Andy McCluskey, co-founder of U.K. synth-pop avatars Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD), cherishes his Chicago connection.
As teenagers growing up in Liverpool, England, during the early ’70s, McCluskey and Paul Humphreys heard the future in the music of German experimental bands such as Kraftwerk, whose landmark hits such as “Autobahn” and “The Man Machine” ushered in a new era of electronic pop music.
Humphreys had some knowledge of electronics so he ended up building his own machines to make noise, and McCluskey ordered a cheap synthesizer from his mother’s mail-order catalog for the equivalent of about $10. Combining cheap equipment with innovative lyrics and alluring melodies, OMD’s early singles, including “Electricity,” “Enola Gay” and “Joan of Arc,” became hits, and the duo’s first four albums created a template for electro-pop that was not only melodic and danceable, but cerebral and frequently disquieting. Those records filtered into America, thanks in part to adventurous record stores such as Wax Trax in Chicago, which was frequented by John Hughes, a young movie director and script writer from the suburbs. Hughes was a new-music fan who would sprinkle the soundtracks to his movies with songs he discovered in the overflowing Wax Trax import bins.
In 1986, when Hughes was looking for a closing song for “Pretty in Pink,” a movie he scripted, he called OMD at a pivotal time in the duo’s career.
“For all the millions of records we sold, we didn’t make the money that Depeche (Mode) made, because we signed a terrible deal and they were on a (more equitable) 50-50 deal,” McCluskey says. “We sold 20 million singles and 12 million albums, but we owed Virgin 12 million pounds, and not because we bought castles and yachts. We were on a schedule where we had six weeks to write a record, because we needed the money.”
When Hughes called, OMD was “honored and flattered. We met him and (actors) Molly Ringwald and Jon Cryer. He needed a song for the final prom scene and we gave him one. ‘I love it,’ he says, ‘but we changed the ending. Can you write another one?’ We were going to start touring in two days, but we went into a studio in Hollywood, and finished it by 4 in the morning, then biked it over to Paramount (move studio) by 9 in morning.”
The song, “If You Leave,” became OMD’s biggest hit in America, though McCluskey is somewhat sheepish about the quality as it was written at a time when he and Humphreys were hurriedly cranking out songs to fill out albums. “We had nothing walking into the studio, so Paul sits at the piano and gets some chords, we put together some drum samples, and I came up with lyrics that did the job. It’s a good song from a period when we were writing a lot of songs quickly out of necessity. We were relying on our ability to write and play music when we didn’t have time to develop the best ideas. When we’re at our best, our lyrics are not the usual subjects for pop songs. That’s my forte, but in the mid- to late-’80s I was just writing down the first words coming to my mind, which were slightly cliched lyrics.”
McCluskey acknowledges that his frankness about this era of OMD isn’t particularly popular with the fans who came to the band around the time “If You Leave” cracked the top 5 on the American singles chart. “Saying things like that upset Americans, of course, because those more expedient records coincided with our American success,” he says. “They could have been better if we had more time. If our original idea was not always strong, we didn’t have time to adjust and we ended up overlaying things. We could ‘craftsmen’ our way around the tracks. We ended up using loads and loads of varnish.”
No excuses are necessary to justify OMD’s recent work, however. McCluskey carried on without Humphreys in the ’90s before finally pulling the plug, but the two resurrected OMD in 2006. The reconstituted band used the minimalist craft of its early albums as a touchstone, which is why the last two OMD albums in particular, “English Electric” (2013) and “The Punishment of Luxury” (2017), sound far better than typical cash-in reunion releases.
“After a couple years of playing together again and loving being in the band, we had to ask, ‘Are we a tribute band to ourselves?’ ” McCluskey says. “We didn’t want to be a sad pastiche of ourselves, and we didn’t want to put out new albums just to have a new logo for a T-shirt to sell on tour. So we went back to the strict, minimal, slightly more experimental electronic sound of our early albums.”
OMD couples that sound with ambitious lyrics, which address how the hopeful man-machine future glimpsed in the ’70s by Kraftwerk and its electro-pop disciples has darkened, as corporations rule the tech world and social media reduces human interaction to what McCluskey describes as easily misinterpreted hieroglyphics.
“We were probably the last kids of the last world war’s utopian hope,” he says. “There was going to be a wonderful new future — there’d be a robot maid in the house and a robot car in the garage, but it just didn’t turn out that way, did it? Anybody who went through the ’70s, the Cold War, the collapse of manufacturing, could see that things wouldn’t pan out that way.”
On the latest OMD album, the title track is based on a 19th-century Italian painting, Giovanni Segentini’s “The Punishment of Luxury” (originally titled “The Punishment of Lust”).
“I’ve known that painting since I was teenager — it hangs in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool,” McCluskey says. “We’ve appropriated the title and applied it to the modern world. We’re materially better off, but we’re less happy. We’ve been brainwashed to think my neighbors don’t respect me because my car isn’t modern enough, or my kids think I’m a bad guy because I didn’t buy them the newest Xbox. We’ve been lured into this toxic mindset. But there is hope at the end of the album. My hope is that people will get through this, we will adjust and overcome.”
Until that time comes, McCluskey says with a laugh, OMD “will keep writing these cheerful pop melodies full of dark, dystopian lyrics.”
Greg Kot co-hosts “Sound Opinions” at 8 p.m. Friday and 2 and 11 p.m. Saturday on WBEZ-FM 91.5.
Kot is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @gregkot
