Often labeled as the "Lennon-McCartney of
synth-pop"—a weighty mantle that has as much to do with their hailing
from Liverpool as anything—Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys ruled the
better part of the '80s as Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, one of the earliest
synthesizer-driven bands to break out of the post-punk scene and lead the
charge toward the defining sound of the decade. Yet for all its early
innovation, OMD ended its career as just another follower, working within a
once-exciting genre that had become increasingly formulaic, and trapped by the
commercial success of its sappy New Romantic smash "If You Leave" (written for
John Hughes' Pretty In Pink). After Humphreys—an electronics student
who had been behind all of the band's headier sonic experiments—decided
he'd had enough of trying to meet those newfound expectations, McCluskey ended
their lifelong partnership and briefly soldiered on alone; meanwhile, Humphreys
kept busy with The Listening Pool (formed with fellow OMD castoffs Martin
Cooper and Malcolm Holmes) and with German musician Claudia Brücken, performing
live as Onetwo and even occasionally as OMD Revisited.
After nearly 20 years apart, the original lineup
of OMD recently reunited behind the 2007 re-release of 1981's Architecture
& Morality—the
band's third record, and the pinnacle of its European success—and
embarked on a sold-out tour of shows to be captured for a companion DVD. The
resultant Architecture & Morality And More, filmed last May at
London's Hammersmith Apollo, finds the band obviously looking older and grayer,
yet performing in its entirety an album that only sounds more timely and
spry—especially in the wake of all the modern bands it's inspired. As the
reformed, re-energized OMD prepares for its 30th-anniversary tour this fall, The
A.V. Club
spoke with Humphreys about his thoughts on his bandmates' evolution from
new-wave pioneers to mainstream pop stars, the details behind OMD's dissolution
and eventual reunion, and what it has planned for the future—including
hints about a new studio album already in the works.
The A.V. Club: After all this time, why choose
a tour around Architecture & Morality to reintroduce
yourselves?
Paul Humphreys: It was timing, really.
Before we'd toured with Architecture & Morality last year, we'd not
actually done a tour together as the original lineup since about 1990. We'd
been talking about doing some things together anyway, and then EMI said they
really wanted to re-release and re-master Architecture. And you know, it's
probably the album that Andy and I are most proud of. We're proud of quite a
lot of stuff that we've done, but as an entire album, it's one of our proudest
pieces of work. And actually, the journalist Paul Morley had said to me before,
"You know, when you do go on tour, it would be an interesting angle to just
play an entire album from beginning to end, because a few people are doing that
now." So we thought, "Okay, let's go out on the road to promote it, and why not
play the whole album?" We'd been talking about going back on the road anyway,
just to see if there was any interest in OMD playing live again after all these
years, so we thought "Why not?" We booked seven shows and ended up playing 50,
so there was definitely a demand.
AVC: What did you discover, revisiting these
songs that were written more than 25 years ago?
PH: Until we decided that we were going to do it and
started rehearsing it, I hadn't actually listened to the album for many years,
so it was quite interesting coming back. It was a little like listening to a
different band, really. I had this perspective from it that I've never had
before, and it really struck me how interesting the album was. It wasn't
quite as commercial as I remembered. I think in my mind—because we'd had
so many million-selling hits on the record, and the album itself had sold
millions—I thought it must have been very commercial. But listening to
things like "Georgia" and "The New Stone Age," I realized that, no, actually,
it was quite experimental. Not to mention the title track, which is completely
mad. And I do think those songs stand the test of time—which I definitely
can't say about all the records I've made. [Laughs.]
AVC: What do you remember about the original
recording sessions for Architecture?
