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Humphreys, too, perceives a kinship between English Electric and OMD’s early works. “As far as I’m concerned, there’s not enough of that around.” Finally, we wanted to include as many seriously pretentious conceptual elements as possible, which is what we’re famous for,” he quips. But somewhere along the line we rather abandoned our own song-writing parameters, so on the new record we also wanted to consciously unlearn the conventional song-writing we’d picked up.
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Basically, we saw our musicianship as a bad habit we’d got into,” McCluskey laughs. “When we first started, we didn’t have proper instruments – we couldn’t play any – and we had no idea how to write songs, because we’d never learned anyone else’s. We wanted to unlearn the musical conventions that we’d picked up over the past 30 years. We wanted to strip the sound down to the simplicity of the early days. “We expect, and other people expect of us, a certain conceptual, intellectual content – it’s the ethos of OMD, it’s the reason why we got together in the first place – and so we consciously set out to do several things on. “We felt that History of Modern was a good collection of songs, but we’ve realised that we’re a band for whom just having good songs is not enough,” McCluskey offers. History of Modern saw the original OMD line-up of McCluskey, Humphreys, Malcolm Holmes and Martin Cooper work together for the first time since 1986’s The Pacific Age. Signature refrains like industry, uncertainty, loss and communication (or lack thereof) – not to mention technological change – align the record’s identity more with the band’s early-80s albums, rather than, say, 2010’s “comeback” LP, History of Modern.
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English Electric experiments with new technology (laptops, phones) where once there were tapes and analogue synths, and it voyages through space and time: Our System is sound-tracked by NASA audio-files from the Magnetosphere of Jupiter Helen of Troy evokes ancient mythology and recalls early-80s OMD chart-heroine Joan of Arc. “I think that’s always been our mantra, and this album explores that,” says vocalist / bassist McCluskey, who formed OMD with school-friend Humphreys (keyboards, vocals) in 1978. It’s a record that could be defined by one of its lyrics: “what does the future sound like?” Three decades on, it is therefore a joy to find these once-solemn young men from the Wirral as ebullient and quick to laugh, equally happy to discuss their early days on Factory Records, the parallels between OMD and Atomic Kitten (the pop group McCluskey assembled in the late 90s), and the aesthetics, themes and pop appeal of their twelfth album, English Electric. They infamously lost three million fans with the “commercial suicide” of their audacious fourth album, Dazzle Ships, and at the height of their fame, co-founders Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys grumbled to Smash Hits magazine that they were “eternal pessimists.” They wanted to merge Stockhausen and Abba. The British electro architects’ legacy suggests otherwise – iconoclastic hits like Enola Gay and Souvenir millions of albums sold over 35 years the likes of Robyn, The xx and LCD Soundsystem citing them as a critical influence – but OMD were a product of post-punk: they wanted to change the world with their art. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark never intended to be pop stars. This interview originally ran as the cover feature of The Herald Arts supplement on Saturday April 6, 2013, under the heading, ELECTRIC COMPANY.