In 1978, the Human League adopted an entirely electronic set-up and launched the single “Being Boiled”. Only two bands before OMD had tried to draw popular attention to electronic music: Ultravox and the Human League.
Until OMD arrived on the circuit, electronic music had been kept in the dingy shadows of dive bars, manifesting as little more than a novelty perpetuated by the likes of Cabaret Voltaire, Fad Gadget, and Throbbing Gristle. Now, this is a particularly lofty comment from a man who has also shown a tendency to re-write history in his favor, but let’s think about what to make of it. In a 2008 interview, McClusky mentioned that upon formation in 1978, OMD had been trying to change the world. But how could I make sense of a band that shifted from producing minimal electronic songs about clean energy to corny, John Hughes ballads? How could I allow a band to get away with playing love songs when their initial mandate explicitly prohibited them? A dive into history might be the only way to find an answer. In this instance, however, with my fascination held by Humphreys’ faultless synth-work and McClusky’s refined bad dancing, it just didn’t sit right with me as an honest label.
I recognize that this is a reductive label, but sometimes it just works. It’s old news to ascribe the title of selling-out to a band that shifted from an ambitious sound to something more digestible. Quickly, however, I found myself listening to tracks that I was quite sure a younger OMD would have been unwilling to play. That is the driving purpose I arrived in Central Park, ready to hear. Most importantly, they would do all of this while maintaining a sense of playfulness and naivety. They would choose electronic instruments over guitars, drums, and the like and replace love songs with diligently researched tracks about electrical currents, radio waves, atom bombs, and historical figures. But shouting from the sidelines wouldn’t be enough – OMD knew that for musical tastes to be changed, it was the mainstream needle that needed moving.įrom this moment onwards, OMD went about injecting the German avant-garde into the British mainstream. That was what OMD was after innovation in modern sound, something to raise the intellectual character of the music. Here was precision oozing endlessly, machinery and science meeting music to create something completely new. In Kraftwerk and other German electronic bands, OMD found the model of music they aspired to. With this frustration sitting in the back of their minds, their imaginations were to receive a swift overhaul when they heard Kraftwerk, the pioneering German electronic group, play in 1975 for the very first time. Not only had the songs become loud and chaotic, but they had lost discipline and meaning.
They had thought that the obnoxious guitar solos and screeching vocals of modern rock had become unpalatable. When OMD played their first gig in the famed Liverpool club, Eric’s, they were doing so out of rebellion.
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Flash forward a handful of decades and a series of acclaimed and somewhat less acclaimed albums, and this 24-year-old boy right here got to see OMD live in NYC’s Central Park, just in time for their final 40th-anniversary show.Ĭlutching onto the bar at the very front of the mosh-pit, I was one of just a few mid-20s kids who were surely attracted to OMD for their warm synth ballads that referenced a time when electronic music first became accessible. OMD had struck a chord without a guitar in sight, and electronic music had begun to resonate with audiences in a manner it never had before. Leading with synthesizers was having a peculiar effect crowds were forming and sticking around for the encore. One concert became two, three, and then four. Well, something messed up, and it wasn’t the audio system. They would shake off some of the tracks they’d been writing since the two were 16 in 1975, and then they’d retire. Synthpop legends Andy McClusky and Paul Humphreys said that when they formed Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD) in 1978, it was to play a single show.
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