PH: We had our own studio in the center of
Liverpool—on Mathew Street just up from where the Cavern used to
be—and we started recording there. The album before, Organisation, was very much Joy
Division-influenced, and with every album, we'd look for sort of a different
angle on OMD, and try to reinvent ourselves. And just by accident, I had
discovered all these choral samples—although in 1981, of course, there
was no such thing as samplers, so it was really just tape loops. A friend of
mine had recorded a choir, but he didn't have the facilities to loop all these
individual notes that he'd recorded. We had loads of tape machines in our
studio, so one day he knocked on my door and said, "If you help me make these
tape loops, I'll let you have a copy of all these choral things." And that just
set us off on a path, really. The first thing we did was "Souvenir," and I used
all these choral loops, so we got off into all these choral, architectural,
dark things, alongside using some shortwave radio and lots of synth. That set
us off on the path that would become Architecture & Morality. There's definitely a
thread that goes all the way through the album, this sort of choral,
orchestral, electronic theme. A lot of our albums are a bit fractured, but that
one seems to be very consistent. And after we recorded some of it in our own
studio, we went to a studio that no longer exists in Oxfordshire called The
Manor. So many amazing records were done there—including [Mike
Oldfield's] Tubular Bells—and it was just a really inspiring place,
this manor in the middle of nowhere. We kind of hung out in this big, beautiful
house and were hermits for about three months, and that's how the album came
out.
AVC: That noticeable lightening of the mood
between Organisation and Architecture, was that indicative of something
happening in your personal lives?
PH: I'm not sure, really. We've always been kind of
dark Northerners. [Laughs.] No, I think it was just in the sounds we chose. For
each album, we have this kind of palette of sounds that we choose from, and I
think the palette of synths and choral loops just lent themselves to a lighter
sound. It wasn't really conscious.
AVC: Was there a conscious move to write using
more standard pop structures?
PH: Well, I think from the very beginning, we were
writing standard pop songs. But because we started in 1978, the instruments we
were writing pop songs on were not standard, so it had this really odd twist. Now
everyone's using synths, but in those days, there were only select bands using
synths, so they sounded weird, even though the songs we were writing, even on
the first album, were conventional songs in their way. It was just the package
that we put them in that made them a bit weird. And of course, we did our
weirdest album after Architecture, with Dazzle Ships. Which was a hugely
experimental album, and it almost ended our career. [Laughs.] We went from
selling three or four million to three or four hundred thousand, because no one
could understand the album. So there was a lot of pressure on us from Virgin to
come up with a commercial record after that—pressure from the record
company, pressure from management, but also pressure from ourselves. We'd
gotten into the industry for our love of music, but suddenly we were a
commercial enterprise, with all these people relying on us, staff who needed
wages paid, mortgages, bills to pay. It was like, "We better deliver this
time." Although I think we went a bit safe when we did Junk Culture and Crush. I think we were just
trying not to lose our record deal. [Laughs.]
AVC: Dazzle Ships is also getting the
re-release treatment, correct?
PH: Yes, after we did Architecture last year, Virgin decided
it was going to re-master and re-release Dazzle Ships. It's amazing, because in
1983 when we released it, it got absolutely slated in the press. No one could
understand it. And now, 25 years on, we're getting five-star reviews for the
same record.
AVC: Was Dazzle Ships intended as a concept
album?
PH: It was, in a way. Every album had been more and
more successful, and I think after Architecture & Morality, it was like, "Well, we
can just do whatever the hell we feel like doing, and people will buy it."
[Laughs.] But also, people had been saying, "Oh, just do Architecture II now, and you'll be the
next Pink Floyd." And it was like, "Oh God, that's the wrong thing to say to
us! We don't want
to be the next Pink Floyd!" We consciously went back to our roots, to things we
were listening to when we first started—lots of Germanic, experimental stuff—and
also, we'd found all this great new technology, because in the early '80s, it
was changing so fast and so radically. So it was just us playing with this new
gear that we could finally actually afford to buy. When we first started, you
know, synthesizers were so prohibitively expensive. I studied electronics, so I
was making our first synths and drum boxes from separate components. We
couldn't afford anything, because we came from working-class backgrounds and
had no money. So by the time we did Dazzle Ships, we had a bit of money,
and we could buy all this new stuff that was coming out, which really lent
itself to being more creative.
AVC: Now that you've reformed the band, all of
that gear has been replaced by a Roland X8. Do you miss your old setup at all?
PH: I don't really miss the unreliability. [Laughs.]
