Andy McCluskey (vocals, bass)
and Paul Humphreys (keyboards, vocals) met at primary school on the Wirral, then started writing songs in their teens in Humphreys’ mum’s backroom. Out of the ashes of seven-piece band The Id rose Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, playing their first gig in October 1978 at Liverpool’s Eric’s while their first single, Electricity, was issued by Factory in May 1979 with a Peter Saville-designed sleeve.
“Our first days are a roll-call of iconic names,” declares McCluskey from a hotel room in Nashville. “But back then they were just people and places with no history. Tony Wilson only signed us to placate his wife. She listened to our demo and told him he should put our music out.”
“And we never wanted success,” adds Paul Humphreys. “OMD was our art project that got out of hand. When we first met Tony, we took it as an insult when he said, ‘Guys, you’re the future of pop.’ We were like, ‘Fuck off, Tony, this is art.’”
Electronic with sweeping bittersweet melodies, their early run of innovative hits – Messages, Enola Gay, Souvenir, Joan Of Arc, Maid Of Orleans – and albums (1980’s self-titled debut and Organisation, 1981’s Architecture & Morality) remain synth-pop landmarks. After a further four albums and constant touring, Humphreys left; McCluskey continued to helm a reconfigured line-up until 1996 then quit to become a stay-at-home dad. In 2005 the pair reunited and have since made a further three albums together.
and Paul Humphreys (keyboards, vocals) met at primary school on the Wirral, then started writing songs in their teens in Humphreys’ mum’s backroom. Out of the ashes of seven-piece band The Id rose Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, playing their first gig in October 1978 at Liverpool’s Eric’s while their first single, Electricity, was issued by Factory in May 1979 with a Peter Saville-designed sleeve.
“Our first days are a roll-call of iconic names,” declares McCluskey from a hotel room in Nashville. “But back then they were just people and places with no history. Tony Wilson only signed us to placate his wife. She listened to our demo and told him he should put our music out.”
“And we never wanted success,” adds Paul Humphreys. “OMD was our art project that got out of hand. When we first met Tony, we took it as an insult when he said, ‘Guys, you’re the future of pop.’ We were like, ‘Fuck off, Tony, this is art.’”
Electronic with sweeping bittersweet melodies, their early run of innovative hits – Messages, Enola Gay, Souvenir, Joan Of Arc, Maid Of Orleans – and albums (1980’s self-titled debut and Organisation, 1981’s Architecture & Morality) remain synth-pop landmarks. After a further four albums and constant touring, Humphreys left; McCluskey continued to helm a reconfigured line-up until 1996 then quit to become a stay-at-home dad. In 2005 the pair reunited and have since made a further three albums together.
Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark
(Dindisc, DID 2, LP, 1980) £25
(Dindisc, DID 2, LP, 1980) £25
Top 30 fanfare from Wirral duo recorded in their own Liverpool Gramophone Suite studio.
Andy McCluskey: “Our debut: a collection of songs Paul and I and a couple of other people from previous bands we’d been in in our teens had written with no ambition or belief they’d be heard by anybody other than ourselves. It started out pretty ambient with just bass guitar and Paul making things out of his aunt’s radios cannibalised for the circuit boards, then once we got a cheap electric piano and organ, we subconsciously wrote tunes. Dindisc signed us on the back of the Electricity single and we built our own studio in an abandoned warehouse in Liverpool with our advance because we thought there was no way in hell anyone was going to buy an album. So when we got dropped for selling no records, we’d at least have a studio. We recorded it in three weeks and were utterly surprised when we had a hit with it. This was not much more than a year after we’d played our first gig at Eric’s, where we had just dared ourselves to go up and play one gig with a crazy name. To this day, I think half the people bought it for the Peter Saville sleeve.”
