Good morning,
Is it? Too early to tell really. But distract yourself whilst you decide with an enjoyable chat with OMD co-founder Andy McCluskey, a very lovely fella with lots of good tales to tell and definitely the first TNC interviewee to utter the phrase “hairy blues wankers”. Who could Andy be talking about? The only way to find out is to scroll down. Go on then!
We’ll see you on Friday. Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… OMD’s Andy McCluskey
At the end of the month, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark release their new album Bauhaus Staircase. It’s the synth-pioneers’ 14th studio album, and their fourth since founding members Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphries reformed the band in 2006. One of the most influential electronic acts of all-time, they’ve sold an incredible 25 million singles and 15 million albums but Bauhaus Staircase might well be the full stop on their career when it comes to new output. In a very entertaining chat with Niall a few weeks ago, Andy revealed that he’s not sure he has it in him to make another as he looked back across four decades that has taken in big hits, commercial suicide, Atomic Kitten, unintentionally influencing ZZ Top, dodging retirement and much more.
Hey Andy, how’s it going?
It’s going good. I’m sitting in my programming room and I’ve left everything switched on in here and it’s boiling hot so I’ve got a face like a tomato but everything is good.
What have you got there in your programming room?
There’s my screens, my speakers. The only thing that actually records anything acoustic is the microphone. There’s still a few bass guitars lying around. It’s not acoustically treated, it’s just a room at my house but it’s where I work. Paul is the one who has the proper studio. I’ve got a tiny little mixer, not even a mixing desk, and a good old Mac G5 tower.
I imagine all that technology is a stark contrast to when you first started out.
Oh man, we could not have imagined it. We started out in Paul’s mum’s back room because she went to work on a Saturday afternoon so we could make noise without disturbing her. We had my upside down left-handed bass guitar, Paul didn’t even have a keyboard, he just cannibalised his aunty’s radio so he ripped the circuit boards out and used the components to make noise machines. We had a thing called a tube phone where we put a wooden piccolo into this long roll that the carpet had come on, put a microphone at the end of it and put it through an echo machine. Our early stuff was really ambient because we didn’t have any keyboards. From a mate at school, we bought a Vox Jaguar organ and a Selmer Pianotron, I’ve never seen one since it, that plucked the metal bars and that’s the sound of the Electricity melody. We bought those for a combined total of 60 quid and that’s how we started. The first six gigs we did, we didn’t even own a synth, we were borrowing synths. We finally got one from my mother’s mail order catalogue, which was horrible.
Ah, all the experimentalism you did alongside the pop side of things makes sense then because that’s how you started.
Absolutely. When we first started, our mates were like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’. They all wanted to be in a band that did cover versions of Pink Floyd and Deep Purple and we were making these weird noises. We’ve always straddled two camps where we like to do things that are experimental, where we’re challenging ourselves and having mad ideas but what we try to do with an experiment is to make it musical. You can have the most obtuse idea and go, ‘What would it sound like if I had loads of recordings of car doors being slammed and a mousetrap going off and me farting backwards and I make that into a song? Well, I haven’t heard anything like that before. Do I want to hear it again? Not really.’ So experiments have to be musical. We just seem to have a knack for writing catchy tunes as well, which has served us well.
Congratulations on the new record.
We’re very happy. We wouldn’t release it if we didn’t think it was worth people hearing. As Paul always likes to say, ‘We’re not making a new record so we’ve got a new logo on the tour T-shirt.’
What’s it like when you’re the judge of deciding if your own stuff is good enough to be released, rather than doing it because, say, there’s a record contract demanding it?
It’s good. I mean, you could end up kind of delusional and in your own little ivory tower where you’re doing it for yourself and you don’t care. I like to think that we are good enough self-editors, we know that not everything is gold. Nine times out of 10, you will write something and you’ll come back the next day and shove it into the corner. I made this analogy, it’s like songs in the computer are an artist’s studio with canvases stacked up against the wall and occasionally you’ll go over there and go, ‘Oh, let me have a look at this one again and maybe do something with this.’ I look back to the mid-to-late 80s, we did a couple of albums which not every song is up to quality because we didn’t have time. We’d come home from touring the world after nine months and our manager would say to us, ‘Right, you’re skint, we need a new album yesterday’ so it would be straight into the studio for four or five weeks and the first nine or ten things we wrote, good, bad or ugly, that was the album. That’s not how we are now. The other thing is that the Bauhaus Staircase album is going to be released exactly two weeks after the 45th anniversary of our first ever concert.
Ah, wow.
Yeah, and 45 years being in Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark is actually quite cool. People say nice things about us. For a long time, I felt like we were swimming against the tide, it was hard, journalists didn’t like the instruments we were playing, people questioned the music, blah, blah, blah, ‘It’s not real music, not rock’n’roll.’
Did that ever make you question it?
