upfront
Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark
What was happening in the world 40 years ago this month? Terrible things, no doubt. But not entirely! Because November 1981 also saw Liverpudlian synthpop supremos Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark release what has proven to be their most popular album, Architecture & Morality. An anniversary to toast, agree OMD vocalist Andy McCluskey and Buzz’s Carl Marsh ahead of a Cardiff arena date.
Do you look back and think about the legacy that you as a band have created? Other musicians go, “oh my god, you’re so influential, you changed this, I saw you do this, this is why we started!” There’s a lot of younger bands who namecheck us and really want to sound like [1983 LP] Dazzle Ships. We remember the pretentious little schmucks we were.
We were lucky as well: punk and new wave detonated the music industry. Every city had its own club with local bands, so the A&R man had to leave London to go to the provinces. And so we were allowed to do something crazy, and it was actually allowed to become pop music. We built our own studio, wrote the songs and didn’t go in with a producer: the A&R man was just given the tape and I said, “there’s the first album.” We were both 16 when we wrote [debut OMD single] Electricity.
Who influenced you to write something like that at that age? I had a very limited palette of things I was interested in: Kraftwerk and Neu!, Brian Eno, Roxy Music and David Bowie. When I went to see Kraftwerk in 1975 it was like the first day of the rest of my life. Electricity was just a punky sped-up version of [Kraftwerk’s] Radioactivity…
Are there OMD songs you’ve fallen out of love with and back again over the years? We aren’t one of those bands that’ll go, “oh I’m so bored of my biggest hit. I’m going to slow it down and fuck it up.” I never in a million years thought I’d still be doing this 42 years after the band started; we’ve been blessed to have had a successful connection with people, and they’ve paid money to come and see you. These songs have been good to us, we’ll be good to them – treat them with reverence and play them the way people want to hear them.
After everything, do you still feel like you’ve got something to prove? Without sounding bigheaded, [OMD cofounder] Paul Humphreys and I would rank [latest album] The Punishment Of Luxury -right up against Architecture… and Dazzle Ships. But we spent three years working on it – the magic doesn't happen in a day.
It sounds like you're more in tune with who you are as a band now – you split for a while, between 1996 and 2006? There was a time there in the 90s, when grunge and Britpop was around and we were considered to be an out-of-date synthpop band, but we’re now we're in this kind of postmodern era. If you’re considered iconic within the genre, people go, “yeah, that's good, you’ve done some classics, carry on.”
The penny dropped for me about five years ago: I went out onstage and didn’t have stage fright. I always used to absolutely brick it before I went on stage – I had a chip on my shoulder, I was fighting everybody, the press, the audience. I was quite angry and intense. And that’s when I suddenly thought – these people have come to see you because they like what you do, and they trust you to be brilliant because they’ve seen you before, so chill! Enjoy your moments. All that work you did and you’re now in a position where you can say, I’m not going to retire. I’m going to smell the roses onstage.
Although I must admit, I might be a bit worried when we get to Cardiff because we haven’t played there for about 14 years – no, maybe actually 12, with Simple Minds. Very remiss of us. We can’t get the routing right. A few times we’ve played Bristol and my friends from Wales have had to come over the bloody bridge again. But now we’re really looking forward to coming over there. My friend Ani Glass, who’s a great Welsh singer, will be there to see me.
ORCHESTRAL MANOEUVRES IN THE DARK, Motorpoint Arena Cardiff, Wed 10 Nov. Tickets: £45. Info: 029 2022 4488 /
motorpointarenacardiff.co.uk
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Alex Lake Twoshortdays
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