Andy McCluskey: “Our debut: a collection of songs Paul and I and a couple of other people from previous bands we’d been in in our teens had written with no ambition or belief they’d be heard by anybody other than ourselves. It started out pretty ambient with just bass guitar and Paul making things out of his aunt’s radios cannibalised for the circuit boards, then once we got a cheap electric piano and organ, we subconsciously wrote tunes. Dindisc signed us on the back of the Electricity single and we built our own studio in an abandoned warehouse in Liverpool with our advance because we thought there was no way in hell anyone was going to buy an album. So when we got dropped for selling no records, we’d at least have a studio. We recorded it in three weeks and were utterly surprised when we had a hit with it. This was not much more than a year after we’d played our first gig at Eric’s, where we had just dared ourselves to go up and play one gig with a crazy name. To this day, I think half the people bought it for the Peter Saville sleeve.”
Organisation
(Dindisc DID 6, LP, 1980) £15
(Dindisc DID 6, LP, 1980) £15
Mike Howlett-produced, Joy Division-influenced second album sees group become a four-piece with the recruitment of Malcolm Holmes and Dave Hughes.
Paul Humphreys: “We’d played with Joy Division and been entranced by their melancholy and darkness, and they really influenced the direction we went in with the second album, with songs like Stanlow and Statues. Stanlow is a love song to the Stanlow oil refinery [in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire]; we used to do a lot of gigs in Manchester when we were on Factory. We’d go over from the Wirral and come back late at night and Stanlow looked like this futuristic beautiful city and we fell in love with it. Also, Andy’s dad worked there and we got into the refinery to record all the machines. We thought we needed to represent the actual machines on there. VCL XI, which was one of the first experimental pieces we wrote, was named after a valve on the back of Kraftwerk’s Radio-Activity [the name of the valve is actually written “VCL 11” on the Kraftwerk album]. That’s the kind of nerds we were.
“This was also the first time we worked with a producer – Mike Howlett, the bass player of Gong. We learned a lot from him. We were young and didn’t understand the recording process and he guided us and pushed us – he was sensitive to our more esoteric, experimental side. He was a very good musician, too. We first worked with him on Messages, the single version which had given us our first hit; we needed a follow-up and had had the beginnings of Enola Gay for the first album and that became our first priority.”
Architecture & Morality
(Dindisc DID 12, LP, 1981) £10
Paul Humphreys: “We’d played with Joy Division and been entranced by their melancholy and darkness, and they really influenced the direction we went in with the second album, with songs like Stanlow and Statues. Stanlow is a love song to the Stanlow oil refinery [in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire]; we used to do a lot of gigs in Manchester when we were on Factory. We’d go over from the Wirral and come back late at night and Stanlow looked like this futuristic beautiful city and we fell in love with it. Also, Andy’s dad worked there and we got into the refinery to record all the machines. We thought we needed to represent the actual machines on there. VCL XI, which was one of the first experimental pieces we wrote, was named after a valve on the back of Kraftwerk’s Radio-Activity [the name of the valve is actually written “VCL 11” on the Kraftwerk album]. That’s the kind of nerds we were.
“This was also the first time we worked with a producer – Mike Howlett, the bass player of Gong. We learned a lot from him. We were young and didn’t understand the recording process and he guided us and pushed us – he was sensitive to our more esoteric, experimental side. He was a very good musician, too. We first worked with him on Messages, the single version which had given us our first hit; we needed a follow-up and had had the beginnings of Enola Gay for the first album and that became our first priority.”
Architecture & Morality
(Dindisc DID 12, LP, 1981) £10
Reluctant pop stars give machines heart, soul… and Mellotron.
PH: “The first song we did for the album was Souvenir. That came from Dave Hughes, who was no longer with us, but he knocked on my studio door – he’d been recording a choir, and he asked if I could make tape loops from his recordings? He said if I did, I could have a copy for payment. I started messing around with them and suddenly I had Souvenir. I was a reluctant singer but sang it because Andy was on holiday. I got so excited about the track I thought I’d throw some vocal ideas down. I played it to Andy when he was back and he said, ‘I don’t need to sing this, it’s perfect as it is.’ Because we really enjoyed the choral thing, we then bought a Mellotron, so we were able to merge these orchestral, choral sounds with raw synths.
“We found the Morality And Architecture book [by David Watkin] and we saw it as a metaphor for OMD: the architecture as the rigid electronic structure and the morality was the beauty and emotion created by the orchestral choral sound. As kids we’d wanted to be Kraftwerk, but as we went on, we wanted to do something with a bit more soul, emotion, melancholy. In the end Kraftwerk removed all emotion and went incredibly robotic which was their remit but we wanted to create emotional electronic music and this was a culmination of that.
