Omd -

OMD - The Story of a Modernity

Fetishists of technology with a romantic soul, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark embodied one of the defining experiences of a decade, and something more besides. Capable of forging a brand-new sound by infusing accessible melody with carefully measured doses of avant-garde electronics, their retro-futurist music remains, to this day, a starting point for many musicians exploring new pop.

by Marco Bercella

The beginning…*

Liverpool, autumn 1978. Paul Humphreys and Andy McCluskey are two former schoolmates barely out of their teens, united by a single passion: German electronic music. Since their school days, rather than worry about learning to play instruments, the two young men had been collecting them, in indirect observance of punk's commandments. In truth, though, what moved them was less punk than a revelation that had struck three years earlier. On 11 September 1975, Kraftwerk played the Empire Theatre, and the two young men were there in the front row, so smitten that they managed the far-from-easy feat - given who they were dealing with - of actually meeting the band. That same day marked the beginning of Andy's friendship with Karl Bartos, which would later lead to a 1993 collaboration on Bartos's post-Kraftwerk project, Electric Music.

Their technological fetishism, combined with a certain shortage of cash, drove them to scrounge up wherever they could any gadget capable of producing synthetic sounds, as long as it was affordable. With the unattainable machinery of the Dusseldorf musicians firmly in mind, the duo managed - through mail orders, trusted second-hand finds and unemployment benefits all ploughed into instalment payments - to get hold of a Korg MS20 synth, an Elgam Symphony electric organ, a Korg Micro-Preset, an old Selmer Pianotron and a Roland CR-78 drum machine. Rounding out the set was the electric bass slung over Andy's shoulder, the only conventional instrument in a line-up that, with a few exceptions, could fairly be called makeshift.

In October 1978, the two of them - often shut up at home fiddling with levers and jacks - got the chance to perform at Eric's Club, Liverpool's busiest venue, on the very stage that was already hosting the hot names who would go on to write the history of the post-punk era.

It's likely that the opportunity came to Andy specifically, thanks to his brief stint with Dalek I Love You, who, alongside Teardrop Explodes and Echo & The Bunnymen, were stirring up the Merseyside scene.

The ideas were not yet fully formed, the sound was raw and heavily indebted - unsurprisingly - to the Kraftwerk of "Radio Activity" (whose sleeve notes supplied one of the band's names, VCLXI, used interchangeably with the equally eccentric "The Messerschmitt Twins": both would later become OMD song titles), the vocal parts still diluted among frequencies produced by radio waves and oscillators, yet nonetheless steeped in an unexpected dose of catchiness. Dark manoeuvres in pop territory.

The substance and originality concealed within those incestuous manipulations did not escape the Midas touch of Factory's Tony Wilson, who offered them a contract for a single. The name the band gave itself was Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, taken from the title of one of their early compositions.

The only official document of this phase is the rare EP "Free Artefact - The Unreleased '78 Tapes", released posthumously in 1980 as a bonus with the first ten thousand copies of their second album.

The first electric shocks

OmdIn May 1979, "Electricity" came out under Factory's banner. What would go down in history as a single far more famous than it ever was a seller (incredibly, it was later reissued several times without ever achieving so much as a decent chart placing) had an extremely troubled birth. Wilson insisted that the song, along with the b-side "Almost", be produced by his illustrious associate Martin Hannett (the man behind both Joy Division albums, among others, to give you an idea) - a choice the band was not at all happy with. The dispute was settled with something of a compromise: the A-side in its original version, the B-side with Hannett's take on "Almost".

Electronic drums in four-four time, an analogue phrase that kills, McCluskey's pleading voice, melodic accessibility turned up to the max - "Electricity" soon became something of a cult favourite, and later one of the defining songs of OMD's career.

"I don't understand you, guys: do you want to be Abba or Joy Division?"

(Carol Wilson, head of Din Disc)

This is why the talent-scouts at the newly founded Din Disc, a label controlled by Virgin, became convinced that the appeal of this unprecedented blend of Teutonic iciness and fifties romanticism was well worth a bet. "We couldn't believe the doors could open so easily - Andy recalls - I found it hard to believe there were madmen out there willing to bet on us." "It was fantastic and incredible at the same time," Paul echoes, "and to think this had been, for us, a completely off-the-cuff project. I still remember the day we signed the contract, especially the astonished glances Andy and I exchanged."

