Anyone who grew up in the 1970s will remember Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, the iconic conceptual album featuring weird and wonderful instrumentals. The album, released in 1973, spent 250 weeks in the UK album charts once it had reached No 1, and was used as the theme tune to the film The Exorcist and won a 1974 Grammy Award for best instrumental composition. Within a year he had become a multi-millionaire.

Mike, 19, was the first artist signed by Richard Branson's newly-formed Virgin Records, when his debut album - recorded in Virgin's studio at Shipton-on-Cherwell, near Kidlington - made him an instant star.

It should have been a dream come true, but Mike found himself unable to cope with the fame. His mother's mental health problems had shaped his childhood and led to her eventual suicide when Mike was 21.

As Tubular Bells was released, panic attacks engulfed him. Branson urged him to do live tours, media junkets and promotions, when he barely had the confidence to step outside the studio. "I'd have heart palpitations, sweating, feelings that I was going to explode and disappear and die. I wanted to run somewhere but there was nowhere to run to."

Branson must have felt intense frustration with Mike, who simply felt unable to continue this wave of success. "Looking back, it's quite funny," he laughs. "I must have driven him round the bend. I wasn't being difficult, I was just mentally disturbed. It's taken me 30 years to sort myself out."

The second album, Hergest Ridge, was savaged by the critics but still went to No 1. "It was universally hated and reviled. Then the third album, Ommadawn, was accepted and then there was this period when my music world disintegrated with the advent of the punk rock movement."

It has taken years of therapy, meditation and a seminar on a New Age philosophy called Exegesis to steer him to a calmer, happier life. "The seminar made me confront my fear and face my panic," he explains. His autobiography, Changeling, charts his career, his struggles with depression and drink dependency, and how he has come to terms with his mother's death. "It was like an absolutely marathon psychotherapy session," he reflects. "It's putting away the whole experience up to my 54 years and leaves me free to live the rest of my life." Mike, the son of a Reading GP, had a happy childhood until he was seven, when his mother had a Down's Syndrome baby, who lived less than a year. She spiralled into depression and was sectioned when he was nine. Years of mental illness followed as she became addicted to prescription drugs and alcohol.

Mike escaped into music, playing acoustic guitar in his room and later joining Reading Folk Club, becoming a session musician, hanging out with his sister's friend Marianne Faithfull and her then boyfriend Mick Jagger. Mike was always interested in new technology. When he wrote Tubular Bells, it was rejected by so many different record companies he had all but given up.

"They said it wasn't marketable. It didn't fit into the existing categories. It wasn't blues or glam rock or classical. It didn't have a front-man singing words. It didn't even have drums."

Then, while working with a band who were rehearsing at Shipton Manor, he met the owner, Richard Branson, who was turning the manor into a recording studio.

"He was different. There was an energy about him which was infectious," he recalls. "He seemed from a different social class. He had bags of confidence and a big smile. He was all the things that I wasn't. I liked him."

Virgin executives were looking for a unique sound and were brave enough to go with it, even though it was as far away from mainstream as you could get. It was branded 'Progressive Rock'.

"Richard didn't pay much attention to me until Tubular Bells was successful," Mike recalls. "But when the album was finished, he pushed it with all his might and considerable personality."

When Tubular Bells soared up the charts, Mike wasn't prepared for the attention the success would bring. "I was going through a lot of problems psychologically and having that focus of attention made it worse. Success for many people is a terrible thing. You lose your privacy and can't trust anybody because you don't believe they like you, although they like to be associated with you. After a few years I realised that many of the people I believed to be friends were actually employees, they worked for me. I was paying people to be my friends."

He'd drink to stave off the panic attacks and at one point was getting through a bottle of brandy a day and a bottle of wine at night, with a bottle of vodka on hand to top himself up.

He ended up with severe stomach problems and realised he physically couldn't carry on. Now he has a bottle of wine with a meal, but doesn't drink before 8pm.

He also found it difficult to settle into relationships with women, he admits, and feels this may be because he was so upset when his parents split up, and again at his mother's death, that he didn't want to go through that sort of pain again.

"It wasn't until I went through normal psychotherapy sessions that I went through the grief that I'd been suppressing over her death. That grief was so deep and so extreme.

"I was also grieving over the loss of my happy family life which I'd had up until the age of six. It made me afraid to lose it again in my later life."

Mike tells me he has eight children, although I can only account for six of them and he won't talk about his private life.

He lives with his second wife Fanny, who is 23 years his junior, and their son Jake in a £5m 19th-century estate in Gloucestershire. Family life is great now, he says, but it has been a rocky road to contentment.

In the 70s Mike married his Exegesis course leader, Diane Fuller, but the marriage lasted just three months. Soon after, he began a long relationship with public relations professional Sally Cooper, with whom he had three children. But he finally left her for Norwegian singer Anita Hegerland, with whom he had two children.

At one point he advertised through Lonely Hearts columns in national newspapers in search of romance and had quite a bit of fun, although it wasn't until the mid-1990s - when he designed and built his dream house in Ibiza - that he met Fanny, who worked in a hotel there.

"I have a lovely little family now. Every morning I watch Thomas The Tank Engine with Jake and take a walk in the woods. I'm working on a classical album and getting a lot of recognition. I have definitely mellowed. I've matured like a fine Bordeaux."

He keeps panic attacks at bay using a variety of techniques. "The demons are still there - I just don't let them control me."

Changeling is published by Virgin at £18.99.