, this one is good tale I think.

Until next month, keep on rocking in the free world.

- King of Braves

No comments:

Post a Comment