OMD: 'We became fascinated with the Cold War'

Much was certainly expected by their label, Virgin, after the multi-platinum global success of its predecessor, Architecture & Morality. However they perhaps hadn’t reckoned with Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys presenting them with a concept album based on Cold War shortwave radio recordings and musique concrete-influenced soundscapes, with few radio-friendly singles.

Millions of fans who had lapped up hits such as Souvenir and Maid of Orleans deserted them, and Dazzle Ships sold only 300,000 copies worldwide. Yet in the decades since then it has come to be appreciated as visionary work, praised by the likes of Mark Ronson, Moby and the musician-turned-TV physicist Professor Brian Cox. To mark its 40th anniversary, OMD are releasing an elaborate double-vinyl edition.

“Dazzle Ships, although it almost finished our career, is an album me and Andy are incredibly proud of,” Humphreys tells The Yorkshire Post today.

Looking for extra material for the box set, he visited Universal’s vast archive of mastertapes. “Pretty much everything we recorded is in a huge vault just outside of Heathrow,” he says. “It was really fun to go in there. It was one of those places where it’s a proper vault with a great big handle on the door that your turned and the door is about 3ft thick, it’s like a bomb shelter you’re going in. And in there of course is all The Beatles’ and Bowie’s stuff, I was in there going, ‘Wow, this is amazing, there’s some history in here’.”

OMD’s section alone was “massive”, he says. “We had our own studio and in the early days we used to catalogue the tapes ourselves but we weren’t very good at it, we used to just put working titles on things. Even songs that were released aren’t called the right name on the tapes, so it was a bit of a journey going through all these tapes going ‘what’s that?’ I was in the vault calling Andy all the time going ‘Do you remember this title? I don’t remember this song’ and he’d say, ‘Oh, that turned out to be Souvenir’ or something.” For the Dazzle Ships period, he found “some of the ideas were so sketchy they weren’t exciting to listen to”, nonetheless there were “a few little gems” including an early version of two B-sides, The Avenue and 4 Neu, “which were so radically different and barely recognisable to the versions that went out but the original kernel of an idea was quite beautiful”.

“Our fans like to hear our work in progress, and it’s interesting for me too to go through it,” he says. “Around the 30th anniversary of Dazzle Ships we did a show at the Royal Albert Hall and we played all the album and all of Architecture & Morality and of course we hadn’t played a lot of Dazzle Ships live so I had to go back to multi-tracks just to hear what we did and find some of found sounds which were recorded from shortwave radio so they can’t be recreated, I had to nick them and make them into samples to fire in on a keyboard, but what was fascinating about it was they were so simple, we hadn’t even filled the multi-track, they were quite bare bones and a kind of liked that.

“We took that ethic into the later albums. Particularly The Punishment of Luxury, we took that blueprint from Dazzle Ships of less is more. With modern technology there are so many possibilities, we call it the tyranny of choice now, you’ve got so many options that you can disappear up your own backside. What was great in the early days was we kept things simple and only left things there that really needed to be there.”

Dazzle Ships, he feels, is the perfect illustration of the leap in technology in the 80s. “We used to love to do the musique concrete, which was basically found sounds, anything that makes a sound you can try to incorporate it into a piece of music, but it was very difficult before samplers when you could record something digitally and play it back on a keyboard,” he says. “We used to have to use analogue tape machines and record things then try to press ‘play’ at the right spot. When we hit Dazzle Ships we bought one of the first samplers that came out and really Dazzle Ships was us exploring musique concrete.

“A great example is Genetic Engineering, we went out to a local toyshop and bought a load of kids’ toys that made sounds and the whole of Genetic Engineering is basically that. The main keyboard in it is a kid’s toy piano that we sampled and all of the chorus vocals were done of a kid’s Speak and Spell. Anything was fair game then and Dazzle Ships is an example of us trying to push a sampler to its limits.”

Virgin bosses would have preferred another Architecture & Morality and at one point asked the band if they wanted to be Stockhausen or Abba. “And we said ‘can’t we be both?’” Humphreys recalls. “We were signed to Dindisc for the first three albums and Dindisc was owned by Virgin. For Dazzle Ships we went onto the mothership and I don’t think they knew what they were getting with us. I think they’d seen the numbers and went ‘OMD are doing whatever they want to do and we keep selling more and more millions of them, so I’m sure they know what they are doing’. I do remember one executive saying to us, ‘You should just do Architecture & Morality II now and you’ll be the next Genesis’, and we were like, ‘OK, let’s not do that then​​​​​​​’, we didn’t want to be the next Genesis.”