“Joan Of Arc and Maid Of Orleans gave us huge hits; the album was No 3. Having hits enabled us to experiment. There have always been two sides to OMD. Someone at Virgin once said, ‘What are you, ABBA
or Stockhausen?’ and we were like, ‘Can’t we be both?’”
PH: “The first song we did for the album was Souvenir. That came from Dave Hughes, who was no longer with us, but he knocked on my studio door – he’d been recording a choir, and he asked if I could make tape loops from his recordings? He said if I did, I could have a copy for payment. I started messing around with them and suddenly I had Souvenir. I was a reluctant singer but sang it because Andy was on holiday. I got so excited about the track I thought I’d throw some vocal ideas down. I played it to Andy when he was back and he said, ‘I don’t need to sing this, it’s perfect as it is.’ Because we really enjoyed the choral thing, we then bought a Mellotron, so we were able to merge these orchestral, choral sounds with raw synths.
“We found the Morality And Architecture book [by David Watkin] and we saw it as a metaphor for OMD: the architecture as the rigid electronic structure and the morality was the beauty and emotion created by the orchestral choral sound. As kids we’d wanted to be Kraftwerk, but as we went on, we wanted to do something with a bit more soul, emotion, melancholy. In the end Kraftwerk removed all emotion and went incredibly robotic which was their remit but we wanted to create emotional electronic music and this was a culmination of that.
“Joan Of Arc and Maid Of Orleans gave us huge hits; the album was No 3. Having hits enabled us to experiment. There have always been two sides to OMD. Someone at Virgin once said, ‘What are you, ABBA
or Stockhausen?’ and we were like, ‘Can’t we be both?’”
Dazzle Ships
(Telegraph/Virgin V 2261, LP, 1983) £8
(Telegraph/Virgin V 2261, LP, 1983) £8
Experimental apotheosis that lost them their audience.
AM: “We had lulled ourselves into a false sense of security. Because we had this very easy and accidental journey from Paul’s mum’s backroom to selling five million copies of Enola Gay and having three Top 5 singles off Architecture & Morality, we thought we could do what the hell we wanted and people would buy it. It was always important for us to do something different with each album and that’s what we did each time. But with Dazzle Ships we changed it a bit too much.
“A couple of critics were saying, ‘Now you have the world listening and you say you want to change the world, why are you writing about oil refineries and dead saints? Why aren’t you more political? Why are you not addressing the world now?’ I took that to heart and thought we needed to be more brutal, to strip away the candy of the melodies and be more concrete and political. So, we began messing around with the Radio Prague call sign. You’ve got to remember this was during the Cold War; to be recording political programmes from propaganda radio stations from around the world scared the crap out of people. We wanted to play the call sign of Radio Swiss International but they refused permission as they thought it was a communist album.
“Every year on tour we went to the big American army base in Frankfurt. there was a DJ there who was a sergeant and he did interviews with us and he also played the call sign of Radio Prague on the US Forces Network radio channel. He said, ‘This will ruffle some feathers. They’ll think the commies have taken us over.’ In hindsight, it was quite a dangerous thing to do.”
AM: “We had lulled ourselves into a false sense of security. Because we had this very easy and accidental journey from Paul’s mum’s backroom to selling five million copies of Enola Gay and having three Top 5 singles off Architecture & Morality, we thought we could do what the hell we wanted and people would buy it. It was always important for us to do something different with each album and that’s what we did each time. But with Dazzle Ships we changed it a bit too much.
“A couple of critics were saying, ‘Now you have the world listening and you say you want to change the world, why are you writing about oil refineries and dead saints? Why aren’t you more political? Why are you not addressing the world now?’ I took that to heart and thought we needed to be more brutal, to strip away the candy of the melodies and be more concrete and political. So, we began messing around with the Radio Prague call sign. You’ve got to remember this was during the Cold War; to be recording political programmes from propaganda radio stations from around the world scared the crap out of people. We wanted to play the call sign of Radio Swiss International but they refused permission as they thought it was a communist album.
