After nearly 40 years, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark head Down Under to dish up greatest hits tour

When Manchester music maverick and Factory Records founder Tony Wilson told Liverpudlian synth-pop duo Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark they were the “future of pop” in the late 70s, they told him to “sod off”. “We’re experimental, we’re not pop music,” Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys informed Wilson, who added that he’d like to release their debut single, Electricity. “Oh yeah, we’d like to do that, obviously.” Later, when OMD signed to British independent record label Virgin Records, one of the executives complained that he didn’t understand their music. “One minute you’re ABBA, with these catchy pop songs,” he moaned, “and the next you want to be (avant-garde German electronic composer Karlheinz) Stockhausen.” Their response? “Yeah, can’t we be both?” The frisson between art and commerce has rarely sounded so good. OMD is a band as capable of setting lyrics about the bombing of Hiroshima to a galloping new wave tempo (1980 signature song Enola Gay) as it is penning a zeitgeist-capturing synth-pop swoon like If You Leave. The latter is the group’s biggest hit, thanks to the song featuring in director John Hughes’ 1986 teen romcom Pretty in Pink. Both Enola Gay and If You Leave will be performed live when McCluskey and Humphreys lead OMD’s first tour of Australia in close to 40 years. Sitting in his “programming room” a stone’s throw from his childhood home on the Wirral Peninsula in Merseyside, OMD singer, keyboardist and guitarist McCluskey apologises for the long absence. The synth-pop innovators pulled the plug back in 1996 after releasing 10 albums, before reuniting in 2007 for nine shows that spiralled into 49 concerts and the release of comeback album Architecture & Morality. The second coming of OMD has now produced four very well-received albums, including last year’s excellent Bauhaus Staircase, and several tours of the UK and Europe. McCluskey jokes that long-awaited tours can go two ways — there’s either a fierce appetite for the band, or entrenched doubt. “Are they wandering around stage with their wheelchairs and Zimmer frames,” the affable Englishman chuckles. “Trust me, we can still kick arse on stage. “People want to hear the hits — and believe me, we play them — but we’re not just a nostalgia act. “I’m so glad we did reform,” McCluskey adds. “It’s been a total delight.” In addition to the two founders, OMD 2024 stars long-serving keyboardist Martin Cooper and drummer Stuart Kershaw. But the band’s sound — a reaction against the turgid guitar solos of macho 70s rock — was forged by McCluskey and Humphreys, who met at age seven in primary school and started making “abstract, ambient” music together when they were 16. Inspired by German electronic legends Kraftwerk, the right-handed McCluskey started out playing a left-handed bass guitar upside-down, while electronics enthusiast Humphreys tinkered with a circuit board he cannibalised from his auntie’s radio. “Our friends didn’t think it was music,” McCluskey laughs. The Korg synthesiser bought out of one of his mother’s mail order catalogues for £7.76 a week paid over 36 weeks and used on their early recordings still sits in his programming room. Once record deals and success arrived, OMD splurged on a Fairlight synthesiser and sampler. McCluskey reveals that the “very amazing piece of Australian technology” cost the band £24,000. “The house I grew up in was valued the same amount of money (at the time),” the 65-year-old says. “That’s how scarily expensive they were.” McCluskey adds that Humphreys now has an app on his iPhone that mimics the digital sampler. The Fairlight defined the sound of OMD, and everybody else, for the next few years. Hardware aside, the relationship between the two founders, once described as the Lennon-McCartney of electronic music, was the crucial software. “I’m a control freak and that’s one of the reasons why I like working with Paul,” McCluskey says. “He’s a passive genius.” The frontman adds that getting access to that genius is a little more complicated now that Humphreys is remarried with a three-year-old daughter. Still, Bauhaus Staircase, which peaked at No. 2 on the UK charts, showcases classic OMD songcraft and features songs inspired by recent world politics. Kleptocracy is an idiosyncratic album highlight and you’d struggle to find Duran Duran or Spandau Ballet namechecking Deutsche Bank. “We shouldn’t be elitist,” McCluskey laughs. “There’s nothing wrong with a good pop tune and the lyrics don’t always have to make a lot of sense. “I always wanted to write about things that I thought were more interesting than just ‘ooh baby, I love you’.” Across 46 years of music, OMD have written about oil refineries, alternative energy sources and the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. But when Hughes changed the ending to Pretty in Pink and told the band that the song they planned to record would no longer work, the songwriting duo were forced to come up with their biggest hit in a matter of hours. “We were under pressure,” McCluskey says of writing If You Leave. “We just went into the studio and whilst we were waiting for the rented Fairlight to turn up, Paul and I did the unmentionable, which was sit around a piano and write like Tin Pan Alley songwriters.” While the song was a massive hit, If You Leave didn’t immediately kick open doors in the US, where they were signed to Epic. The label was obsessed with wringing every dollar out of pop phenomenon Michael Jackson. “They didn’t need anybody else, they were making so much money,” McCluskey explains. “We couldn’t get arrested in America. They weren’t putting any effort into promoting us.” The musician says that at least they got to walk the red carpet at the Hollywood premiere of Pretty in Pink at Mann’s Chinese Theatre. However, once they changed record companies, If You Leave got a second life and was soon inescapable. “I can remember driving around LA in a car with the top down, which you don’t do in Liverpool, and on came If You Leave,” McCluskey recalls. “I was so bored of it, so I pressed a different (radio) station and If You Leave was playing. It was simultaneously on four radio stations. Now, that is a hit.” He should not have taken If You Leave for granted. The hits soon dried up, Humphreys left OMD in 1989 and the McCluskey-led outfit called it quits in 1996 after releasing 10th album Universal. That album featured the single Walking on the Milky Way, a track McCluskey rates as “as good a song as I could ever write”. Radio wouldn’t touch the song. Retail wouldn’t stock the single. OMD were old hat. “I was banging my head against a wall,” McCluskey says. “The vehicle is considered past its sell-by date.” His good friend Karl Bartos from his heroes Kraftwerk suggested he not only write for other people, but also create the vehicle to perform the songs. “Stick with me on this one,” McCluskey says conspiratorially, “Kraftwerk invented Atomic Kitten.” Spurred by Bartos and working with Kershaw, who replaced original drummer Malcolm Holmes in OMD, he created English girl group Atomic Kitten. Three years after they formed, the dance-pop trio landed a massive hit with Whole Again, co-written by McCluskey and Kershaw. Atomic Kitten went on to score 13 UK Top 10 singles in a six-year burst. “Atomic Kitten was great fun,” McCluskey says. “We honestly didn’t have a clue what we were doing.” His involvement with the manufactured pop outfit ended during the fractious lead-up to a second album. And while he worked behind the scenes as a writer and producer on various other projects, the fact his two children had never seen OMD live spurred him to return to the stage. While McCluskey loves touring, describing it as “smelling the roses I planted on the 46-year OMD journey”, he suspects Bauhaus Staircase might be the band’s final album. “I’m in my programming room,” he explains. “Do I want to sit in this room and mine my head, my heart and my soul for ideas that are good enough to make a new album? “Being cruelly honest but mentioning no names, there’s a lot of our contemporaries that release albums because their manager has told them they need a new record so they have a new logo on the t-shirt for the tour. “That’s not the main reason you should make music,” McCluskey continues. “We really, really sweat blood over the past few albums. The older you get, the harder it gets. You think ‘No, I’ve written about that. No, I said that before. That melody sounds like that.’ “Quite frankly, if it wasn’t for COVID, the Bauhaus Staircase album wouldn’t exist,” he laughs. “There was f…-all else to do.” Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark play Red Hill Auditorium on February 12, 2025.