I'll admit straightaway that I was never an OMD fan back in the day — I pretty much thought all '80s synth-pop was pretentious, poser bullshit that was an affront to all things ROCK, maaaan. I've come around a bit in the past decade, though, at least regarding the more experimental late '70s/early '80s stuff; and while I still can't say I listen to OMD much these days, I think their story is pretty fascinating — and all the more so when you hear it from OMD founders Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys themselves. I conducted this ShockHound interview with them at SXSW '11...
Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark — Interview by Dan Epstein
“Basically, it was just fun to be making music in the way that we used to,” says Andy McCluskey of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, reflecting upon the recording of last year’s History of Modern, the first OMD album since 1996’s Universal, and the first one created with OMD co-founder Paul Humphreys since 1986’s The Pacific Age.
“It was like being teenagers again," he says. "We could do what the fuck we wanted to do. We didn’t have a record company, we didn’t have anybody telling us what to do, so we could go back to doing our art.”
Though OMD remain best known in this country for “If You Leave,” the 1986 synth-pop smash featured in John Hughes’ Pretty In Pink, their early work — which made them stars in their English homeland, even while it was mostly ignored here — was quite cutting-edge, mixing Kraftwerk-influenced electronics with musique concrete sound collages and melancholy pop melodies on albums like 1980’s Organisation, which featured their classic UK hit “Enola Gay.”
Once written off as just another couple of synth-pop posers with a pretentious band name, McCluskey and Humphreys have had the last laugh; once reviled by even their closest friends, their singular music has now influenced several generations of electronic artists, from eventual superstars like Depeche Mode and Pet Shop Boys to contemporary artists like Kleerup and Cold Cave. And, as we had the pleasure to learn firsthand, there isn’t anything remotely pretentious about McCluskey and Humphreys these days; they both turned out to be extremely engaging and humorously self-deprecating when we met up with them for this career-spanning ShockHound interview.
SHOCKHOUND: History of Modern came as a bit of a shock to a lot of people, as it showed that the classic OMD sound is still very much intact.
PAUL HUMPHREYS: It came as a shock to us to, to be still doing it again. [Laughs]
ANDY MCCLUSKEY: We had reformed to play live a few years ago, that’s been going fantastically, but that’s the easy thing — for bands of our age, it’s kind of a dangerous and stupid thing to dare to make a new record; people think they should make a new record but they actually don’t have anything to say. Apparently, we’re terribly influential and iconic now, so the last thing we wanted to do was blow all that credibility by making a shit record. [Laughs] The important thing was really that we had something to say, that we would say it in our own style that we invented, but not doing a nostalgic pastiche of ourselves. The way that it’s been received, it would appear that we struck the balance we wanted to between sounding like OMD, but being relevant and still having something to say.
SHOCKHOUND: When did you initially discover this musical chemistry between the two of you?
MCCLUSKEY: So, it was that easy. You just meet people and give them a demo. He was the first person who said to us, “What you do is the future of pop music,” and we were like, “Fuck off. We’re experimental. Don’t call us fucking pop!” [Laughs] But he turned out to be right. So, we released “Electricity” on Factory [in 1979]. He was good to his word. He sent out demos to all the labels. There was a new label started under the Virgin umbrella, and they were excited. They were like, “When are you playing again?” “We haven’t got a gig for a few weeks.” “Oh, we want to sign you.” We were like, “Yeah right.” So, they came up to [Paul's] mother’s room, sat on the sofa, and we played our entire set of six songs. The next time we saw them, they gave us a seven-album deal. Considering that here was two guys who started out having no aspirations of being in the music industry, because we didn’t think we could…we play this gig and within six months we’re getting offered a seven-album deal. It was just wrong. It shouldn’t have happened. [Laughs]
HUMPHREYS: It was bonkers, really.
SHOCKHOUND: At that point, were you able to buy all the synthesizers you wanted?
HUMPHREYS: The thing was, because all our friends just still kept telling us we were crap, we were kind of believing this. So, we thought, "Even though we’ve got this seven-album deal, we’ll get found out; we’ll do one crap album, and they’ll drop us." We got this big advance, so we thought, “What are we going to do when we get dropped?” We spent all the money on a recording studio; we just blew it all.
MCCLUSKEY: We budgeted for failure. We thought, “If they drop us at least we’ll have a studio.” So, that’s what we spent our money on.
SHOCKHOUND: Tony Wilson’s prediction obviously came true — first in the UK, and then over here.
