Post-Punk Monk

OMD ca. 1980 – and then there were two

[continued from previous post]

So, yes. OMD quickly discovered they were “failing upward” with surprising ease. As 1979 turned into 1980, they readied their debut album for a release early in the year. We discussed the motorik art rock of “Bunker Soldiers” up front. The next song on the album was an absolute early OMD classic. “Almost” was the same version used as the B-side to the still unlucky third release of “Electricity” at the time of the album’s release on Dindisc. Much of this album is synthpop by reputation only. Many songs barely have actual synths used and alternatives [electric organs, the Selmer Pianotron®] were used because they were cheap and more available. The band did have a Korg M-500 Micro-Preset by the time of recording the album, and the lead lines here were expansive and cinematic. Since the Korg was a monosynth, the band applied a chorus to fatten it up admirably. Most of the lead lines on this album did not have the “pop” that they attained here with it.

The stuttering, white noise rhythms of the song and the rhythmic use of organ chords perfectly fit the melancholy of the number. It sounds like they had eight tracks to play in in their studio, unless they bounced four tracks. That made for a clear, powerful mix that had simplicity, clarity and punch. The stuttering repetition coupled with the melancholy of the lyric and the bass line, actually superseded much of the first album, and pointed to the much darker second one to come.

The Pianotron: outstanding in its field

As a contract, the subsequent track, “Mystereality” could not be more different than the song that preceded it. This one really felt like a song left over from their days with The Id. It sounded like the product of teenagers with even a punning title that would have been past its expiration date by age 20, I would think. The simple, chugging rhythm box and the Pianotron sound almost like nursery rhymes and the lead instrument here was saxophone, as played by Martin Cooper, who would figure more prominently in the band’s future.

The classic track “Electricity” was a debut single of staying power that few bands get to enjoy. The Pianotron was used for the lead riff with a simple, motorik beat bashing away in the background as organ chords mirror the bass line an octave up. Very simple, but effective. The intelligent lyrics that examined power generation and where humanity has to go with it was a signifier from the get-go that OMD were not content to relive rock clichés but would mark out their own territory with a series of intellectual observations that would soon get even more ambitious than this song was.

Of course, years later McCluskey admitted to Kraftwerk when meeting them as a lifelong fan that they just took “Radioactivity” and sped it up, to which the Düsseldorf band simply stated “yes, we know.” I could not have known it at the time, myself. In 1980 I had only a copy of “Autobahn” to my name and I did not even know of, much less actually hear the “Radioactivity” album until 1982 -1983, if you can believe that! I did not know it existed until my friend Tom showed me a copy. At first I thought it was a followup to “Computerworld!”

OMD claim to have never performed a concert since day one where they did not include “Electricity” in the set, and if a band ever had to have a song that they simply had to include in their sets, than it really doesn’t get much better than this one. It remains the quintessential OMD song and a powerful précis of their entire artistic point of view. One can understand why it was released three times in a year, though the sleeve at left was the third release on Dindisc that thriftily knocked out the text in white instead of the costly thermographic process used on the first 5000 copies released by Factory in 1979.

Next: …Yet more nods to Kraftwerk

Orchestral Manœuvres In The Dark – Orchestral Manœuvres In The Dark | 1980 – 2.5

The perky drumbox that set the pace of “Bunker Soldiers” was adorned with an expansive, almost Asian melody on the polysynth. It plays almost like a cute parody of technopop until the chorus, where the band have obviously been hitting their Velvet Underground records.  In a gambit taken straight from “The Murder Mystery,” the title is spelled at random in the left channel while random numbers are spoken in the right. The deliberate deconstruction of data into noise that cannot be parsed was an early move that this band were going to play the rock game by their rules. After all, they were only doing this for fun.

OMD were formed while Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys were still in school. They first knocked around under the guise of Hitler’s Unterpants who sounded for all the world like kids goofing at being a band rather than the real thing. By the time of college, they had formed a large band known as, The Id, and gigged around Liverpool from ’77-’78 before breaking up. McCluskey played bass and sang while Humphreys, an electronics buff, played keyboards. Julia Kneale and John Floyd also sang and the drummer was Malcolm Holmes. They had a second bass player, Steve Hollas, and a pair of guitarists: Neill Shenton and Gary Hodgson. With eight members, it was impressive that they lasted as long as they did.

After the band split, having only recorded three songs in primitive demo form. One of these, “Julia’s Song,” was posthumously released on a 1979 compilation of Liverpool bands called “Street To Street.” McCluskey joined the first Liverpool technopop band, Dalek I Love You, for all of a month before realizing that Alan Gill was not going to cede the writing spot in the group to others. He then reunited with childhood chum Humphreys, and they set about making their own mark as Orchestral Manœuvres In The Dark; a band name that was as different as possible to the prevailing punk name ethos of the time.

Click to enlarge – you won’t see anything otherwise

The band recorded a two track demo as produced by manager Paul Collister under the nom du disque Chester Valentino [“Electricity” + “Almost”] and sent out copies and quickly got the nod from Tony Wilson and Factory Records. Actually, that’s not quite right. It was Wilson’s wife who thought that OMD had that certain something, and convinced her mate to sign them for a single. The band were favoring the demo recordings to be pressed on 7″. Wilson thought “let’s see what Martin Hannett” can do with them.” Hannett was the in-house producer doing interesting work with Joy Division at the time and he favored a more polished sound, heavy on the reverb for the iconic “Electricity.” For release the band got their demo on the A-side with Hannett’s version of “Almost” on the B-side.

While McCluskey had designed all of the band promo materials until then, they wisely ceded design control to Factory’s in-house designer Peter Saville and the start of a long partnership and many sleeves began when Saville suggested a radical, black-on-black thermographic printed sleeve; similar to how business cards were made back in the 70s. When the ink was printed to the surface of the sleeve, before it had a chance to dry [which takes hours] it was dusted with plastic powder and blown off, leaving the powder affixed to the still wet ink. Then the sleeves were heated, allowing the plastic powder to expand and puff up, giving the printing a tactile element. Because of the expense involved, there were only 5000 of these sleeves printed for the first, 1979 release of the single. I once bought one of these mail order for about $30 in 1986-5 and rethought the cost and returned it to the dealer for a refund – like a fool!!! The median cost now is five times that.

Having singed a single deal with Factory, this quickly snowballed into a long-term deal with Dindisc, a Virgin subsidiary as run by Carol Wilson; the aforementioned wife of Tony Wilson who knew a good thing when she heard it. OMD and “Chester Valentino” took their advance for the album and sagely built their own studio with it, reasoning that this might be their only ever album and instead of running up bills in someone else’s studio, they would at least have this to show for it when it all faded. But the best laid-plans of mice and men beg to differ sometimes. In early 1980, their debut album was released on Dindisc with a striking Saville/Ben Kelly cover as shown above. Kelly was an industrial designer and partner of Saville who had punched some metal panels like that and Saville had liked the look. The losenge shapes were stamped out of the outer sleeve, leaving the orange inner sleeve visible from inside. Saville admitted that he was influenced by Talking Heads award-winning “Fear Of Music” sleeve with an embossed black-on-black diamond plate texture of the previous year. Come 1980, Saville would be the one taking home awards for his OMD sleeve. Thank goodness I was able to buy a pristine first pressing of this in the blue/orange 12×12 grid sleeve as shown above in the early 90s for about $30. Mint- copies now are over twice that.

Next: …What about the other 9 songs?