“Every year on tour we went to the big American army base in Frankfurt. there was a DJ there who was a sergeant and he did interviews with us and he also played the call sign of Radio Prague on the US Forces Network radio channel. He said, ‘This will ruffle some feathers. They’ll think the commies have taken us over.’ In hindsight, it was quite a dangerous thing to do.”
Junk Culture
(Virgin V 2310, LP, 1984) £15
(Virgin V 2310, LP, 1984) £15
Recorded in Monserrat with Brian Tench (and, nearly, Tony Visconti). Puts group commercially back on track.
PH: “Dazzle Ships had lost us 90 percent of our audience – we’d gone from selling four million records to 200,000. We’d pushed the envelope too far and we were scared. We’d bought houses, had a management company, crew, we had financial responsibilities and we panicked. We decided to rely on our songwriting craft, ditch the experiments and write a few hits. We thought getting out of Liverpool might be good, so we went to Montserrat. We were in this paradise setting, we would stop work at 5pm, go down to the beach where we’d hear calypso reggae bands and we got influenced by our surroundings – that’s where Locomotion came from, with the steel drums. Brian Tench produced – he was the engineer on Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill and we loved the way that sounded. But before we began the record, we’d also met Steve Levine, who worked with Culture Club. He had just bought a Fairlight CMI sampler keyboard, but instead of working with Steve we just bought a Fairlight and went to the Caribbean.
We spent two months in Monserrat but we hadn’t finished Locomotion so the record company suggested we bring in Tony Visconti. We thought, ‘Great,’ because he‘d worked with Bowie. But he really didn’t understand us. There’s a great quote in his book where he says something like, ‘Those guys rely far too much on technology. I wanted to bring musicians into the band.’ He really didn’t get us.”
PH: “Dazzle Ships had lost us 90 percent of our audience – we’d gone from selling four million records to 200,000. We’d pushed the envelope too far and we were scared. We’d bought houses, had a management company, crew, we had financial responsibilities and we panicked. We decided to rely on our songwriting craft, ditch the experiments and write a few hits. We thought getting out of Liverpool might be good, so we went to Montserrat. We were in this paradise setting, we would stop work at 5pm, go down to the beach where we’d hear calypso reggae bands and we got influenced by our surroundings – that’s where Locomotion came from, with the steel drums. Brian Tench produced – he was the engineer on Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill and we loved the way that sounded. But before we began the record, we’d also met Steve Levine, who worked with Culture Club. He had just bought a Fairlight CMI sampler keyboard, but instead of working with Steve we just bought a Fairlight and went to the Caribbean.
We spent two months in Monserrat but we hadn’t finished Locomotion so the record company suggested we bring in Tony Visconti. We thought, ‘Great,’ because he‘d worked with Bowie. But he really didn’t understand us. There’s a great quote in his book where he says something like, ‘Those guys rely far too much on technology. I wanted to bring musicians into the band.’ He really didn’t get us.”
Crush
(Virgin V 2349, LP, 1985) £8
(Virgin V 2349, LP, 1985) £8
Stephen Hague-produced sixth album that broke America.
PH: “We had a saying: ‘In trying to break America, America broke us.’ We spent a lot of time and money on trying to do it, and our label suggested an America-friendly producer. We liked Stephen, we were fans; he’d worked with Malcolm McLaren and the Pet Shop Boys, and it worked. So In Love was a big radio and MTV hit and then we put out Secret. That got A-listed and started getting played, but then Paramount Pictures brought the Pretty In Pink film forward. We had written If You Leave for the soundtrack and it was being heavily promoted, so we had to pull Secret, but the radio stations ignored that and kept playing both. We got the success we craved, but we exhausted ourselves getting it.”
PH: “We had a saying: ‘In trying to break America, America broke us.’ We spent a lot of time and money on trying to do it, and our label suggested an America-friendly producer. We liked Stephen, we were fans; he’d worked with Malcolm McLaren and the Pet Shop Boys, and it worked. So In Love was a big radio and MTV hit and then we put out Secret. That got A-listed and started getting played, but then Paramount Pictures brought the Pretty In Pink film forward. We had written If You Leave for the soundtrack and it was being heavily promoted, so we had to pull Secret, but the radio stations ignored that and kept playing both. We got the success we craved, but we exhausted ourselves getting it.”
