Andy McCluskey: electric dreams.

Published: Feb 1, 2025.

INTRODUCTION The vast majority of bands who grew out of the punk movement circa 1976, and eventually rose to fame, were not from London. As England was turned upside down by the “nastiness” of punk, it was the local clubs like Eric’s in Liverpool and The Factory in Manchester that became the breeding ground for every soon-to-be famous artist and musician.

Fueled by punk’s just-get-up-and-do-it-yourself attitude, bands like the Buzzcocks, The Smiths, Joy Division, Echo and the Bunnymen, Simple Minds, and many, many more, took the torch handed to them by punk and created new sounds and styles that would eventually turn the world upside down.

My name is Richard Smith. I’m an art director and a filmmaker and I’m your host. In episode seven, we meet someone who pushed back against the guitar-noodling prog-rock of the day and set out to make his dream of orchestral manoeuvres in the dark a reality. 

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RICHARD SMITH: My guest today has inspired many to dance including ZZ Top and members of No Doubt and Bare Naked Ladies. His song Sailing on the Seven Seas got to number three in the UK single charts and is also how we met.

He’s right-handed, but he learned to play a left-handed bass. He still lives in the borough where he was born near his hometown, Liverpool.

And building on the success of his band’s 14th album, Bauhaus Staircase, he’s about to embark on a long-awaited tour across the US.

Please welcome to the show, the one and only, Mr. O. M. D. – Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark – Andy McCluskey. Andy, welcome to the show.

ANDY MCCLUSKEY: Thank you, Richard. It’s nice to be talking to you after all these years.

RS: It’s been a long time since we were messing about together.

AMc: I must admit when I stopped in the nineties, I didn’t think I’d do Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark again. I felt when the band reformed in 2006, I felt I was like an old football player who was allowed to put his boots back on and get out on the field.

And hopefully I’m playing better than most 65-year-old football players will be now. 

RS: It must be really rewarding to have come all this way and still release an album that is critically acclaimed. Bauhaus Staircase is considered one of your best albums. That must be very rewarding after all this time, you’ve still got it.

AMc:  Thank you very much. You never expect when you’ve been going this long. First of all, we didn’t expect to be going this long. We only put the band together for one concert and here we are 46 years later. But essentially we said to ourselves if we reformed, if we did do the crazy thing and do new music, that we would make sure it was worth listening to.

We did not want to be a sad, feeble pastiche of our former selves. And I think that in some respects, when we were breaking America, America was breaking us. Some of the music that we released in the late eighties, in hindsight, wasn’t our best music. Some of it was great, but it wasn’t consistently good.

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And I think that we were determined that if we were going to make new records, we were only going to release them if they were good. Now that’s easier said than done. A lot of people aren’t very good self-editors, but I think that Paul and I given enough time, I think know what we’re doing, trust ourselves.

I think more than anything else, what we lost in the late eighties was we didn’t have enough time. We were chasing round and round in ever-decreasing circles and losing money at the same time, which was scary because we’d signed such a terrible deal when we were kids. But yeah, thank you. The new albums have been really good and very well received by fans and critics, and it makes all the hard work feel like it was worth it.

RS: I’m going to bring you back probably a while. You touched on it a little bit, talking about how you got together for one concert. You were born in the peninsula of Northern England, called the Wirral. Just across the Mersey from Liverpool. You met Paul Humphreys at school, and then you were in several bands coming out of that: Dalek, I Love You, Hitler’s Underpants.

The question was, why did you want to start a band? 

AMc: Good question.

RS: Do you remember?

AMc: I do. I had friends who played instruments and I kind of wanted to join that club. I wasn’t terribly sporty. I was into art and my mates at school were starting bands. So, I wanted to join.

I quickly realized that I couldn’t afford a drum kit. Six-string guitars hurt my fingers too much. So, I ended up going for bass because it just seemed like it was going to be the easiest option for various reasons.

I bought myself my first bass guitar, which, as you said in the introduction, I play upside down because I only had a certain amount of money for my 16th birthday.

I went to a secondhand store and the cheapest one they had was left-handed. So, I just had to buy that one. And I learned to play with the strings upside down. I am the only right-handed person, I think, in the world who plays his bass with the strings upside down because once I’d learned, I couldn’t change that. My original lefty was stolen after four years, the first time we ever played in London. I just had to keep playing. So, to this day, I play with my E string at the bottom.

RS: I used to play a bass years ago, I can’t imagine how you even do that.

AMc: Oh, believe me, I love handing it to other bass players, it fucks their head up totally. 

RS: That’s brilliant. 

AMc: I’ll be honest, it’s much easier to play split octaves because you’re reaching up, not pulling down if you think about it. Go get your bass out later and practice it.

It’s just, I play it upside down. I’m sure it’s affected the way I play, but that’s the way I play.

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RS: So how was punk a part of what you were thinking back then? How did it influence you? How did it inspire you? I read that you wanted to be in an electronic band because you didn’t like a lot of the more, ‘laddish’ bands that were around at that time.