At this point, the well-dressed young men, backed by a credible label and a degree of financial stability, manage to carve out a role as opening act for Gary Numan's live shows, whose fame, straddling 1979 and 1980, has few equals in England. A string of sold-out concerts and the contract earnings reinvested entirely in the Gramophone Suite, the studio the two had set up near the Eric's, prove to be the decisive moves that put the duo on an unexpectedly fast track.

The big manoeuvres 

There's no time to lose. The two studio rats call in their school friends, starting with two members of their old high-school band (The Id), drummer Malcom Holmes and saxophonist/keyboardist Martin Cooper, and going on to Paul Collister (who occasionally appears under the pseudonym Chester Valentino), the sound wizard already present as a backstage éminence grise, alongside faithful Winston, on the very earliest dates of the live tour. What's that? Who's Winston? He's the band's third member on stage, admitted for the occasion among the ranks: he's actually a Teac reel-to-reel tape recorder owned by Collister himself, on which the backing tracks for the live performances were pre-recorded.

To these still occasional collaborators (only some of whom would later become permanent members of the line-up) is added Dave Fairbairn, brought in to play the sparse guitar parts required. The recording sessions for the self-titled debut album (the cover is by graphic designer Peter Saville, who would design several more for Omd, as well as some very famous ones, including those for Joy Division and New Order), released in February 1980, move along swiftly and wrap up in no time.

The reasons for such decisiveness lie in the fact that the tracks are a carefully chosen selection of material written during their amateur years, and in the stripped-down nature of a production that, spartan as it is, still reveals a skilled command of sound treatment. All things considered, there's nothing surprising about this, given the years-long flirtation between our duo of heroes and their beloved machines.

The record, while paying its dues to the naive-toned electronics of Neu!, and approaching pop material with the wide-eyed irreverence of Brian Eno, still hints at new horizons, going on, with hindsight, to become one of the first blueprints on which many chapters of new British electronic pop would be written. The sound destined to dominate the world for much of the new decade.

The ska-oriented march of "Bunker Soldiers" is countered by the swaying lope of "Dancing", while the idiosyncratic martial strut of "Red Frame/White Light" is offset by the dense romanticism of "Messages", which on its third attempt (after the less fortunate outings of "Electricity" and "Red Frame/White Light") finally catapults the band to number 13 on the charts, setting the course for their subsequent success on 7-inch. A collection of small new-pop essays with real substance, which would land the album at a flattering number 27 on the UK Chart, where it stayed for twenty-nine weeks. 

Dropping the first bomb 

OmdJust eight months after their debut, along comes Organisation, the second chapter of the album saga.

Driving the album is the single "Enola Gay", which, with five million copies sold worldwide and top chart positions in Italy (their first ever number one), Spain and Portugal, hands Orchestral the keys to real success. "Enola Gay" reveals to everyone the winning alchemy of a sound that balances an irresistible instrumental hook with a dramatic vocal delivery. With lyrics that are anything but sunny, telling the story of the B-29 bomber and its pilot Paul Tibbetts, who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and named the plane after his mother. Enola Gay, indeed.

But anyone who by now expects to find easy-listening craftsmen is sorely mistaken. And indeed Organisation (named after the first project from which Kraftwerk were born back in 1970) is an album so darkly toned it could be nominated as the synth-pop answer to Joy Division. It's no coincidence that the distress over the death of Ian Curtis, whom they'd met back in the Eric's days and who tragically took his own life that year, exerts a strong influence on the band's mood, to the point of shaping the lyrics of the beautiful "Statues", which closes on the telling line "I can't imagine how this ever came to be".

The record winds through the shadowy movements of "2nd Thought", the menacing synth-punk convulsions of "The Misunderstanding", the melancholy slope of "The Promise" (which sees Paul make a successful debut as lead vocalist) and the old cover of a Dick Hayes song, "The More I See You", even offering up a dark swing with "Motion And Heart". Special mention goes to the sacral, multi-part meta-industrial suite "Stanlow", whose desolate yearning keeps in the background the sinister pulse of the refinery it's named after.