MCCLUSKEY: It was quite strange for us in the early ‘80s, because very quickly it took off in England. We had our first hit single [“Messages”] in the spring of 1980 in the UK. It just escalated. We were playing by our own rules; we were doing just the hell what we wanted to do. The record company let us do it; they weren’t sending A&R men, because we were in our own studio, so they couldn’t come and tell us what to do. We just gave them the record. They said, “This is the single,” and released it, and it was a hit. By the third album [Architecture & Morality], which came out in 1981, we were selling millions of records and having massive hits; but in America, we could not get arrested. Virgin had kind of taken a bundle of bands and sort of given a package to Epic Records; I think we were given away with XTC and Japan or something. Epic Records had Michael Jackson, so they had other things to be concerned about. I think their idea of releasing one of our records was to press one and hide it under the carpet. We weren’t getting anywhere. We would be selling millions in Europe, and then we’d be coming over to the States and playing the shittiest clubs — to admittedly a few die-hard fans who’d be listening to college radio or adult-alternative radio, but for five years we just couldn’t get arrested over here. And then, we changed labels to A&M who were interested in us, and almost simultaneously this gentleman called John Hughes, who happened to be a big fan of English music, said, “Do you want to do a track in my movie?”
HUMPHREYS: Which of course we said yes to.
MCCLUSKEY: We wrote “If You Leave” and it was in Pretty In Pink. All of a sudden we were pop stars in America.
SHOCKHOUND: Did Hughes give you a specific description of what he wanted for the film?
HUMPHREYS: He gave us the script, so we wrote a song based on the script. We [were] just about to start an American tour, and we had this multi-track tape with this song on it that we were going to mix in LA before we started the tour. We get to LA, he contacts us and says, “Listen guys, we did a screening of the film and everybody hated the end, so I’ve re-shot the end, and sorry but your song doesn’t work. Can you write us another one?” We’re saying, “We have two days before we start a tour.” So he said, “Go into a studio and come up with something.”
SHOCKHOUND: So, “If You Leave” wasn’t the first song?
MCCLUSKEY: No, it was a song called “Goddess Of Love,” which nobody’s ever heard of. [Laughs] But yeah, we went into a studio off the top of our heads, just borrowed a load of gear and bashed this idea out and worked on it, cut a rough vocal and about four o’clock in the morning we put it onto a cassette, put it in a taxi and send it to Paramount Studio and go to bed. About 8:30 the manager phones us up, “Yeah, John’s heard it. He’s in his office. He loves it. Get back in the studio and finish it.” So, that was how “If You Leave” was written and conceived. I don’t think at the time we had any idea [that it would be a huge hit]; we were just tired. We had just done a song, given it to him, gone on tour and of course the few months later the film comes out…and it just went ballistic.
HUMPHREYS: Pretty early on, really. We were in various bands before OMD, and we were kind of writing the songs for them.
MCCLUSKEY: We discovered we had an interest in German electronic and experimental music that our friends did not share. They were more into prog-rock — Genesis, Pink Floyd and stuff like that. I started buying German import records, but I had a really crap mono record player. Paul studied electronics, so he built himself a stereo. We had this kind of symbiotic relationship. We grew up at school together, although with different academic years. We grew up in the same town, so we’ve known each other since we were yay high. When we were 16, that’s when we started to do musical things together. We’d be playing in bands with our friends that were a bit high school prog-rock; but on Saturdays around at his mother’s house, we’d try to emulate our heroes but with the biggest pile of crap equipment that we could beg, borrow, steal or make. It was really a hobby, because we thought we were being experimental; our friends thought it was shit.
HUMPHREYS: They actually did.
MCCLUSKEY: We just stayed in the backroom on Saturday afternoons. It wasn’t until three years later, when we were old men of 19, that we finally decided to dare to go and play a gig.
SHOCKHOUND: So, basically you were just living out your Kraftwerkian fantasies in the privacy of Paul’s mum’s back room?
HUMPHREYS: Yeah, it was kind of good that we didn’t have any money; because I think if we had money and could afford to buy synths, which were really expensive, we would’ve sounded just like Kraftwerk. The fact we had a bunch of crap instruments meant that we couldn’t sound like Kraftwerk, and we developed our own sound.
MCCLUSKEY: It was homemade punk Kraftwerk, or as close as we could get.
SHOCKHOUND: Where you aware of any of the other Kraftwerk-inspired artists coming up in England at the time, like Tubeway Army or the Human League?
