The song that Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark can no longer listen to
For committed fans of pioneering synthpop outfit Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, there’s a definitive mark in their album run that accelerates the band’s descent towards creative dead ends.
OMD was at the centre of UK electronic music’s first wave. Formed in 1978 in the Merseyside area, schoolfriends Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys had veered through double-denimed rock projects before encountering Kraftwerk’s foundational electronic conjurings from Germany’s Düsseldorf. Enamoured with the emergence of synthesizers and their new portability by the decade’s close, the pair would eventually release the fizzy ‘Electricity’, and before long, support synthpop star Gary Numan on his The Touring Principle ’79 series of dates.
Across the nation, a disparate cluster of budding synthesists began switching on analogue gear and playing around with wires and patches. Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, early Human League, and John Foxx’s Ultravox! all paved the way for the synthpop explosion that seized the charts in 1981, offering essential early records that sat in the vinyl collections of the likes of Depeche Mode or Soft Cell, who found themselves swept up in the polyphonic revolution.
OMD’s early albums would stand as a key cornerstone of the electronic pop surge, 1980’s eponymous debut and Organisation leaving an indelible influence on the class of ‘81. Amid that year’s zenith, OMD would release Architecture & Morality, a confoundingly lofty and ambitious record draped in Mellotrons and boasting two singles about Joan of Arc, which still pushed the album to a UK top ten.
Yet, King Midas’ touch began to rear its head. Seemingly unable to do wrong, OMD cut the equally fantastic Dazzle Ships, a deeper reach into the avant-garde which, while retrospectively praised, was met with critical bewilderment.
And so began the chase for commercial recoup. Out went Eastern Bloc radio samples and industrial musique concrète, in came stodgy funk and Latin flourishes created by the Fairlight CMI. While finding some Billboard favour in the States, and later gleaning something of a defining song with ‘If You Leave’s inclusion on the Pretty in Pink soundtrack, 1984’s Junk Culture would spell a run of albums that alienated old fans with their glossy and kitschy popcraft. Such an ebb would reach its nadir with The Pacific Age two years later, a cluttered gunk of chintzy trumpets and turgid basslines that made the soaring heights of ‘Enola Gay’ feel like ancient history.
It’s this record that McCluskey picked out as the one OMD cut that he could no longer listen to, highlighting the album opener ‘Stay (The Black Rose and The Universal Wheel)’ as their seventh LP’s worst offender. “What a pretentious title for a start,” he confessed to NME in 2023. “I listen to that now and I’m just like: ‘What fucking planet were we on?’. It’s got all these gratuitous chord changes because the intro was written in a key that was completely different to the verse, and it’s got all this programmed and real brass. Why is a synth band using brass? I’m horrified. I cannot listen to it. Not everything we did was gold and there is proof”.
He’s not wrong. Each brassy bleat and soggy drum beat all rub the wrong way, clearly signalling an exhausted creative unit bereft of any ideas. While still sailing with moderate success in the UK and US album charts, founder and core member Humphreys would leave not long after, reducing OMD to Humphreys’ sole captaining through the 1990s minor success, then on to masterminding the Atomic Kitten pop group for the 21st century.