Because every night, I'd go onstage with my fingers crossed, going, "Is it
going to work tonight?" And I got fed up with the Rick Wakeman-esque bit of
having synths all around me. Now I enjoy putting all the work in before we go on tour, getting
all the sounds absolutely perfect—because the X8 is just a giant sampler,
really, even though it's got a great synth built in. So I can have all those
sounds pre-programmed in and just push a button, and I'm not worried about all
the instruments being in tune, whether the filters are right, all that. I can
just enjoy the playing, instead of spending my life fiddling onstage, trying
desperately to get songs to sound like they did on the record. Some of those
early synths, every time you'd turn them on, they didn't sound the same as they
did the last time you turned them on. But I still have all those old
synths—and of course I went back and sampled them into my X8. Although to
do the Architecture & Morality songs, we had some of the synths, but they didn't
work anymore, so there were some frantic nights on eBay. [Laughs.] There was
one synth I was trying to get where someone always outbid me at the last minute,
on four different attempts, so I had to wait three months for it to come around
again. And I know
I overpaid for it.
AVC: Do you think that being forced to wrangle
sounds from those early synthesizers also forced you to be more creative? As
opposed to if you'd had a massive bank of presets to work with?
PH: Perhaps. A lot of the synths were very limiting,
and they only made a certain set of sounds, so yeah, it forced you to
experiment with them and process them to death through any box you could find,
and really push each synth to the max to be different. I think now, if you're
not careful, you can just go through that glorious set of presets, and now
everyone's got the same sounds. I've always tried—through the years, and
I've since got better—to invent my own sounds. I try to get my head into
each synth I have and make sounds from scratch, make my own palettes. That's
probably because I'm old-school, and I've had to do that from the beginning.
I've made a conscious attempt to keep that going. Now there are just so many
sounds available to you—just on your laptop and GarageBand, even—so
I try to limit myself to a palette of sounds when I'm working on a specific
project. Otherwise you can spend weeks just going through banks and banks of
presets. And they're all quite boring, and you've heard them all before on
other records.
[pagebreak]
AVC: Europe has always been more receptive to
OMD's more experimental side, with Architecture being your commercial
peak, yet in America, you're more known for your romantic pop songs. Why do you
think the U.S. didn't embrace your darker side?
PH: I think one of our problems—and it was
really a constant source of frustration to us—was, we signed to Virgin
for the rest of the world, but Virgin didn't have a record company in America
at that point. So they just licensed their artists to other labels, and they
did this kind of bulk package of us and XTC and a bunch of other bands to Epic
Records. And to be honest, Epic didn't really give a shit about OMD. They
didn't even understand what OMD was, and they put absolutely no effort into
promoting us. The weird thing was that Virgin did this really long-term
contract with Epic that was like our first four or five albums. They wouldn't
let us go, but they wouldn't promote us either. It was so frustrating, because
we'd be playing these huge arenas in Europe, and then we'd go to America, and
we'd be playing these tiny little clubs on Long Island, going on stage at 2
o'clock in the morning, on this tiny little stage where people were so drunk,
they'd be vomiting on your shoes. [Laughs.] It was really quite
soul-destroying. It was really late in our career that we managed to pry
ourselves off Epic—A&M; had been wanting us for years, but Epic
wouldn't let us go. When we finally managed to get on A&M;, that was when
things started to take off. And that was also when we were consciously writing
poppier songs, because it was specifically for things—like "If You
Leave" was written for Pretty In Pink. And of course that was our really big hit.
AVC: Do you think that trying to create
something more palatable to a wider audience—like "If You
Leave"—cost you your early fan base?
PH: Yeah. And looking back, I regret it. One of the
reasons we broke up was because I wanted to get back to more experimental
stuff, and we were kind of stuck in this electronic-pop thing. Andy was still
into the pop world, though, and he continued on in the band for a couple of
albums after me before he packed it in. But I could also see going into the
'90s—you know, there's nothing more out of fashion than what went on in
the decade before, and electronic pop was really out of fashion as the '90s
began. I could see we were starting to struggle, and I thought it might be time
to hang up my boots for a bit. But what I really wanted to do was give OMD
a big rest, and then come back and reinvent ourselves. I thought we'd gotten
too conventional, and really let go of why we got into this, which was to be
experimental, but do it in a palatable way.
