Blog
2023
15/12/2023 - Anita and Mike's unreleased single Dance To The North Star and Moonlight Shadow with Anita's vocals.
By Simon Smithson:
A lot of people have been waiting to hear this hidden treasure for many years, Anita and Mike's unreleased single Dance To The North Star and Moonlight Shadow with Anita's vocals (instrumentation sounds like a different mix of the original recording). I recently purchased it from the former chief executive of Virgin Records Scandinavia. Please note that I will not be making it available in full quality, just theses videos on this post. This is because, as some of you may remember, I had some legal problems a few years ago when I tried to release an unreleased track after being given the wrong licencing information by prs. I don't want to risk anything similar happening. Please note that I am having some repetitive strain injury problems at the moment so won't be replying to many messages. I wanted to get this posted for you all as an early Christmas present though. Below is the story of the single which the seller messaged to me. If only 3 copies were made, this would explain why it has remained hidden for over 37 years. Enjoy, and Merry Christmas everyone!
"A lot of stories goes into this recording, I was CEO of Virgin in Scandinavia at the time and we had huge success with Mike Oldfield, "Crises" sold well over 500 000 copies, Anita was huge in Norway and this Polar session was a given Platinum record event. We @ Virgin therefore requested this one-of-single. Mike did all instrumental recordings in UK and came to Stockholm and Polar Studio 2 with the backing tracks for Anita to add vocals to. But Mike was extremely harsh on Anita during vocal recordings, she had to re-do, re-do, sing lines one by one, she almost broke down... The result was great but Mike, in the moods he were in those days, just said "no commercial release". As far as I know the German manufacturing plant Gutersloh only made 3 testpressings, one to Mike, one to Virgin UK and one to Virgin Sweden (this is the one). Just went through my Virgin notebooks from 1986 and the singles vocals were recorded @ ABBA Polar Studio Stockholm on thursday march 6, 1986"
Dance to the North Star can be listened here
Moonlight Shadow can be listened here
Cover
Label A
Label B