The Pacific Age
(Virgin V 2398, LP, 1986) £5
(Virgin V 2398, LP, 1986) £5
Last album to feature Paul Humphreys until the 2005 reformation.
PH: “We had two months to write the songs and we went into the studio with the first 10 we came up with.
It felt incredibly rushed. We went to Paris for two months to record it with Steve Hague again and engineer Tom Lord-Alge [U2, Simple Minds]: two incredibly experienced people. But we were 10 years into the band. I’d not had a proper holiday, tempers were getting frayed, we were drinking too much, taking too many other things. To save us financially, we did a Greatest Hits; we didn’t want to, but it saved us. But we’d run out of ideas; there were no songs left in the well. We did an American tour with Depeche Mode in 1988 and did what turned out to be our last show at the Pasadena Rose Bowl. I left soon after. It was obvious that music was changing – electro[pop] felt very much confined to the 80s. Ironically, (Forever)
Live And Die was the only one of our singles that went Top 20 in the UK and US at the same time.”
PH: “We had two months to write the songs and we went into the studio with the first 10 we came up with.
It felt incredibly rushed. We went to Paris for two months to record it with Steve Hague again and engineer Tom Lord-Alge [U2, Simple Minds]: two incredibly experienced people. But we were 10 years into the band. I’d not had a proper holiday, tempers were getting frayed, we were drinking too much, taking too many other things. To save us financially, we did a Greatest Hits; we didn’t want to, but it saved us. But we’d run out of ideas; there were no songs left in the well. We did an American tour with Depeche Mode in 1988 and did what turned out to be our last show at the Pasadena Rose Bowl. I left soon after. It was obvious that music was changing – electro[pop] felt very much confined to the 80s. Ironically, (Forever)
Live And Die was the only one of our singles that went Top 20 in the UK and US at the same time.”
Sugar Tax
(Virgin V 2648, LP, 1991) £8
(Virgin V 2648, LP, 1991) £8
McCluskey’s
first “solo” LP hits No 3 and spawns two Top 10 singles.
AM: “Paul and I have a different memory of what happened when he left, unsurprisingly. But what I am totally sure of is that we had completely lost the plot. The band stopped in 1989. We were tired, we’d been touring and touring and touring. We just hadn’t enough time to write good songs. We tried to write separately, but we really didn’t want to put out an album where I wrote one side and Paul wrote the other. Then I recall Paul came to me and said he and the rest of the band wanted to carry on as OMD without me. I went to Virgin, asked if they could do this, and they said, ‘You are the singer and would I consider going out on my own?’
I was suffering from anxiety, but spent a few months writing with a couple of younger guys in Liverpool [Nigel Ipinson and Phil Coxon]. I took my time, asked myself why were the early songs better than the later ones, and decided to not
try to write a hit but have fun exploring the craziest ideas in my head. Sailing On The Seven Seas is quite a bonkers tune and – bang! – it gets to No 3 and the LP goes platinum. Though you’ll see that my name doesn’t appear anywhere on the album. I was trying to hide behind the corporate identity of OMD because I was terrified that I was on my own because all I’d ever known was working with Paul and then Paul, Malcolm and Martin [Cooper].”
first “solo” LP hits No 3 and spawns two Top 10 singles.
AM: “Paul and I have a different memory of what happened when he left, unsurprisingly. But what I am totally sure of is that we had completely lost the plot. The band stopped in 1989. We were tired, we’d been touring and touring and touring. We just hadn’t enough time to write good songs. We tried to write separately, but we really didn’t want to put out an album where I wrote one side and Paul wrote the other. Then I recall Paul came to me and said he and the rest of the band wanted to carry on as OMD without me. I went to Virgin, asked if they could do this, and they said, ‘You are the singer and would I consider going out on my own?’