The album is a masterpiece, easily surpassing the more playful approach of its predecessor by veering towards a deeper, more elaborate production, playing out among tormented, gothic-tinged introspection in which melody nonetheless remains firmly in charge. The drives that animate it and its underlying complexity don't stop Organisation from reaching number 6 on the English charts, as well as achieving significant success across the rest of Europe. 

Architecture of a coronation 

Making the most of the incalculable advantage of having the Gramophone Suite at their disposal to fine-tune their songs, Omd hit the shops just a year after Organisation, and even before that, in August, with the tear-jerking single "Souvenir", the first sung by Humphreys, which reaches number 3 on the charts. Although songwriting remains the preserve of the co-founders, the band's line-up officially and permanently expands to include Mal Holmes and Martin Cooper, who during the sessions is temporarily replaced by keyboardist Mike Douglas. With its orchestral layers and nostalgic choruses that blend seamlessly with the band's trademark background noise, Architecture And Morality establishes itself as the album of self-awareness, standing as the stylistic synthesis of the two previous records.

The instrumentation grows lusher, the guitars come through loud and clear in the sound, and amid the keyboards there's even a Mellotron poking through — an instrument much loved by 70s prog bands but often shunned by musicians of the new generation. Under the skilled production of Richard Manwaring, who had already worked with Human League, McCluskey makes an adjustment to his use of his voice, shedding the sickly undertone that marked the Organisation sessions in favor of a crooning style that's still melancholy but no longer quite so desperate.

Once again there's no trace of uncertainty in the songwriting, which ranges from the epic lyricism of "Joan Of Arc/Maid Of Orleans" (the latter would become the best-selling single in Germany in 1982) to the romantic turmoil of "She's Leaving", via the spiced-up Kraftwerk-style ambience of the title track. Guitars underpin both the chiaroscuro opening of "The New Stone Age" and the closer, the elegiac "The Beginning And The End". In between, closing out side one of the vinyl, we find "Sealand": a mini-symphony of over seven minutes that carries a synth nocturne in a crescendo into the industrial drumming of its finale.

Also worth noting is the gorgeous artwork by Saville, who would match this standard again on the cover of the following album.

Third album in three years, and a third bullseye, crowned by sales figures never matched again: number 3 in the UK, and similar results in nearly every European country, with three million copies sold worldwide.

“There’s a brand new science, for a brand new world, with no moral codes and no big words. No Aryan races, no clone workers, no science-fiction nightmares. But: healthy children, cured diseases, giant harvests and new species…”

(Genetic Engineering)

The four young men who line up at the starting blocks at the end of an exhilarating tour that stretched through most of 1982 haven't lost a shred of the enthusiasm of their early days — but above all, true to their original ambitions, they can now finally afford every piece of cutting-edge gear going. Kraftwerk are, technically speaking, almost within reach. A healthy dose of audacity shaped the recording of the new album, perhaps paired with a certain recklessness given the staggering sales results achieved up to that point — especially when set against a sound that, far more often than people realize, has always trodden anything but easy, if not outright experimental, ground. The band's studio turns into an arsenal of state-of-the-art weaponry. Alongside the never-abandoned gear of their early days come the Oberheim OBX, two Roland emulators, and even the famous "Speak And Spell" toy from Texas Instruments, which would leave its own mark on the new effort.

Dazzle Ships — the title taken from a 1919 painting by Vorticist painter Edward Wadsworth, which also inspired Saville's artwork — is yet another work worthy of their reputation, yet it wasn't matched by public response. We're talking, bluntly, about a commercial flop: against the three million copies sold by its predecessor, this one barely scraped together three hundred thousand.

It's widely believed that the stumble can be blamed on excessive experimentation, but this explanation doesn't fully convince. Is "Radio Waves" really more cryptic than "The Misunderstanding", or "ABC Auto-Industry" more inaccessible than "Architecture And Morality"? And then: what does a quintessential synth-pop single like "Telegraph" lack that kept it from repeating the success of the (in some ways) less immediate "Maid Of Orleans"? Looking at what was happening on the English charts starting from 1982, we're more inclined to put it down to a slow but steady shift in public taste — first seduced by the dark colors of the first wave of post-punk, but gradually drawn more and more toward the sunnier, breezier pop of Abc, the more straightforwardly danceable sound of Phil Oakey's Human League, or perhaps the soul-leaning style of Yazoo. A mere coincidence, then. One of the many fickle factors that decide a band's commercial fate.

