OMG it's OMD

Since I’ve written 5000 words on Jean Michel Jarre, it seems appropriate to dedicate my next piece to Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (mercifully shortened to OMD), another group I would consider a guilty pleasure.

As with Jarre, my OMD listening started in the 80s. The first singles of theirs I remember were So in Love, If you Leave, and Forever Live and Die. I fell greatly in love with the latter, at the tender age of 11; I found something transcendent about the song, although today I find it a bit much, esp the steel drums. After those mid 80s hits. The band kind of disappeared after that in my consciousness, probably for the good reason that they split up (for a time) in 1988.

As mentioned in my Jarre survey, the Synthesizer Greatest compilation that I bought when I turned 15 featured OMD’s early single Electricity. Although Synthesizer Greatest credited the song only to its writers (McClusky and Humphreys), I managed to discover that OMD were the creators of the song. I think this was through listening to a BBC Radio series called This is Pop in 1994. This programme also introduced me to their song “Messages”, which to me sounded amazing. In early 1995 I managed to find a copy of the the group’s first, self-titled album.

Who were OMD?

OMD were primarily formed and fronted by Merseysiders Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys. The band’s prehistory is extensive. As McCluskey tells it, they saw Kraftwerk perform in Liverpool in 1975, and they resolved to emulate those unlikely German idols. The punk years followed, and the pair rotated through a series of groups as part of the Eric’s Club scene, and OMD didn’t crystallise until 1978. Their first single was Electricity, a Kraftwerk-style paean to energy, released on Factory Records in 1979. Factory passed on the band’s first album, and missed out on many sales as the group got snapped up by Virgin Records imprint Dindisc.

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (1980)

OMD’s album debut is a mixed bag. It’s got the singles Electricity, Messages, and Red Frame/White Light. Electricity is a belter, although McCluskey’s wailing double-tracked vocal doesn’t quite have the dead-pan dignity of Ralf Hutter. Messages is perhaps the most 1980 song ever written. Sparingly written, with two chords for the verses and one chord for the break (no chorus!), the song is sustained entirely by its bleak concrete brutalist mood. Red Frame/White Light is a spirited piece of punk electronic, a love letter to a public phone box the group used to arrange their affairs.

My favourite song on the album is the Messerschmidt Twins, a gentle ballad about… something, that has a well-observed arrangement.

So far, a great debut, but there are some squirm-inducing moments. Mystereality is a flatline (although I’ll concede the sax has an agreeable Roxy Music vibe), Julia’s Song is a dirgey drum-machine-and-organ number that goes on a bit too long. Dancing is throwaway silliness. Pretending to see the Future isn’t quite there. Even the achingly beautiful Almost is marred by perhaps the most risible lyrics in the pop canon:

I'd travel oh so far
To be where you are
I'd travel there by car
To be where you are
But if I get there I'd find
That I'd change my mind
It happens all the time
To a friend of mine

If there was ever a verse in desperate need of punching up, this is it.

Many first albums sound nothing like how a group will become. With OMD’s self-titled debut, they emerged remarkably complete. Half the songs could sit comfortably on later albums; the only real difference is that a larger proportion of songs don’t work. This aside, OMD’s debut is a very assured beginning.

Organisation (1980)

Having released Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark in May 1980, the group were asked to do another one asap, and astonishingly they had it out by October. This period produced the group’s breakthrough single Enola Gay, an upbeat number about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

Organisation - named in honour of Herr Schneider und Herr Hutter’s pre-Kraftwerk band, is by turns bleak and cheery. 2nd Thought is Organisation’s version of the debut’s Messerschmitt Twins. Motion and Heart has the audacity to be in swing time, but features one of the most beautiful synth solos outside of a Kraftwerk album. The More I See You is an unexpected cover of a 40s song, which utilises McCluskey’s Deep Voice well. The most remarkable song on the album (though not necessarily the best) is the closer Stanlow, named for an oil refinery McCluskey’s dad worked at. While OMD songs of the time zip past in under 3 minutes, Stanlow stretches to an epic six.