AMc: Well, you’re right that initially I was finding my musical way and my alternative to the mainstream. I certainly wanted to be alternative to the mainstream. But I found those alternatives before punk before I’d heard of punk. When I started, I was in some pretty awful pseudo-prog rock bands with my long hair.

Quite simply, I liked people like Bowie and Roxy Music and the Velvet Underground more than  Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, and Genesis. But all my mates were into that at the time. And then I heard Autobahn on the radio. The summer I got my bass guitar I heard Autobahn by Kraftwerk on the radio in the summer of ’75.

I went to see them play at the Liverpool Empire on the 11th of September, 1975, and I sat in seat Q36. I remember it because it was the first day of the rest of my life. They changed my life. I just saw this and went, oh, that’s much more interesting than all this long-haired hippie dippy crap. I want to do that, but a) I’ve got no money, and b) an upside-down bass guitar. How the hell am I going to do it? 

Punk hadn’t happened yet. You had some, what are now called punk bands from CBGBs and stuff, the Ramones and people like that. But in England, the Pistols and The Clash hadn’t happened. So, I found my alternative in these, four sharply dressed Germans wearing suits and ties.

Which was the antithesis of long hair, flared denims, and guitar solos. The punks were against that as well. I think the punks didn’t dislike Kraftwerk, I think because they saw it as another movement that was against Anglo-American rock cliches. So, I got into this.

Fortunately, Paul Humphreys, asked me to join his friend’s band and I joined them and it was prog-rock, but I started writing songs that were a bit weirder.

Paul had a stereo. I only had my mother’s mono record player. Paul had a stereo he’d made himself because he was studying electronics. On Saturdays, I started to go around to his house with my German import albums, and we started listening to music. We had no money, so we made this really weird project.

I guess it was punk, with radio circuits gutted out of Paul’s auntie’s radio. We were just making weird noises. It was weird, quite atonal, and not very musical. Eventually, Paul bought an electric piano and an organ. This was in early ’76.

The first song we wrote was Electricity, which is our punky British homage to Radio-Activity by Kraftwerk. But all of this was happening before punk came into our lives.

RS: Was punk an influence then, or was it more that you were catching a wave, or where did you see yourselves? 

AMc: I liked punk from the very first time I started to hear it. I owned an EMI copy of Anarchy in the UK.

My father had racing greyhounds, some of which lived in the house and one of them took a bite out of it and then promptly shat on the living room carpet.

RS: That’s a story for the archives.

AMc: That’s even more judgmental than most British journalists. I loved the energy. And I loved the fact that it was DIY. The theory at least was that you just got up and played. You didn’t have to learn. To be honest, the Pistols could play. I mean, Sid Vicious couldn’t play bass when he joined, but the original Pistols band. People like The Slits were proper DIY.

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They had to teach themselves. If you read Viv Albertine’s book, she couldn’t play guitar at all, but she was the guitarist in The Slits. She just started making up her way to play. So, they were generally, genuinely more punk than a lot of the early punk bands who could play.

But I liked the energy. I liked the fact that they were challenging what I already saw as boring stereotypes. The hippie music of the sixties had turned into this overcomplicated, signature-changing, sort of wanky jazz hog that was just like, Oh God, seriously.

RS: You’re not a fan of Yes? 

AMc: I was when I was like 14, 15, then I went off them. If I listen back now, I like some when they’ve got a tune. But when they’re just noodling, I’ve never been into virtuoso musicianship. I’ve never been interested in, “Oh, I’ve spent 10 years learning how to twist my body around this instrument. So now I’m going to play as many notes in a bar as I possibly can to prove to you how good I am.”

It’s like, I don’t fucking care, play a tune I want to hear. Forget all that, play a tune. Even if it’s only got two notes or three chords.

RS: I hated them growing up, and then punk came along, and they were my older brother’s band, ugh, horrible, whatever.

Then, ironically, years later, I saw a movie called Buffalo 66, it’s a Vincent Gallo movie, and they used so many Yes songs. That context suddenly changed my perspective on Yes, and now I’m a fan. I’m sad to say.

AMc: If you wanted me to choose something that grew out of that, Jon and Vangelis, I love. That’s because one, it’s electronic, and two, I just think some of the tunes are better than many of the Yes songs.

The important thing for me about punk was that there was an alternative to the music that I had myself decided was unnecessarily verbose and up its arse.

The argument is how much punk changed the world specifically. I think the most important thing about punk was the ethos that you just got up in there and did it, even though that was a lie.

Most successful bands were not, they hadn’t only just picked up a guitar. The one thing that punk did change was that for a couple of years, it decentralized the music industry in the UK. A&R men had to get off their fat, lazy asses and get out of London and go to the provinces because provincial bands were suddenly making noise.

Although the main punk bands were basically from London. Once they detonated the idea that, all right, you’ve got to be great musicians and you’ve got to have been together for so long and served your dues. Now we’re just going to get up and do it. All these alternative clubs started opening all around the UK.