By 1983, OMD are a band shaping pure English pop with the same boldness that Neu! had used to transfigure rock a decade earlier, faithfully following their own highly personal script, alternating instantly catchy tracks ("Genetic Engineering", "Telegraph"), straightforward Mitteleuropean-style ballads ("All The Things We Made"), and even a waltz ("International"), as well as pure sonic experiments ("Dazzle Ships Parts II, III & VII"). All of this comes wrapped in yet another update of their sound and a further refinement of the production, now even tighter — not by chance entrusted to Rhett Davies (Genesis, Roxy Music, Brian Eno, Talking Heads are among the names that stand out on his résumé as a producer).

The Discovery of America

Maybe it's that Andy and co. find it pretty galling to watch from the sidelines as the new British invasion hits its peak on American soil (in July 1983, as many as eighteen of the top forty best-selling singles in the US are British), or maybe losing a sizable chunk of their popularity overnight just leaves a bitter aftertaste — whatever the reason, Junk Culture, released in spring 1984, marks a sharp stylistic break for Orchestral from everything that came before, alongside a parallel shift toward more standardized, mainstream conventions.

The sky over OMD, grey up to that point — or at most serenely twilit — now opens up into broad patches of sunshine. For one thing, the album isn't pre-worked at the Gramophone. Beyond that, what drives the change of direction is a radical overhaul of the instrumentation, with heavy use of the Fairlight, new-generation drum machines, and Martin Cooper's sax. But above all, there's the brazen attempt to steer toward Caribbean atmospheres (!), flirting with carefree songwriting that veers at times into outright crowd-pleasing.

The result is jarring: while it helps them claw back a spot in the top ten back home, it not only fails to connect with American audiences (a modest number 182 is all they manage), but also leaves many longtime fans scratching their heads.

Looking at the glass half full, it's worth noting that, even in this new guise, OMD haven't lost their knack for writing singles with real appeal — at least for the European market. So both the slightly silly "Locomotion" (number five) and the catchy, Hawaiian-shirt jingle of "Talking Loud And Clear" (number eleven) win over audiences as they should, as does the sparkling uptempo "Tesla Girls" (number twenty-one).

On the credit side we must count "Never Turn Away", which as it stands could easily pass for the next Junior Boys single, and more broadly a rhythm section that today finds plenty of disciples among the new generation of synth-pop acts. Still, there are too many awkward or weak moments for Junk Culture to add up to a fully successful album.

OmdEvidently unsatisfied at having missed their main target, McCluskey and co. decide that, to truly break into the American charts, an American producer might realistically come in handy. This marks the console debut of Stephen Hague, who would later become a go-to man for hit singles, and not only that: his credits include such heavy hitters as "True Faith" by New Order and "West End Girls" by Pet Shop Boys, for whom he would go on to produce the entire debut album. Another sign of their attempt to land on golden shores can be seen in the cover of Crush, released in summer 1985. The painting depicted could easily be mistaken for the work of celebrated New York painter Edward Hopper, and indeed it was only the high royalties demanded for the use of one of his actual works that led them to choose an imitation tribute from 1930, credited to Paul Slater.

Ahead of the album's release, May saw the single "So In Love" hit the shops, which, with its airy sax and the help of traditional instruments, can be called a pop song in the strictest sense. And what a pop song. This time the American public rewarded the Liverpool lads with a flattering twenty-sixth placing, as the track combined their by-now well-honed skill at crafting verse, hook and chorus with an irresistible radio appeal. The song was somewhat snubbed back home, yet Crush still debuted at number 13, offset by a merely passable thirty-eighth spot in the United States.

Crush is the only Orchestral album to show any interest in rock. On the driving "88 Seconds In Greensboro" a distorted guitar even peeks through, leading into a guitar-driven surge with a psychedelic aftertaste. The rest alternates between good moments ("The Native Daughters Of The Golden West") and others where mannerism takes over ("Hold You"). The former outweigh the latter, tipping the verdict toward a solid pass, though by now it's clear that their old sparkle is gradually fading.