Organisation is a confident improvement on OMD’s debut. Having hit their stride, the next step was to see where next the group’s talent would take them.

Architecture and Morality (1981)

The album kicks of with The New Stone Age, an angsty bit of guitar janglage (possibly about nuclear annihilation, but you never know), rather out of keeping with the group’s previous synth-first tone. It gives the album an urgent kick-off. Following this up is She’s Leaving, a wistful song which manages to sound a bit like Joy Division (bass, synth pads) and later New Order (via the general arrangement). (Interestingly, OMD had played gigs with Joy Division, and the bleaker bits of Organisation is ascribed to Ian Curtis’ suicide occuring during that album’s recording. In retrospect, while OMD’s silly lyrics and pop style make it seem a bit lightweight compared to Joy Division’s deep seriousness, there’s less separating the groups (during OMD’s 79-83 period at least) than you would think.)

The next song is Souvenir, Paul Humphreys’ first turn at writing a single, and providing lead vocals. The song is 3 minutes of well-mannered if bloodless romantic pining. McCluskey later sniffily called the song “soppy”, and I kind of agree with him. It reached number 3 in the singles charts, though, so saleswise it was hardly a mistake.

The final track on the first side is Sealand, which features a remarkably long introduction, a brief vocal, and a lengthy conclusion. While it follows a similar template to Stanlow (the track being long and slow tempo), Sealand is more intimate and languid.

Side two kicks off with two singles about Joan of Arc: “Joan of Arc” and “Maid of Orleans”. “Joan of Arc” is the more conventional of the two, so conventional in fact I don’t have much to say about it.

By contrast, Maid of Orleans is a waltz-time march featuring what sound like mellotroned bagpipes. “If Joan of Arc/Had a Heart/Would she give it/As a gift”, intones Andy. It sounds unpromising but it was a big UK hit. (This was from a time when Laurie Anderson’s O Superman could reach number 2.)

After two slow songs about Jeanne d’Arc - neither of which I’m particularly fond - the album’s title track is a genial instrumental confection of sound-effects, mellotron choir, and glockenspielish. The description doesn’t seem that promising, but it’s mood is genial and it’s my favourite track on the album.

Following on is the tongue-lolling puppy-pop of Georgia, which isn’t so innovative, but decent enough. Proceedings are capped by The Beginning and the End, a very gentle ballad wit lots of plinky plonk sounds and guitar. Again, nothing too startling, but a splendid ending.

Although OMD’s debut and Organisation were both strong albums, Architecture and Morality marks simultaneously a maturing of their style and a keenness to push the boat out further experimentally. The album sold in great quantities and marks the high point of OMD’s career, the pinnacle of a continual progression from unlikely teenage experimental band to European stardom. Though there were more highlights to come, it all got a bit harder after this.

Dazzle Ships (1983)

Dazzle Ships is both OMD’s best album and the point at which the group began a long, five year slide into oblivion.

The album kicks off with some time pips and an ident for Radio Prague, recorded over shortwave. This oddity is succeeded by Genetic Engineering, an extremely jolly single partially recited by a Speak and Spell. ABC Auto-Industry is a bit of tape or sample looping which is a decent bit of collage. Following on is Telegraph, a storming single, belted out by McCluskey in his Yelling Voice. Perhaps the piece de resistance is the manic tomfoolery of This is Helena (your MC for today), followed by the more sombre International. A song in the same mode as Maid of Orleans, this song concludes the first side.

Side II begins with the “difficult” Dazzle Ships (Parts II, III, & VII), which is short (though perhaps not short enough for some listeners). The Romance of the Telescope is a sort of bleary funeral march. Silent Running is a gentle and perhaps nondescript song, that serves as a platform for the launch of Radio Waves, my favourite song on the album. There’s a couple of minutes of speaking clocks in different languages, then the closer Of All the Things We’ve Made, a sweet farewell.