No, never. Not at all. It started out as an experimental hobby, we didn’t get into this because we wanted to be rich and famous pop stars. If we did, we would have come up with a lot better fucking name than Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark! It was a one-off gig, it was a dare to go on stage at Eric’s Club in Liverpool. And so now, people say nice things about us, we’re creating our place in the pantheon of musical history, which is very nice and I like it so the last thing we want to do is release a dud album when everybody goes, ‘Oh, they just undid all the good work!’.
Some artists I interview are totally blinkered to any impending anniversaries, are you aware of that sort of thing?
I mean, it seems like we went through a phase where every week it was the 40th anniversary of something or other and yeah, we enjoyed it. This is the nice thing because we do make new music, we have contemporised ourselves.
Yeah, the new album doesn’t feel nostalgic, it’s forward-facing.
Yeah, exactly. And so that means that we are still relevant. I think we still make good new music. We’re not just doing a sad pastiche of ourselves that only really hardcore fans will actually like. But then we can go out and play a tour which is the 40th anniversary of Architecture & Morality and we play all the songs. We played the Royal Albert Hall a few years ago and we played all of Dazzle Ships and Architecture & Morality. Dazzle Ships, the album that nearly killed our career in 1983, is now considered the fractured masterpiece!
Haha, if you wait long enough…
Yeah. And people travelled all around the world to come and see that, so we can wear lots of different hats. Some bands won’t do the retro festivals like Let’s Rock ‘80s and Rewind. We love doing them because it’s a party and we get to play to people who maybe are a Tony Hadley fan or a Howard Jones fan and they see us and go, ‘Well, shit, they kicked my ass, I didn’t know they were that good onstage’.
You mention how Dazzle Ships was a commercial disaster, is there anything in your career that’s been the opposite, where you’ve been surprised by how well it’s done?
Well, Enola Gay is a classic example. I wasn’t really sure about a song about the airplane that dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, whether that lyric would work as a pop lyric. I liked the song, but I wrote it. Paul Humphreys and our manager at the time described it as cheesy pop shit, they didn’t want to be associated with it! I remember the first time we ever went to Italy in early 1981 and we flew in and the rep up picking us up at the airport said, ‘We’ll just go to the hotel to do a quick press conference before we go to lunch and then to the TV show’ and we were like, ‘Press conference?’. We walk in and we go into this room and there’s about 50 journalists there. The first person gets up and says ‘Hi, I’m such and such, how does it feel to be Number One in Italy?’ We’re like, ‘Hang on, is this candid camera?’ and the record person goes, ‘It was a surprise. We didn’t want to tell you’. It was crazy. So yeah, we’ve had some nice surprises as well as some negative ones.
In those early days, what felt like the biggest breakthrough?
It was a series of events where it just kept snowballing. Getting signed to Factory was amazing, holding Electricity in my hand, a song that Paul and I had written when we were 16, that was amazing. Then signing to Dindisc records for a seven-album deal, it was like ‘What?!’. We were so convinced that we weren’t going to sell records, we thought, ‘Well, they’re giving us a 30 grand advance here, we’re not going to blow that in somebody else’s studio and have a couple of two-inch reels to show for it, we’re going to build our own studio,’ so we built our own studio in Liverpool and recorded the first album there. I think maybe doing the first Top Of The Pops too, for all of the 80s whenever we did a TV show just before the red light went on, Paul and I would look at each other because we did it the first time we did Top Of The Pops, we’d look at each other and go, ‘How the hell did this happen?’.
How’s the dynamic between you two now compared to the first wave of OMD, is it different?
We’re very different people. I think when it fits together, it really dovetails and when it doesn’t fit, it can be a bit bumpy. The time we have most concerns is usually mixing. I tend to just be about the feel and Paul is about sonic clarity. Sometimes I say to him, ‘You’ve cleaned this up so much, it’s sonically beautiful, but it’s lost all its feel, go and make a cup of tea, I’m going to fuck it up a bit.’ But he is better than me at mixing. He’s much better with technology. It’s the difference between us, I’m the artist and he’s the electrician. I was supposed to go and do a Fine Art degree and he was supposed to go to London and work for British Telecom and we took a gap year. By the way, I found out recently that had I gone to Leeds to do Fine Art in 1978, I would have been on the same course as Green Gartside from Scritti Politti and Dave Ball and Marc Almond from Soft Cell.
That’s amazing, how did you discover that?
I read Dave Ball’s book Electronic Boy and then he mentioned Green. Green played with us a couple of years ago and I said, ‘We would have been at the same place’. It was amazing. But that’s the difference between us. I’m the art boy. He’s the technician, so we bring different things to it. This album has been made in a way that we promised ourselves we wouldn’t do, which is remotely. We both like being in the room. We like the chemistry, the spark, but obviously with the circumstances we couldn’t. Paul moved house four times during Covid and kept having to rebuild his studio so he was unable to do work for months on end. And again, because of Covid, I sat in this room and had nothing else to do but write. I went into my computer and said, ‘Right, where’s all those things that didn’t sound like gold a few years ago, maybe I can polish them up and see if I could do a bit of alchemy here’. And actually, always check your back catalogue that you haven’t released, there may just be something there. The melody for Kleptocracy was already on that piece of music, it was just called When I Was Young. It was just the title, it didn’t have any lyrics on it and I just suddenly went, ‘If I changed the bass in the verse, I could sing like this on it’, boom. Suddenly, you get inspiration.