Just when the dream of landing a big overseas hit seems to have faded, director and screenwriter John Hughes asks them to write something for the soundtrack of the comedy "Pretty In Pink". No sooner said than done. Despite offering nothing more than many of their other songs — if anything, a bit less — the crowd-pleasing "If You Leave" lands in the top five in both the US and Canada.

It's likely that this very event indirectly caused the artistic and commercial disaster that materialized at the end of 1986 with The Pacific Age. With Hague still behind the desk, the album turns out to be a clumsy attempt to stretch the one-off formula of the soundtrack song across an entire LP. Try as they might, out of the indigestible mishmash — thankfully ignored by most — at least "Forever Live And Die" manages a decent commercial showing, reaching number 18 in America and nearly every major country's top ten. It's a curious thing, though, that Omd should conquer certain markets right as the tank seems close to empty.

*…And the end? 

Despite supporting Depeche Mode on their American tour, the The Best compilation released in 1988 bodes nothing good. The predictable cash-in release, accompanied by yet another single, "Dreaming", coincides with the split between McCluskey, who keeps the original name, and the other three members.

The trio of defectors embark on the forgettable project The Listening Pool, whose modest debut "Still Life" would only be released in 1994, after a legal dispute with Virgin that thankfully didn't damage their friendship with Andy.

After a long period of reflection, Paul forms a new duo with Claudia Brücken, the longtime singer of Propaganda: Onetwo debut with the EP "Item" in 2004, followed in 2007 by the respectable Instead.

Just a few months after the traumatic split, McCluskey recruits musicians Lloyd Massett and Stuart Kershaw to breathe new life into Omd. By 1991, with Sugar Tax, they recover a freshness that had seemed lost. The mood is strikingly immediate, at times danceable, and while staying true to the synth-pop school, it manages to avoid sounding out of step with the times. The public takes notice, rewarding them with a third-place chart finish that pairs nicely with the success of the spot-on single "Sailing On The Seven Seas".

Among the other euro-pop melodies, "Sugar Tax" features a talked-about sexy disco cover of the Kraftwerk-esque "Neon Lights".

We don't know what terms Andy and Stephen Hague parted on. What's certain is that less than a month passes between the Hague-produced New Order release, the successful "Republic", and the new album by the Liverpool group, Liberator. The year is 1993, and Liberator can be seen as a techno-tinged, not always especially inspired, reworking of the pop-disco of "Sugar Tax". It's an update of their sound comparable to the one carried out by the Manchester outfit, though the latter's greater impact is fully justified by its superior quality.

One final attempt to merge their recent experiments with the more solemn themes that marked their early days comes with Universal (1996), but the thin inspiration makes it a flat record best skipped. The 1998 collection adds nothing to the already-available "The Best", but it's a clear sign that the group's second act has truly run its course.

Among the posthumous material released on CD, it's worth mentioning Navigation (2001), which also gathers the experiments found among the numerous singles' b-sides. Ranging from minimalism to ambient to musique concrète (including an enjoyable synth-based reworking of Lou Reed's "Waiting For The Man"), as if to highlight the alternative tendencies that also played a decisive role in shaping their hit songs. Andy continues his artistic career as a mainstream songwriter, and does so with striking commercial success, co-writing with Stuart Kershaw much of the material with which Atomic Kitten topped the charts at the turn of the new millennium.

But the pull of the stage proves so strong that, in 2007, the now-aging Paul Humphreys, Martin Cooper and Mal Holmes reunite with McCluskey, ostensibly to tour behind the 25th-anniversary reissue of Architecture And Morality, released the previous year. The European tour racks up numerous sold-out dates, prompting a repeat run in 2008, this time with friends China Crisis as support act.

Buoyed by the enthusiasm of the unexpected reunion, the reconstituted quartet gets back to work writing new material, and in September 2010 a new album of original songs is released — the first with the original lineup in twenty-four years. A full-blown reunion record that yields History Of Modern. Unfortunately, what's missing are the songs themselves, despite the many signs of good will scattered throughout, which occasionally stir a touch of emotion through their callbacks ("History Of Modern (Part II)") or raise a knowing smile ("RFWK", a title dedicated to Kraftwerk, the acknowledged masters of their early days). Not bad songs by any means, but certainly a bit faded, lacking both bite and genuine melancholy.