I was suffering from anxiety, but spent a few months writing with a couple of younger guys in Liverpool [Nigel Ipinson and Phil Coxon]. I took my time, asked myself why were the early songs better than the later ones, and decided to not
try to write a hit but have fun exploring the craziest ideas in my head. Sailing On The Seven Seas is quite a bonkers tune and – bang! – it gets to No 3 and the LP goes platinum. Though you’ll see that my name doesn’t appear anywhere on the album. I was trying to hide behind the corporate identity of OMD because I was terrified that I was on my own because all I’d ever known was working with Paul and then Paul, Malcolm and Martin [Cooper].”
Liberator
(Virgin V 2715, 1993) £40
(Virgin V 2715, 1993) £40
Dancey second sans Humphreys. Samples Barry White, makes No 14.
AM: “I was more confident working without Paul now, but I screwed up. Stupidly, I unlearned all the lessons I had learned writing Sugar Tax. I rushed into Liberator, I let Phil Coxon co-produce. I was precious about my production, so we ended up with two layers of production. It all got busy and messy. Dream Of Me [which includes a sample of Love’s Theme by The Love Unlimited Orchestra] was the song the label thought was going to be OMD’s first No 1, but it only reached No 24. Stand Above Me didn’t do what was expected of it, either, and the rot set in. I was aware that Britpop was approaching and I didn’t know what I should do. I tried to incorporate techno and house, I got more dancey, I did
it with the best will, but it didn’t work.”
AM: “I was more confident working without Paul now, but I screwed up. Stupidly, I unlearned all the lessons I had learned writing Sugar Tax. I rushed into Liberator, I let Phil Coxon co-produce. I was precious about my production, so we ended up with two layers of production. It all got busy and messy. Dream Of Me [which includes a sample of Love’s Theme by The Love Unlimited Orchestra] was the song the label thought was going to be OMD’s first No 1, but it only reached No 24. Stand Above Me didn’t do what was expected of it, either, and the rot set in. I was aware that Britpop was approaching and I didn’t know what I should do. I tried to incorporate techno and house, I got more dancey, I did
it with the best will, but it didn’t work.”
Universal
(Virgin V 2807, 1996) £80
(Virgin V 2807, 1996) £80
Includes the group’s first Top 20 hit for over five years, yet McCluskey calls it a day.
AM: “I’d abandoned techno/house;
it was like an old man dying his hair jet-black: ridiculous. I decided to follow the current trend of getting more acoustic, using real drums and bass. I was writing with Karl Bartos – he’d just left Kraftwerk and was trying to throw off what he saw as the electronic straitjacket and go more organic, too. Walking On The Milky Way is one of the greatest songs I’ve written. I was 35, had just become a father and was about to become a father again and I didn’t realise I was about to retire. So here I was writing a song about looking back to the glory days and wondering what the future holds. It became my epitaph. Radio 1 refused to play it; Woolworths wouldn’t stock it – 40 percent of chart singles were sold there back then – so the fact it got to No 17 was remarkable. But the label stopped promoting it. I could see I was no longer a priority, I felt like a dead man walking, so I stopped. I wanted to be a stay-at-home dad. I did my last appearance on Top Of The Pops as the Spice Girls did their very first one.”
AM: “I’d abandoned techno/house;
it was like an old man dying his hair jet-black: ridiculous. I decided to follow the current trend of getting more acoustic, using real drums and bass. I was writing with Karl Bartos – he’d just left Kraftwerk and was trying to throw off what he saw as the electronic straitjacket and go more organic, too. Walking On The Milky Way is one of the greatest songs I’ve written. I was 35, had just become a father and was about to become a father again and I didn’t realise I was about to retire. So here I was writing a song about looking back to the glory days and wondering what the future holds. It became my epitaph. Radio 1 refused to play it; Woolworths wouldn’t stock it – 40 percent of chart singles were sold there back then – so the fact it got to No 17 was remarkable. But the label stopped promoting it. I could see I was no longer a priority, I felt like a dead man walking, so I stopped. I wanted to be a stay-at-home dad. I did my last appearance on Top Of The Pops as the Spice Girls did their very first one.”
History Of Modern
(100% Records BNL 001, 2LP, 2010) £30
(100% Records BNL 001, 2LP, 2010) £30
The second coming: McCluskey
and Humphreys on the same page again.