He views the album as “the soundtrack” to its sleeve​​​​​​​, which was elegantly designed by Peter Saville. “Dazzle Ships wouldn’t have existed if we hadn’t worked by the designer Peter Saville, who did all our amazing sleeves​​​​​​​. Before we even started the album he said, ‘I’ve found these dazzle ships​​​​​​​ from the First World War, how they disguised the ships’ and he showed us these pictures and said ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing to do a sleeve like this?’ ​​​​​​​We said, ‘OK, we have to call the album Dazzle Ships, that’s the sleeve and now we have to write a soundtrack​​​​​​​ to the sleeve’.”

Included in the album is a debate about the pros and cons of technology. “ABC Auto-Industry is a song about machines taking over the manufacturing industry,” Humphreys says. “We were talking about that in ’83, and now most cars are made by robots, as are may other things.

“We’ve never been a band to really go for rock ’n’ roll cliches, we’re always trying to make pop music but using themes that are interesting. Most of Dazzle Ships is about the Cold War. We’ve always been fascinated by war, Andy and I, every type of war, whether it’s physical or cold war. We’re products of the 60s, that wasn’t that far from the Second World War and our parents experienced it. My dad was a prisoner of war, he was captured in northern Africa and marched over to the Black Forest in Germany and he was forced to fell trees for the Nazis until he got liberated when the Americans swept through on their way to Berlin. I grew up with these stories of the Second World War, so did Andy, so that’s why there’s a lot of themes going through our songs, particularly the early ones like The Messerschmitt Twins, Bunker Soldiers, Enola Gay about the atom bomb on Hiroshima.

“We became fascinated with the Cold War. Andy and I used to stay up late at night in our studio and we had a shortwave radio so you could tune into Eastern Europe and put a tape machine in record and see what we could find. That’s why there’s the Time Zones thing and samples of Radio Prague in Dazzle Ships’ title track. International as well starts off with quite a heavy speech we found, it was actually in English but it was from Prague.

“We’ve been fortunate that we both have a knack of writing a catchy tune so we could surgarcoat most of our craziest ideas, but the thing about Dazzle Ships is there’s not much sugarcoating on it, really. I think that’s what shocked people after the beauty of Architecture & Morality, but a lot of bands, contemporaries and younger, cite that album as a major influence on them, so we did something right. And it’s a fan favourite. Dazzle Ships, Architecture & Morality and The Punishment of Luxury our fans cite as our best work.”

In June, OMD join Soft Cell, Midge Ure, Blancmange and more performing at 80s nostalgia festival Let’s Rock Leeds at Temple Newsam. After resisting such events in the past, they now seem more at ease with playing their hits on festival stages. “We’re proud of our catalogue​​​​​​​ and people want to hear these songs,” Humphreys says. “We’re not one of those bands that are embarrassed by their hits, they’re our children, they gave us a wonderful life, so we’re not ashamed of them. We love to go out and play them and to be quite honest, these shows are just fun. Because we’re not just doing the retro stuff, we’re a current band, we tour in our own right​​​​​​​, we’re working on a new album at the moment​​​​​​​, which is almost finished, so we thought as long as we have this side of us that remains current and we’re not just trading on our former glories then it’s OK to do these retro gigs. The audiences are bonkers, they’re so much fun to play to, and quite a lot of these Let’s Rock festivals we can headline​​​​​​​ so it means we can do a proper show, we can bring our light show with us and our screens​​​​​​​.

“And to be honest, we’ve been doing these shows for a number of years and afterwards we found when toured in our own right our audience numbers went up because people who saw us at those festivals went ‘OMD, they’re an entertaining band live, I’ll go see them when they come around’. So it kind of served that prupose as well.”

Humphreys reveals he has mixed eight ​​​​​​​new songs out of the 12 planned for the new album and they’re aiming to release it at the end of this year. “The great thing about making music now is we’re in charge of our own destiny,” he says. “We can just do what we want to do and when it’s finished we’ll put it out.”

The new record has several themes. “There’s the theme of our planet, of evolution, there’s a lot of themes that are culturally relevant. Thematically we’re still pulling from idea that we’re interested in now.”

Dazzle Ships 40th anniversary edition is out on Friday March 31. OMD play at Let’s Rock Leeds on June 17.