It seems that everything unfolds in some kind of limbo where OMD (sorry, Andy McCluskey & the band) spend their time like latter-day Hamlets, wondering which path to take and ultimately taking none. The sincere drive that got the band moving again deserved a better fate - perhaps diving straight into the heart and never looking back, rather than into a head that filters, processes and, in the end, drains away vital energy. What was missing was recklessness, or rather, too much self-awareness won out, and that's a serious problem even for a great band.

But in 2013 OMD decide to try again. Three years after an acclaimed reunion that remained such only in the intentions of that true gentleman who goes by the name of Andy McCluskey, the Liverpool band sharpen their synthesizers and line up at the starting blocks with renewed fervor.

But fervor alone isn't enough, and Andy must have understood that all too well in the wake of the uncertain Hystory Of Modern, when we had occasion to point out the lack of songs truly up to par - which, on closer inspection, are the most important asset for a band like OMD, custodians of a pop sound that's very hard to dodge, including in the expectations of listeners.

Andy himself made no secret of his longing for a return to the band's roots, possibly - we would add - steering clear of the hyper-technological detours that derailed too many of the band's albums from 1984 onward: if with Hystory Of Modern that mistake was inevitably repeated, on English Electric the "back to the future" operation partly succeeds, drawing creative inspiration from the impulses that blossomed in the days of Architecture And Morality and Dazzle Ships, but also from the sweeter, crowd-pleasing side of "Junk Culture", at least in its truly focused moments. All this while making less effort than usual to hide the fingerprints of their guiding lights, those Kraftwerk who show through with little disguise already on the first single, "Metroland", freely lifted from Kraftwerk's own "Europe Endless" (Trans Europe Express, 1977). Some might turn up their noses, and understandably so, but OMD's ability to stamp it with their own unmistakable imprimatur is an added value that can't be ignored.

Another aspect that, at least on the surface, might not work in this album's favor is its core themes, which harken back to an age-old nostalgia for the future that once was, here carved into compositions that unabashedly evoke the famous interludes of "Dazzle Ships": the opening "Please Remain Seated", the paradigmatic "The Future Will Be Silent", complete with a loop lifted from Kraftwerk's "Computerwelt", but also "Decimal" and "Atomic Ranch". All of them rather pleasant, even if, in the age of Siri software amiably chatting with us through our iPhones, sadly drained of their old evocative power.

Continuing through the references, "Night Café" falls in line with those solid 45-rpm singles that have almost never been in short supply, even in the band's dimmer periods (think "Forever Live And Die" and "Dreaming"), "Our System" revives the choruses of "Architecture And Morality", while "Kissing The Machine" goes straight to the source, meticulously reshaping an old track that McCluskey wrote with Karl Bartos, as part of the former Kraftwerk member's project Elektric Music.

"Helen Of Troy" deserves separate mention on one hand - a child of cliché if you like, but emotionally worthy of the band's best work - and on the other there's the flip side represented by "Stay With Me" and "Dresden" (the second single, alas): the former, the only track with Paul Humphreys on vocals, attempts to replicate the poignant and memorable "Souvenir" but ends up sounding like a weak cover of "I Like Chopin" (remember Gazebo?), while the latter, with its bouncy, candy-coated gait, sounds like an outtake from "Liberator", hardly among the band's finest records.

Lifting the album's fortunes back up to a decent standard is the ambient-pop "The Final Song", which samples "Lonely Night" - a 1959 track performed by jazz singer Abbey Lincoln - drawing an original contrast between seemingly distant worlds. Even though questions about its actual usefulness are bound to remain unresolved, uncertainties aside, English Electric is a sincere, open-hearted record. A hand played with cards on the table, a smile on its lips and a heart brimming with barely concealed nostalgia.

In 2017 The Punishment Of Luxury comes out, but, when all is said and done, the thing that works best is precisely the album's title, taken from a 1891 painting by Italian painter Giovanni Segantini, known as "La punizione della lussuria" (The Punishment of Lust).

Little inventiveness and a lot of craft, which is to say, boredom. A chunk of the album where the celebrated McCluskey/Humphreys partnership remembers that it is (was?) essentially a synth-pop band and produces a handful of honestly crafted tracks. Take, for instance, the title track, feisty in attitude with well-pumped, up-to-date percussion embroidering a solid synth melody. Or perhaps the ballad "As We Open So We Close", which has the undeniable merit of a more complex and articulate structure than the classic OMD style, as does the pseudo-waltz "What Have We Done", on this occasion sung by Humphreys.

