Sparks in the Dark

Rip It Up, Issue 112, 1 November 1986, Page 16

Sparks in the Dark

HMD's 'Pacific Age'

Reliability can be a virtue. If OMD were born under enviable circumstances (indie-synth-trendies with great commercial success) as well as surviving two albums of dirge (Architecture & Morality and Dazzleships), then the credit for both goes to their sure-fire ability to write dexterous ditties in the blink of an eye. To listen to Junk Culture, Crush or their latest, The Pacific Age, is to hark back to a world without Trevor Horn, Nile Rodgers, Factory or Robert Elms. Somewhere between sixth-form biology, Kraftwerk and the girl-next-door lie OMD, resplendent on a bed of roses.

Andy McCluskey never thought they’d get past the first album, with its simple songs and a Peter Saville roofing-tile cover. Nor did he expect to survive the clutter of Dazzleships, a murky flop which still pushes the band’s accounts into the red, but he and OMD are still here. They’re on tour to promote album number seven, playing in their home town of Liverpool. Andy is every bit the tourist that his songs imply — he’s given up his flat in favour of a hotel.

What are you doing in a room at the Adelphi? “Watching some kids’ programmes. I don't like to go home and get out of the swing — you know, go home, sit in your armchair, watch TV, do a concert...” Are you pleased with The Pacific Age?

“Yeah, I am — it’s still a little early to be objective about it, but we’ve achieved what we set out to do, to get some of the bollocks out of our stage appearances onto record. Malcolm Holmes, our drummer, is a central figure in the band, so this time we thought, let's get him with a big kit in an ambient room and let him belt the hell out of it.” My Way OMD have always seemed a duo — Paul Humphreys and Andy

McCluskey, but with Crush and The Pacific Age the sound has the quality of a band. "We’ve been playing more like a band in the studio. There’s been a little more democracy than there used to be... I’m not sure if I’m a great fan of this new-found democracy — I quite liked it when I had my own way all the time. I don’t hold with any of this rubbish that a band is better than just one person making decisions, which is the opinion of our American audience, who’ve woken up to OMD five years too late and are giving us all this (accent) ‘Owe you're so huuuman!' bizz, just a load of old codswallop. Especially since some of our biggest hits — bigger than the ones we have now — were done with one finger and a drum machine.” Why “the Pacific age’?

“It’s a phrase that’s been used a lot by economists lately (to describe the shift in global prosperity) — but I don't know if I’m trying to use it to relate (laughter) a whole catalogue of economic changes... It’s a personal view of that change in economic situation, a view from Europe and Northern England where industries and economies are in decline. And as for calling the album that, well firstly, it’s a good title (laughs again) and two, I think we liked it as a little metaphor for the band’s progress at the moment, attracting a wider audience

globally. And I think that I like the contradiction — you think of 'B6 as being a year of turmoil and unrest and the Pacific as a place where things are tranquil and calm.” ‘The Dead Girls’ on the album starts off with a very Pacific sounding chant... "That’s actually just some French tart slowed down... we had this idea that some of the words I’d sing, she’d translate into French, but when she’d done her track we loved her voice so much that we recorded it into this device called the [untranslatable]. This thing’s wonderful — you can slow things down without changing the pitch or you can change the pitch without changing the speed. So we took her voice and slowed it down about three times, left one track in the original pitch and harmonised the other one.” 000 Baby Baby ‘The Messerschmitt Twins,’ ‘Tesla

Girls,’ ‘Joan of Arc’ and now the voice of Martin Luther King on ‘Southern’ — why all the famous people? “A psychiatrist would have a field day, the whole thing of references... well, it’s more interesting than ‘Hey Baby I Love You.’ From day one when we started out we were writing songs about the telephone box and the oil refinery. Whatever you come into contact with, it seems logical that you should write a song about it. We got interested in aeroplanes, so we wrote about the ‘Enola Gay.' I found a cassette of Martin Luther King and his oratory, his messages were just so powerful. It was just one of those silly ideas, to combine his speech with the music, but they just seem to be made for each other. We are directly eclectic but I think we make something out of what we come across, it gets welded into our own ideas.” Is it a way of getting over that ‘Hey

Baby’ hurdle? We are guilty of a certain amount of that... but I mean, God, it took me four years after starting the band to use the word ‘love’ and I am on record as saying that if I use the word ‘baby’ then people are allowed to shoot me...”

You’ve a knack of writing quite whimsical songs...

"We have a lot of fun as a band and a brilliant sense of foul, bluemouthed humour, so occasionally it’s quite nice to put something humorous or a little bit odd in.”

Did ‘lf You Leave' for the Pretty in Pink soundtrack break you in America?

“It was quite funny, a band that a year before couldn't get arrested — next thing we’ve got the lead single from the New John Hughes Film Starring Molly Ringwald, and every man and his dog wanted interviews. It was interesting to see the double hype going on, not only Hollywood but the music industry as well.” Movie soundtracks are a poblem nowadays. “I must admit, it’s very easy for us now, we’ve had our hit and we don't want to do a soundtrack again. I think they’ve got to grind to a hald, I think people are getting sick of seeing every second video with the caption ‘From the Motion Picture.’ Particularly Phil Collins... And all these action packed, or teenage films to which the music is attached must go eventually.” Freudian Slip One last question, six years old — who is Julia, who wrote the lyrics for ‘Julia’s Song? “Miss Julia Kneale. She sang backing vocals for a pre-OMD band called The Id. She was always pestering me to write a lead song for her so we wrote this rhythm track, but she said, Stuff singing your lyrics, and she wrote her own, and by default it was known as ‘Julia’s Song,' and we kept it and did it ourselves. The funny thing is that I’m still singing those lyrics, some of which I’m quite sure are about me and not complimentary.” Cursed forever. Will we see you play the Pacific? “I know that we’re doing Australia either side of Christmas and I believe we’re booked in for one or two dates in New Zealand. I hope it comes off.”

Chad Taylor