While Dazzle Ships is now universally recognised as OMD’s best album, at the time it was considered a commercial and critical failure, doing less than 10% of its predecessor’s numbers. (Even so, there’s many bands who would kill to do as badly as 300k UK album sales).

So what went wrong? To me, absolutely nothing: Dazzle Ships has the same eclectic “scrapbook” feel of Kraftwerk’s Radio-activity (incidentally my favourite Kraftwerk album). It feels like a carefully crafted album from start to finish, and the result of a clear vision. But reading through the Wikipedia for the album, I’ve discovered none of these things is true. Apparently the album was blighted by writer’s block. Similar to what happened with the Human League after their wildly successful album Dare, OMD didn’t really know what to do after Architecture and Morality ticked every box they’d wanted to achieve career-wise. Feeling compelled to continue, but having no inspiration, the group scambled to get an album together using whatever materials they could. Romance of the Telescope and Of All the things We Made were B sides to Architecture and Morality singles, and Radio Waves was a song written pre-OMD. Meanwhile, Cold War radio tape collages were added to create a bit of concept album garnish. The process was hard on the band. Andy McCluskey kept the faith, but Paul Humphreys and the seconary members were dissatisfied with the result.

The band’s production struggles make Dazzle Ships a fortuitous triumph. Does being able to see the seams change my view on the album? Not really. Even if it’s a more cobbled together compilation than anything else, Dazzle Ships is still a masterpiece. But it does make the recipe for greatness feel even more elusive than I previously thought.

As mentioned earlier, I contend that Dazzle Ships isn’t so different than Architecture and Morality. So why did it fail critically and commercially?

Critical failure doesn’t need much explanation; the band were always a bit too pop and too pretentious, and after four albums of much the same thing, the probability of critical disenchantment was only going to increase. As for commercial failure, well, I honestly don’t see Dazzle Ships as being less commercial than Architecture and Morality, especially since the latter album has plenty of uncommercial moments of its own. I think that if anything, Architecture and Morality’s success is more anomalous than Dazzle Ships’ commercial failure. Indeed, standing back considering general statistics of the music industry, Dazzle Ships’ “poor” performance can probably be best shrugged off as reversion to the mean.

But it is true that Dazzle Ships saw OMD in a bit of an artistic cul de sac. While OMD in 1980 was placed at a locus(!) for groups interested in combining electronics and pop (think Gary Numann, Ultravox, Human League, Visage), by 1983 that style had been comprehensively mined, and the world was moving on. To get an idea of of the state of the art in 1983, consider two other pop “industrial” releases from that year: Depeche Mode’s Construction Time Again, and Cabaret Voltaire’s The Crackdown. All three groups were using sampler technology (Dazzle Ships featured an Emulator and old-fashioned magnetic tapes, while the other albums utilised a Fairlight CMI), but the Depeche and Cabs albums were dance-oriented and slickly produced, while OMD was still relying on older electronics and following a by-now well-established template.

To conclude, think Dazzle Ships’ 21st century rehabilitation, I’d say it can be attributed to the passage of time making it easier to reconsider the album on its own terms.

Junk Culture (1984)

After the commercial failure of Dazzle Ships, OMD regrouped. With hindsight, the most dignified course would have been dissolve OMD forthwith, with McClusky and Humphries perhaps carving out a career in the Stock, Aitken and Waterman production mould. But the group’s contract with Virgin left them with a low royalty percentage, so they were forced to continue making albums rather than use money they didn’t have to get out of their contract. (Terrible state of affairs! Hope it wouldn’t happen again today…)

Until compiling this essay I hadn’t listened to any of OMD’s post-Dazzle Ships albums, but I was familiar with its singles from my OMD Greatest Hits CD, obtained back in the day. Those singles suggested that the group underwent a Great Leap Popwards, and Junk Culture’s title certainly seems like a declaration of intent in that direction.

But if you think OMD had sold out, Junk Culture’s first, eponymous track, a baffling blend of reggae and musique concrete, would suggest a continuation of the Old Ways. Track 2, Tesla Girls, however, is a single very eager for chart placing. Not great, not terrible. This is followed by fellow-single Locomotion, an easy-going brass atrocity that I’m quite fond of.