Have you ever had a moment where songwriting has deserted you?
Oh yeah. It gets harder the older you get, because you kind of go, ‘That sounds like something else...’. This album only exists because of Covid. Because I wouldn’t have come into this room if I could go out for a walk or go on holiday or see family and friends. But you weren’t allowed out. We’re releasing a CD of demos and so I went into my computer looking for the very first version of all of the songs and basically six of them, the 1.1 version is March, April, May 2020. I had a big buzz then because there was nothing else to do. I’ve already said this could be the last album because I just don’t think I can mine my heart and my soul again to come up with the ideas.
Have you thought that before?
Yeah, we wrote a song called Of All The Things We’ve Made, which was a B-side from the Architecture & Morality album. After three albums, I wanted to retire, we’d had enough. Hahaha! Listen, I can remember saying to my friend, actually the guy who sold us Paul’s first keyboards who went to school with me, I said, ‘If you see me and I’m still doing this when I’m 25, please shoot me.’ I’m 64 now, I’ve been dodging the bullets!
After OMD split in the ‘90s, you founded and wrote the songs for Atomic Kitten. Is there anything you learned being in the pop world that you brought back into OMD?
Yeah, there were some things I learned, some things that I saw that I’m glad I was never part of. I didn’t realise how dirty and ruthless it was, the manufactured pop area. But also it explains stuff. If you buy a pop album by a manufactured artist, not the top of the range because they can they can get all top drawer songs, the record company or the manager goes to songwriters and says, ‘Have you got something out of the top drawer?’ and they go, ‘Yeah, we’ve got this song, do you want to do it?’, and they go, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s brilliant, my band would love to do that.’ Then the songwriter would say, ‘You can only have that if you take these three out of the bottom drawer that aren’t so good’ and the manager goes, ‘Okay, well, I’ll tell you what we’ll do, if you give the girls 30% of the publishing on those songs, we’ll put them on’. What often happens as well is - I was told this and I couldn’t believe it - the executive of the record company has got publishing on every single one of those. I said, ‘I can’t see his name on the credits’. He said, ‘no, he’s using a nom de plume, look for this name’. And I went, ‘Oh, shit’. So lots of songs get on these albums of manufactured pop groups not because they’re good, but because everybody’s trying to hustle for a slice of the pie. That’s why manufactured pop albums normally start with the three hits and then the rest is just the filler.
That’s crazy. Who’s OMD’s most famous fan?
Well, these days, it’s Professor Brian Cox. He asked me to do a charity concert with him at the Royal Albert Hall last November and I said, ‘I’ll only do it if you play keyboards in Enola Gay’ and he went ‘Can I? Can I really?!’. He came on stage with the biggest, cheesiest grin you’ve ever seen in your life, it was great.
One band that really amazed me is ZZ Top. Somebody said, ‘Have you read ZZ Top’s autobiography?’. I went, ‘No, why would I read that?’. They said, ‘Well, you know, you did Old Grey Whistle Test with them back in 1980.’ I said, ‘Yeah yeah, it’s not my cup of tea. They said, ‘You should read this biography, look at this page.’ We had treated them like a bunch of hairy blues wankers, didn’t say anything nasty to them, just ignored them, like ‘This is the old shit, we’re the new shit’. Anyway, turns out that they credit us for two things. One, they said, ‘the lead singer out of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the dark, the way he swung his bass, we rip that off - all the Eliminator videos where we’re swinging our guitars, we’re copying that guy from Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark’, and they said, ‘And that’s when we went to electric drums and an electric sequencers and basses on Eliminator, because of OMD’. I wish we’d had the bloody sales that Eliminator had!
Oh, that’s brilliant.
There’s been quite a few. Vince Clarke makes no bones about it, he heard Electricity in a club in Basildon and went, ‘Right we’re doing that’.
Last question: did you learn anything new about yourself making the new record?
Ah, that’s a good question. I tell you what I did learn because there’s a few strong songs on the album like Kleptocracy and Anthropocene and Evolution Of Species where I’m saying things that are quite tough and hard but what I learned about humanity during Covid was that we are able to be kinder to each other than we gave ourselves credit for. There was a lot of empathy and love during Covid with people reaching out to neighbours and family and creating WhatsApp shopping groups and things. There’s three songs on the album that were actually kind of love letters from me to other people that I cared about, I promised them I wouldn’t say who they are. It’s not obvious from the lyrics but they’re basically like musical hugs. It’s like, ‘I love you, everything’s gonna be okay’. I think maybe I’ve learned I feel sometimes I carry the world on my back, because I’m a very Type A person, ‘Come to me, I’ll do it, I’ll fix it, I’ll sort it, I’ll make it happen’. People seem to think I’m quite a tough guy and actually I think I discovered that maybe I’m quite soft on the inside. I’ve just spent my whole life wearing armour so nobody could see it.
ND