MCCLUSKEY: We thought we were the only ones listening to that type of music…we were all quite surprised a few years later, we discovered the Human League and they discovered us, then Cabaret Voltaire. Paul and I were at the club in Liverpool called Eric’s, where we used to go to hear the cool bands, this track came on and we went, “What the hell is that? It’s English? Shit, there’s somebody from England and they made a record?” It was “Warm Leatherette” by the Normal. I think that was the ultimate catalyst where we said, “Right. Somebody’s made a record. At least we’ve got to do a concert.” So, we dared ourselves to do one gig in the fall of 1978, and we picked the most preposterous name we could think of, because it didn’t matter. We wanted to show people it wasn’t rock, it wasn’t punk, it was just two dudes with a borrowed tape recorder doing things that even our friends hated.
SHOCKHOUND: So, how did that gig go over?
HUMPHREYS: Well, it was great — we supported Joy Division.
MCCLUSKEY: Which is a good way to start. [Laughs]
HUMPHREYS: It went so well. It was literally going to be one gig, but the guy who ran Eric’s club in Liverpool thought we were really good and said, “I think I’m going to send you over to my friend’s club in Manchester.” And that’s when we met Tony Wilson, who was just about to start Factory Records. He was a TV personality, and we had a demo tape and we gave it to him and said, “C’mon, get us on the telly,” just for a laugh, really. He got back to us a while later and said, “Look, I can’t get you on the show at the moment, but I’m starting a label. How about we put out a single?”
SHOCKHOUND: The majority of the American listeners who bought “If You Leave” thought you were a new band.
HUMPHREYS: Yeah, exactly. They don’t know we made six, seven albums before that. [Laughs]
SHOCKHOUND: So, all of a sudden, you’ve become pop stars in America. What was that experience like?
HUMPHREYS: At the beginning it was fantastic, because we'd worked so hard. We’d do these huge tours in Europe playing at massive places, as Andy was saying, and then we’d come over here and play small clubs; finally, we could get to play some bigger places. Put on more like the shows that we were putting on in Europe, which was a good thing, but then we did a bit too much, really. We stayed on the road, we must have toured nine months over a twelve month period in America. We opened for the Thompson Twins, we opened for the Power Station, we opened for Depeche Mode and we just kept on going round and round…
MCCLUSKEY: [And that’s] in between our own tours. Having worked so long to make it in America, we [wanted] to maximize the opportunity we had. You’d spend all these months on the road in a tour bus; frankly you’d getting a bit ground down. And then it’d be like, “Right, we need a new album for Christmas,” so we’d just go home. The first ten things we wrote, whether it was good, bad or ugly, was going to be the album.
HUMPHREYS: We were on this treadmill.
MCCLUSKEY: We suddenly got turned into a machine, a cog in the machine. I think the quality went down; our enjoyment of it went down. You keep going back to the well, and you haven’t given it enough time to fill up with good ideas, then you’re scraping the bottom. I think that some the stuff we did in the mid to late ‘80s was not consistently good, and by the end of the ‘80s we were sure that we weren’t doing the right thing. We were exhausted. The strange thing, for all the success we had finally got in America, all the tours we did cost us so much money that the millions of records we sold in Europe, all the money got used up in tour support in America. So we got to the end of the ‘80s and sold 40 million records and we owed the record company a million pounds. We were like, “What is wrong with this picture?” [Laughs]
HUMPHREYS: When you add all those things together, we just had enough really. Also, the climate was changing as we entered the ‘90s, as well. Electronic music was starting to go out of fashion, and rock was coming back. We thought we slayed that monster, and there it was back again. When you add all those things together, we decided we’d stop.
SHOCKHOUND: It’s funny — seeing your album covers, press photos, and videos when I was a kid, you always struck me as an overly serious band with no sense of humor about yourselves whatsoever. But talking to you now, you don’t sync up at all with that impression.
MCCLUSKEY: I think it’s two things: We always took our music really seriously, but we don’t take ourselves seriously, which I think is appropriate and correct. When we were young, we were deadly serious about our music — to the point of being kind of painful and precious, quite frankly. Sometimes I look back, and if I could just get hold of 21-year-old Andy I’d just go, “You are living the dream; even if it wasn’t your dream this is now a dream. You’re selling millions, you’re doing this, Hollywood, limos, Chinese Theater…Enjoy it you miserable bastard. [Laughs] Lighten up!”
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Posted by: elliptical reviews | December 12, 2011 at 03:25 AM