Why hasn an official Mike Oldfield biography been published?
Annie Nightingale is a BBC Radio presenter, who was a a friend of Mike’s (and was one of the the people who advised him to sign with Clive Banks). Around 1992, Annie suggested to Mike that his life story would make a good read, so he asked her to write it. Annie made hours of interview cassettes with Mike talking about his life in, as she put it, “extremely graphic detail” – apparently Mike says things about his parents that she could hardly believe. She wrote some sample chapters, and found a publisher willing to take the project on. Unfortunately, CBL asked for an advance that was considered “unreasonably large” – the publisher’s argument being that even though Mike Oldfield’s biography was not likely to be a long-term bestseller, they had to make some kind of profit on it, and CBL’s terms would have destroyed their chance of profitability. They tried to reach a compromise, but CBL stuck to their demand, the publisher pulled out, and the project fell into limbo. However, as far as I