After that: Apollo. Describing it feels slightly self-defiling, but here goes: Afro drum machine sample choir guitar travesty.

So far, mostly terrible, but then there’s the rather more earnest Never Turn Away, with chorused bass and a nice bit of church organ arpeggiation. Whatever else, it adds a bit of restraint and decorum to proceedings.

Things perk up again with Love And Violence, and the old OMD charm is back. The song has a riff contrived from car horns and baleful mellotron choir. Hard Day uses a theme reminiscent of past OMD glories, with McCluskey running the gamut of his trademark vocalisations, from soft baritone to shrieking fury of uncertain pitch. You can’t accuse him of having no vocal range; vocal credibility, however, remains elusive.

Following from this is All Wrapped Up, perhaps the most insulting appropriation of Carribean music since Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da. Moving on quickly, there’s the jarringly named White Trash, which seems mostly about filling up 4:36 of time. Finally, there’s the gently beautiful Talking Loud and Clear, hands-down best song on the album and I reckon in the band’s top five.

So very much a mixed bag, but not unremittingly fructose pop - indeed several songs are given over to being uncompromisingly uncommercial. But while similar songs on earlier OMD albums sound like they come from a place of sincere expression, the experimental tracks on Junk Culture sound a lot like pissing about.

Crush (1985)

Crush begins with So in Love, another top shelf single. Oooh, so evocative! Great video too (though McCluskey walking around with a cane is a bit puzzling - the guy just can’t help being naff).

Secret is another single, a Humphreys number which leaves me in danger of falling into a diabetic coma. What I will say for him is his voice is at least pleasant and is a bit of respite from McCluskey’s.

So far you’d be excused for thinking OMD had finally gone full pop, but then Bloc Bloc Bloc lowers the tone by being a Carribean-Latin piece of nonsense. Then Women III: knife-edge poised between blandness and genius. And then the titular track: aside from McCluskey’s whispering (which sounds oddly like Robert Smith), this song could be on a Holger Czukay album. It’s really silly and fun.

88 Seconds in Greensboro, with its dirty guitar, is reminiscent of Echo and the Bunnymen. Then the Native Daughters of the Golden West, with Kashmirish strings and a wailing that’s, I dunno, the Mission, maybe? Then the too-twee-by-half single La Femme Accident. I mean, it’s not awful, but it’s less interesting than the preceding tracks. After that, Hold You, a sort of soft-rock nothing. Nice drum machine percussion though.

Then there’s Laurie Anderson-esque The Lights Are Going Out. What a weird way to end it all. Something the reader may care to note is that my track descriptions for Crush are all comparisons to tracks by other artists. By contrast, I was doing less of that with earlier OMD songs because they didn’t sound like anyone else. Is this telling?

Although my rapid run-through may suggest otherwise, Crush is an improvement on Junk Culture. But creatively there’s a sense the group was just going through the motions.

The Pacific Age

After Crush, the OMD song If You Leave was used in the John Hughes film Pretty in Pink and became a massive US hit, opening opportunities for the group in the US, while inevitably upsetting OMD’s European fanbase (not quite sure why, the fanbase by this stage must have been prepared for anything). Unfortunately, as with Dazzle Ships, this success meant the group’s US label wanted a new album quickly, and OMD were forced to record, release, and tour The Pacific Age. This process meant for a fairly dire album, but more crucially for the band, a growing level of ill feeling among its members.

Proceedings commence with Stay, which is best described as John Hughes-worthy. Then there’s the shimmering beauty of Forever Live and Die. It’s a Humphreys number of gentle transcendence. I loved it as an 11 year old; but now I’m in my late 40s I prefer the drier industrial pop sensibility of Einsturzende Neubauten’s Halber Mensch. Still, I think Forever Live and Die is a fundamentally decent song. There’s still a bit of that faux Calypso thing going on, but I reckon we can give it a pass.