AVC: What are your impressions of those
later-period albums now? Do you listen to them?
PH: We still managed to write some good songs. I
think we became—perhaps too much, in a way—like craftsmen. We
learned how to write a pop song, so we kept applying the same formula to things
over and over. That wasn't the right move, obviously. But in the later albums,
there were still a few interesting things. We were still trying to push
boundaries, but I think we locked ourselves into this more commercial path.
AVC: Did working with Erasure and Pet Shop Boys
producer Stephen Hague have anything to do with that?
PH: Yeah, I think so. Stephen always kind of
encouraged that. He did some good things, and he's a very good producer, and
he's done some amazing records over the years. But he was sort of drafted in to
help us break America. Although he didn't do "If You Leave," he was kind of
pushing us toward that. He took us more mainstream than perhaps I would have
wanted to go.
AVC: The band broke up not long after that period,
with Andy taking on OMD without you. How did that decision come down?
PH: As I said, I kind of really wanted to knock OMD
on the head for a few years. We'd been in the band since school—although
we didn't call ourselves Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark until 1978, when we
were both 18. Music had been all I'd known since school. I never really got a
proper job, because we'd signed to Virgin when I was 19. So I found myself as a
31-year-old not really ever having a life, because I'd been in this band. Even
though I was married, it was more like I was married to Andy. [Laughs.] I saw
Andy far more than my wife. I wanted to have kids, to kind of stop everything.
But OMD was this enterprise that needed a certain
amount of income every year, and although Andy kind of agreed with me initially,
he succumbed to pressure from the record company and management to make a new
album. Virgin was saying, "Look, there's a contract here saying you have to
make a new album every year." And I said, "Well, I'm not doing it." And Andy
said, "Well, I think I might." So I told him just to go ahead, that I needed to
take a break. It was all amicable, but of course Andy and I were tied up in a
lot of business interests that had to be sorted out. So once our lawyers got
involved, we started to fight. Typical, really. We laugh about it now, but at
the time, it was really very awkward and very difficult and very acrimonious.
And then Andy decided to pack it in himself, and then there was no more band
until very recently. We always kept in touch, because we still had some mutual
interests that we didn't separate, and we'd always say we should do something,
but then Andy would have a project and I would have a project, so it was never
the right time. It's only been in the last few years that we've said, "Look, if
we're going to do this, it has to be now, before we're all Zimmer frames and
wheelchairs." [Laughs.]
AVC: How did he reach out to you about putting
the original lineup back together?
PH: Throughout the years of OMD being defunct, we
always got these phone calls saying, "Can you come do this TV show?" and so on.
We always, always said no. Anyway, one day Andy got this call from a German
show—I think we had the number-one-selling record of the '80s in Germany, "Maid Of Orleans," and this TV station begged us to come play. They said,
"We'll fly you over, we'll pay you, we'll put you in a five-star hotel. Please,
please, please." So Andy phoned and said, "I quite fancy doing this. But if we
do it, we're going to have to do it with the original lineup to do it
properly." So we all phoned around to each other and said, "Yeah, come on,
let's have a bit of fun." And it was a typical TV show, you know: You go there
for two days and you only work for like three and a half minutes playing the
song, and the rest of the time you're sitting around drinking. [Laughs.] So it
was in those few days that we hatched the idea, "If we're gonna do this, we
have to do it now, or we'll never get it together." Because we were always
working on different projects and never had the time—so we decided to
make the time.
AVC: What's the working relationship like now
that you're all back together?
PH: It's a lot calmer. Because we're a lot older.
[Laughs.] We're a typical band, really. You can't expect there to be an
agreement between you every minute of the day. That's not normal when you live
with each other. We've always had our fiery moments, particularly Andy and I.
But everything's a lot calmer now. There's still a lot of admiration and
respect for each other. I think we're probably getting on better now than we
ever did. But that's probably just age.
AVC: What can you tell us about the new album
you're working on?
