Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s love letter to a Cheshire oil refinery: ‘We needed to represent the machines’
It’s really only Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark that could have dreamed up a romantic ode to an industrial site on the Wirral peninsula.
Leading the UK synthpop revolution, Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys wielded their creative diffidence with pop as an asset, confoundingly dropping a series of idiosyncratic, even pompous, immersions of all kinds of intellectual fodder across their early golden album run, be it grand ornate waltzes dedicated to Joan of Arc or the Cold War machinations that haunt Dazzle Ships.
Such restless esoterica already reared its head in earnest for 1980’s sophomore Organisation. By the time sessions began late summer, OMD had shared bills with Joy Division and soaked up their brooding minimalism and mournful songcraft, influencing the downbeat energy that pervaded across their second album.
Albeit led by the hooky ‘Enola Gay’ single, a sprightly number at odds with its atomic bomb subject matter, much of Organisation dwells in ruminative soundscapes and chilly electronics, the frigid ‘Statues’ a partial nod to Ian Curtis, who had taken his life during the writing process.
While full of fantastic songs, from ‘2nd Thought’s disconcerting groove to the cavernous urgency of ‘The Misunderstanding’, it’s the finale that yields Organisation’s most stirring moment. Arresting, rousing, and packed with intimate drama, ‘Stanlow’ manages to posture itself as a spiritual sequel to Kraftwerk’s ‘Neon Lights’ with a majestic wander through the Stanlow Refinery, a processing plant in Ellesmere Port that radiated evocative allure for both McCluskey and Humphreys.
The pair would play Manchester frequently when briefly signed to the famed Factory Records, and travel back home past the refinery’s twinkling landscape. “Stanlow looked like this futuristic, beautiful city and we fell in love with it,” Humphrey revealed to Record Collector in 2019. Entranced by its glowing, industrial beckon, OMD sought to pen a theme for the Stanlow site, helped by the easy access to the plant via the band’s family connections. “Andy’s dad worked there, and we got into the refinery to record all the machines,” Humphreys furthered.
“We thought we needed to represent the actual machines on there”.
Paul Humphreys
Composing an atmospheric engulf of piston percussion and glittering synths, an eerie magnetism pulses throughout ‘Stanlow’. Replete with McCluskey’s direct audio capture of the plant’s diesel pumps, Organisation’s closing number illustrates everything ambitious about OMD in those early, cocksure days, casting their creative eye on the manufacturing fixtures of their hometown and turning such distant metallic canyons as ripe for poetic marvel.
There’s an extra poignancy, too. While Stanlow Refinery is still running after a century of operation, OMD’s grand love letter to the plant points to the essential gravitas such sites had on working-class communities before the new decade’s Thatcherite bludgeon of deindustrialisation onto local identity and economic health, a political war that many Northern regions never recovered from.
Such lofty pop could have stood cumbersome and pretentious in another band’s hands, but OMD manage to conjure a slice of electronic splendour that’s sincerely moving and impossible not to become swept up in, casting a romantic tincture across the Stanlow Refinery’s fantastical realm of colossal chimney stacks, mysterious pipe grids, and illuminating gleam across the lands as a beacon to the enchanting allure waiting to be discovered in man’s artificial environments.