Then comes the time for dressing up. Out come the fluorescent jumpsuits from some old trunk, and safely tucked away in a mirror-lined home studio, they play at being Kraftwerk. In goes the vocoder, the frequency oscillators, the orchestrations, the arpeggios and the spoken third-person voices, like the most fervent of tribute bands. And mind you, here the borrowing no longer concerns just the sound in all its facets, but in an almost Wagnerian crescendo it extends even to the song titles ("Isotype" and "Robot Man" above all), and it doesn't spare the style of the music videos either, which naturally feature bicycles and other imagery straight out of Düsseldorf.

An album, then, half merely passable and half truly embarrassing, confirming that in recent years OMD have slowly sunk into the most banal mediocrity, like a body swallowed by quicksand with not even a trace left behind.

Six years later, however, the new record Bauhaus Staircase (2023) proves to be a surprising album in many respects, recapturing that adolescent wonder that had marked the band's early fortunes - and which placed OMD among the pioneers who ferried the newborn genre of electronic pop from avant-garde dancefloors to radio airplay and the charts - reconciling it with the mastery acquired over decades spent in the recording studio measuring out sounds and atmospheres.

There are many motifs recovered from their endlessly inspired notebook, as if retracing the distinctive traits that have defined a career: from the foretold apocalypse of "Antropocene", whose lyrics are only superficially softened by its airy melodic line, to the tracks whose chorus is handed over to the keyboards (a true house trademark, as in the title track), from the neo-romantic nostalgia of "Look At You Now", "Don't Go" and "Healing", to the exquisite industrial leanings of "Slow Train". And there's no shortage of shimmering, not even particularly hidden, callbacks to the former glories of "Architecture And Morality" (in "Aphrodite's Favourite Child"), the playful artificial voices accompanying "Evolution Of Species" (here too, albeit lightly, an evolution toward an inevitable end) which harken back to the saga of the splendid but misunderstood "Dazzle Ships" (1983). In "Veruschka" we even find stylistic traces that recall 1991's "Sugar Tax", OMD's last truly great album before this one.

Through it all, one is left wondering how it's possible that Andy McCluskey, turning 65 next June, still sings with the same desperate 1950s-crooner wail as he did when he was 25, but also how the "forgotten" OMD managed to debut at number 2 on the UK Chart, outranking names with a far greater global reach: miracles of nature and quirks that only the English can explain.

Nostalgia aside, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark's experience remains one of the emblematic stories of a decade, but also something more. Capable of forging a brand-new sound by threading accessible melodies with carefully judged doses of avant-garde electronics, their retro-futurist music is still a starting point for many musicians working within new pop (Junior Boys, Hot Chip, Postal Service, to name a few). And they remain irrevocably close to the hearts of those who lived through them first-hand, back in the day.

Contributions by Mauro Caproni (“The Punishment Of Luxury”)

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

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Discography

ORCHESTRAL MANOEUVRES IN THE DARK
Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark (Din Disc Virgin, 1980) 8
Organisation (Din Disc Virgin, 1980) 9
Architecture And Morality (Din Disc Virgin, 1981) 8.5
Dazzle Ships (Virgin, 1983) 8
Junk Culture (Virgin, 1984) 5
Crush (Virgin, 1985) 6
The Pacific Age (Virgin, 1986) 4.5
The Best (anthology, Virgin, 1988) 7
Sugar Tax (Virgin, 1991) 7
Liberator (Virgin, 1993) 5.5
Universal (Virgin, 1996) 4
The Omd Singles (anthology, Virgin, 1998) 6.5
The Peel Sessions (Virgin, 2000) 6.5
Navigation — The Omd b-sides (Virgin, 2001) 7
History Of Modern (Blue Noise, 2010) 5
English Electric (BMG, 2013) 6.5
The Punishment Of Luxury (White Noise, 2017) 5
Bauhaus Staircase (White Noise, 2023) 8
THE LISTENING POOL
Still Life (Telegraph Records, 1994) 4
ONETWO
Instead (ThereThere Music, 2007) 6
Milestone
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