The next - eponymous - song is relatively normal, albeit a regurgitation of earlier tunage. The next track is called The Dead Girls, and is plenty weird. “We haven’t fixed it yet,” sings Andy. Too right, you haven’t, mate! The result is a rare positive.

Shame, however, is John Hughesy. MOR without any element of redemption, sadly. I have to confess that for all that I quite like it.

Southern is a pretty strange instrumental: mellotron choir stabs with Martin Luther King samples. Sounds uncomfortably (in a legal peril kind of way) like My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. By contrast Flame of Hope isn’t too bad. Goddess of Love was going to be on Sixteen Candles, before John Hughes had a last minute change of heart. He had good instincts.

Then: We Love You. On the OMD Greatest Hits I found this one a bit ghastly, but - and I’m not entirely sure this is to The Pacific Age’s credit - it’s quite welcome when it turns up there. Finally there’s Watch Us Fall, which is ok. I mean, not really, but all things considered, it’s fine.

If Crush was an uptick in quality, The Pacific Age is a slide into “who cares any more?” territory. It’s the sort of result you’d expect for a band with nothing left in the tank.

Breakup

After one further single (the If You Leaveish Dreaming) to promote OMD’s first Best Of in 1988, the band broke up. Humphreys and secondary band members Malcolm Holmes and Martin Cooper went off to form their own group, The Listening Pool, leaving McCluskey to continue with the OMD name. In the first half of the 90s OMD garnered decent chart success - well done Andy - and wall to wall critical contempt - boo Andy! In 1996 McCluskey finally wound down OMD activities to - wisely - continue pop production without being the front man. He had relatively swift success, helping Atomic Kitten to their first glories. In 2006 the old band got back together, presumably as a lucrative heritage act. Further albums were produced, presumably to keep themselves (and perhaps die-hard fans) interested.

I haven’t listened to anything OMD have produced from 1988 onwards, because I suspect none of it’s particularly essential. If it is, give me a shout.

Evaluation

Listening through OMD’s post-Dazzle Ships albums for the first time, I’ve discovered there’s more continuity through their earlier work than I’d imagined. Every OMD album after Organisation (and arguably before, too) has blended out-and-out pop singles with less accessible material, and that duality runs all the way through to The Pacific Age. But despite this greater-than-expected continuity, the results feature a marked decline. So what exactly changed?

As already mentioned, Andy and Paul felt creatively complete after Architecture and Morality, and I think the rest of their career through to their breaksup was an increasingly desperate search for meaning. Dazzle Ships pulled one out of the bag, but after that their lack of focus couldn’t be papered over. Album quality plunged, and eventually the flow of decent singles also dried up.

From a Greatest Hits perspective, the best of the “desperate era” OMD singles (Talking Loud and Clear, So in Love, If You Leave, Forever Live and Die) place the group on par with contemporary UK acts like, I dunno, ABC (sacrilege maybe?), Spandau Ballet, Paul Young, Nik Kershaw, etc. So actually a pretty handy result. If they’d dispensed with producing albums after Dazzle Ships, OMD’s legacy would probably be less tarnished. Still, you can forgive the group for doing what they had to while contracturally enslaved to Virgin.

What else to say? To my mind the group most like OMD, at least at inception, was Depeche Mode. Aside from OMD supporting Depeche for their famous 101 performance, the two groups weren’t really in competition, but comparing their trajectories highlights an interesting contrast. Depeche Mode managed to overcome the loss of their first songwriter (OMD fan Vince Clarke) and metamorphose gradually into a transatlantic beacon for angsty teenagers. McCluskey and Humphrey, however, never transcended their original motivation to emulate Kraftwerk.

So that’s the strange story of OMD, trying to have their cake and eat it as experimentalists and pop idols. Triumph or catastrophe? Ultimately, yes! Their early career of enthused technological bop is much better than their later dross suggests, and such are their early achievements, that (hopefully) their sort-of legend will live on… forever!