AM: “We got back together in 2005, got offers to produce and play live, we put nine gigs on sale, ended up doing 50, and we loved it. Then we thought: ‘Shall we make a new album?’ The whole raison d’être of the band was to have new ideas, to challenge musical conceptions. History Of Modern got the engine running again. We thought we’d work together remotely but quickly realised Paul and I have to be in the room together to get the chemistry. The title track is
a staple of the live set; everyone jumps up and down to it, and the LP was well-received and gave us the confidence to go forward. It’s our John The Baptist comeback album, the one that spoke of the albums to come. Said the atheist [laughs].”
and Humphreys on the same page again.
AM: “We got back together in 2005, got offers to produce and play live, we put nine gigs on sale, ended up doing 50, and we loved it. Then we thought: ‘Shall we make a new album?’ The whole raison d’être of the band was to have new ideas, to challenge musical conceptions. History Of Modern got the engine running again. We thought we’d work together remotely but quickly realised Paul and I have to be in the room together to get the chemistry. The title track is
a staple of the live set; everyone jumps up and down to it, and the LP was well-received and gave us the confidence to go forward. It’s our John The Baptist comeback album, the one that spoke of the albums to come. Said the atheist [laughs].”
English Electric
(100% Records 100 26, LP, 2013) £20
(100% Records 100 26, LP, 2013) £20
Back-to-roots affair makes No 12. Claudia Brucken guests.
PH: “We got back together, we were playing our back catalogue, and we asked ourselves: ‘Do we want to be a tribute band to ourselves or are we going to be brave and write some new music?’ So we did History Of Modern, but then with English Electric, we sat down and wrote the whole album in Andy’s house in one go. We had a focus: to go back to our early sound, make a very electronic record, get rid of all the organic stuff, experiment and be free. We both felt like kids again, experimenting with our machines. And our fanbase loved it. Claudia Brücken [from Propaganda; his ex-partner] and I were still together at the time and working in the OneTwo Band and I thought she would be perfect as the voice of the machine on Kiss The Machine.”
PH: “We got back together, we were playing our back catalogue, and we asked ourselves: ‘Do we want to be a tribute band to ourselves or are we going to be brave and write some new music?’ So we did History Of Modern, but then with English Electric, we sat down and wrote the whole album in Andy’s house in one go. We had a focus: to go back to our early sound, make a very electronic record, get rid of all the organic stuff, experiment and be free. We both felt like kids again, experimenting with our machines. And our fanbase loved it. Claudia Brücken [from Propaganda; his ex-partner] and I were still together at the time and working in the OneTwo Band and I thought she would be perfect as the voice of the machine on Kiss The Machine.”
The Punishment Of Luxury
(White Noise Ltd 100 66, LP, 2017) £12
(White Noise Ltd 100 66, LP, 2017) £12
Triumphant third post-reunion album reaches No 4, their highest since Sugar Tax. The title is from an 1891 painting by Italian artist Giovanni Segantini.AM: “We were excited at how English Electric had been received – we were
relevant again, but it’s hard work being in your mid-to-late 50s and finding sounds or ideas you’ve never used before. It was like, we’ve done that, done that… But we didn’t want to be a pastiche of ourselves, so we were on a bit of a mission. English Electric and Punishment Of Luxury were both borne out of excruciating pain. My wife and I separated, then ultimately divorced, and my two youngest children went to live in America with her, so I was left at home for English Electric with nothing else to do but write about the pain. Then there’s a lot of different pain on The Punishment Of Luxury from a different relationship [perhaps from Humphreys, as he and Brücken had split by this time], but there’s a strength, honesty and raw emotional power in it.”
relevant again, but it’s hard work being in your mid-to-late 50s and finding sounds or ideas you’ve never used before. It was like, we’ve done that, done that… But we didn’t want to be a pastiche of ourselves, so we were on a bit of a mission. English Electric and Punishment Of Luxury were both borne out of excruciating pain. My wife and I separated, then ultimately divorced, and my two youngest children went to live in America with her, so I was left at home for English Electric with nothing else to do but write about the pain. Then there’s a lot of different pain on The Punishment Of Luxury from a different relationship [perhaps from Humphreys, as he and Brücken had split by this time], but there’s a strength, honesty and raw emotional power in it.”
OMD’s UK tour starts 23 October.
