OMD Dazzle Ships

The Sinking of OMD

Dazzle Ships OMD
Virgin/EMI

The UK music scene in the early 80s was awash with the bastard progeny of Brian Eno and Kraftwerk flagging up their desire to be different by waving a series of increasingly preposterous names at the record buying population. Depeche Mode, A Flock of Seagulls, The Human League, and perhaps most flamboyantly named of all, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, were pop groups branded to broadcast their outsider status before even a note had been heard.

Making the reality of the music match up to the rhetoric of the name-calling required effort. Rickety songs were pitched as quirky Quatermass lab lash-ups, iced with consumptive keyboard introspection and filled with Radiophonic Workshop-nostalgia.

Like the name of the bands that begat them, their tunes were christened with titles designed to layer in extra-textual depth. Thus in the case of OMD, a tune could be titled “Architecture & Morality” with a completely straight face. What might have once been a tongue in cheek approach to titles was now an alchemical conjuring act that transformed it into a proposition ripe for semantic and semiotic interpretation - a sheepish pop tune now bigged-up in Camus’ clothing.

The formula worked though and OMD’s commercial star was firmly in the ascendant by the time they retired to the studio to figure out the follow-up to 1981’s Architecture & Morality.

Plagued with writers block it was the call signs of Eastern bloc radio that provided inspiration. From these, Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphrey’s created a collage of short-wave warblings that criss-crossed between the regular tunes such as “Genetic Engineering”, “Telegraph” and the best of the lot, “Silent Running” wherein it’s obvious they’ve yet to forgive themselves for not being Joy Division.

Originally released in 1983, the allusion to camouflage in the album’s title couldn’t hide the fact that even with Rhett Davies’ glacial production this was pretty thin stuff at the time, requiring the inclusion of two old B-sides to beef it up.

25 years on and expanded with a clutch of extra tracks, the hope that this ugly ducking of clunky samples might somehow have transformed into a beautiful swansong of music concrete pop poetics is just wishful thinking.