PH: It's just in its infancy, really. We toured a lot
last year and some of this year, and I just did a Onetwo tour. And before that,
Andy and I played with a full orchestra in Spain—us and Simple Minds,
playing our hits in these huge arenas. So in between doing that, we've just
done starts, really. There's nothing concrete yet. Andy's probably a bit more
advanced on them than me, because I've been so busy with Onetwo, so he's had a
bit more time and has a few more songs sketched. But I started working while on
the tour, because you can work on your laptop now, which is just fantastic. You
can be away and still write songs, which you could never do in the '80s. I can say I'm heading in a very
electronic direction—very experimental and odd.
AVC: And you also have a 30th-anniversary tour
in the fall?
PH: Yeah, we thought, you know, it's been 30 years
since our very first gig opening for Joy Division in October 1978. And we
thought Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark was only going to be one gig, ever.
So here we are—30 years on, we thought we should celebrate. So we're
doing nine dates in Britain and 19 dates in Europe, doing songs from just about
everything.
AVC: Is there a reason you haven't toured
America for so long?
PH: It's funny you should say that, because we were trying to do it. But to
be honest, one of the problems with coming to America has been, um, the
weakness of the dollar. [Laughs.] Sorry to say. We were trying to put a U.S.
tour together, but when we looked at the figures, we were losing an absolute fortune. We have to pay everyone
in British pounds, our staff and the shipping and everything, and it just
wasn't economically viable, to be honest. But we've hatched a plan to do it
with another band of our sort of ilk and stature and generation. I can't
officially announce that yet, but we're looking to do it next summer. But yeah,
it's quite difficult. I know a lot of British bands are having trouble with it
economically, because they're having to pay for everything in British pounds,
and bands are losing fortunes with the way the American dollar is right now.
AVC: So you're saying it's another thing to
blame on Bush.
PH: [Laughs.] Yes exactly, another thing to blame on
old Dubya. But he'll be gone soon, yes? Right? I know Europe will be
celebrating.
AVC: Speaking of playing with Joy Division, in
your early days, you were also briefly part of Factory Records. Considering the
mythology that's been built up around the Factory scene and the ongoing
fascination with it, do you wish OMD had played a bigger role in its story?
PH: Not really. We were just kind of there when it
all happened. It's been quite interesting to see these films and read all of
these things about Joy Division and Factory—and yeah, we get a passing
mention from time to time, but we didn't play a very big role in it. When we
first joined up with Factory, Tony Wilson said to us, "Look, you just use me as
a vehicle to go on somewhere else. I think you're going to be a successful pop
band, and I don't think you can be that at the moment on Factory. So when we
generate enough interest, I think you should move on." And of course we said,
"No, no! We want to stay on Factory," but when Virgin offered a lot of money to
have us, Tony was happy to get rid of us, and we were happy to go. [Laughs.]
AVC: Do you have any regrets about that?
PH: It's hard to say. I can't complain, really, about
my career. A lot of mistakes I've made have been my own mistakes—Andy's
or mine—and I'm quite comfortable with that. I think I have a bigger
regret that we had a hand in folding DinDisc, because DinDisc was a subsidiary
of Virgin that—while it used all of Virgin's machinery and money—it
almost had the feeling of Factory. Peter Saville was even employed by DinDisc
to do all the sleeves, so we had the best of all worlds there. And through
being young and naïve we fell out with Carol Wilson, who was the boss, and we
never patched it up, and that ended up being instrumental in us getting off
DinDisc and onto Virgin, the parent company, where we went from being the big
fish to one of many big fish. On DinDisc we were the only big fish, and we had
complete control, which we kind of lost on Virgin. That was the beginning of us
losing our way.
AVC: In an interview on the Architecture DVD, Andy says that he
feels like OMD is the "forgotten band of the '80s." Do you agree with that?
PH: In a way. I think people, when they think of the
'80s—and on a lot of these retrospective shows they have on television,
they portray the '80s as being Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, and Culture Club.
And there was a hell of a lot more to the '80s than that. We sold more records
than most of those bands, but somehow people never remember OMD. People don't
mention OMD as being one of the biggest bands of the '80s, which we definitely
were, if you look at our record sales. So that's been a bit frustrating, that
people don't give us the credit we deserve. I'm not really being egotistical
about it. It's just that people are forgetting their history. That was one of
the motivating factors in us coming back and doing it again, to re-remind
people of our existence, and the parts we played in that movement.