One of which was Eric’s Club in Liverpool. So, the London-centric music industry had to go to the provinces for at least two years, because all of the bands of my generation started provincially: OMD, Echo and the Bunnymen, Teardrop Explodes; Manchester, Glasgow, Dublin, although it’s not part of the kingdom, but Dublin,  Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, all of the new bands that were going to become successful were not from London.

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The great thing was that it allowed a lot of new clubs to be breeding grounds. Eric’s wasn’t a punk club though; no punk bands came out of Liverpool, but Eric’s was a club where suddenly all of the misfits, oddballs, and outsiders adopted this place and we were allowed to play.

We invented Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark to play on their Thursday night local talent night. We said, “Can we get up and play?” “What do you want to do?” “Well, Paul and I are going to borrow my mate’s tape recorder, and we’re going to do the electronic music that we’ve been writing since we were 16. Can we do it?” “Yes, you can.” Without that club, we wouldn’t have even invented our band. 

RS: Just to sidetrack a little bit because you mentioned Manchester. Your first single, Electricity, you recorded yourselves and then released as a single with Factory Records. 

AMc: Paul Humphreys had a friend at school who had a small recording studio in his parent’s garage. We said to him, “Could we come in and borrow your tape recorder and make some backing tracks to record, to go and play live?”

So, that’s what we did. One of the songs we recorded was Electricity. And after we played our second concert, which was at The Factory, and this was the wonderful thing, these clubs all talked to each other as well.

So, Eric’s said to us, “Oh, that was really interesting.” I mean, listen. There weren’t even 30 people the first night we played. The guys who ran the club said, “We have this reciprocal arrangement with this new club in Manchester called The Factory, which wasn’t even a club. It was the Russell Club in Hume in Moss Side, which if you know, Manchester was not the nicest part of the town, but once every couple of weeks, it was rebranded The Factory by Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus and Peter Saville, and we got sent over there and we supported Cabaret Voltaire.

We met Tony Wilson, and because he was a local TV newsreader and had bands on sometimes, we cheekily sent him a cassette of our recording of Electricity done in our mate’s garage. And we went in to re-record it with Martin Hannett, who of course did all the great Joy Division albums.

But Martin’s vision of Electricity was a bit too ambient and echoey. So, we used our demo from the garage that was released on Factory. 

RS: Why did you not stay with Factory though? Why did you part ways or was it never a long-term relationship?

AMc: Well, my good friend and your old boss, Peter Saville, the sleeve designer, a fabulous artist, although he doesn’t like to be called sleeve designer anymore. He’s an artist, and a very good one.

RS: He doesn’t like to be called that either.

AMc: No. Okay. What does he want to be called now? 

RS: When I interviewed him, he said he liked the idea of being the old man on the hill where people come for advice. 

AMc: Well, he is. The funny thing is I can recall going to a John Moores painting prize launch in London with him and he walked in and it was like fucking Andy Warhol had walked in the room. All these painters who were doing paintings for this prize, “That’s Peter Saville.” They loved him. He was one of their gods, so it’s the younger artists who treat him like the old man on the hill.

Anyway, we digress. So, Peter said to me, “You were the only band that actually followed our original model for Factory.” I went, “What?” He said, “Get a local band, release a record or some records, develop them to the point where they can be signed to a major, get some money for selling them to the major and start again, keep a conveyor belt going of developing artists.”

We were the only one they did that with. Once Joy Division came along, and then the others, they just stayed on the label. Then the label got bigger and bigger and completely lost the bloody plot.

Do you want to know a proper punk story about how we got on Factory as well? I thought this was an apocryphal urban myth, but it turned out to be true.

We finally met Tony Wilson’s wife. Lindsay Reade, his wife at the time in the seventies. And we said, “We heard a story, but it can’t be true. Is it?”

She went, “What about the shopping bag of the cassettes in the car?” I said, “Yeah.” She said, “I got into the car with Tony and in the footwell of the passenger seat, there was a supermarket bag full of cassettes and said, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘Oh, they’re all cassettes of people who want to get on the TV or want to get on the new label. They’re all the rejects. I’m taking them to the tip’.”

Then she put her hand into the bag and pulled out a cassette and went, “Oh, that’s a weird name. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.” He went, “Yeah, love. They played at the club the other week. A shit couple of hairy guys from Liverpool going on about electrical nonsense. Nah, not my thing.” She then put in the cassette, and it was Electricity. She went, “That’s a hit love.” He went, “No.” She said,“No, seriously, that is a hit.”

So apparently patronizingly he patted her on the thigh and went, “All right, just for you, I’ll sign them.” And the next time we met him because Tony Wilson could spin on a sixpence, he was like, we weren’t a couple of hairy shits from Liverpool, twittering on about electricity, we were the future of pop music. 

We said, “Don’t call us fucking pop. We’re experimental, but if you want to release a record, we’ll do that.” But yeah, his wife pulled us out of the bag on the way to the dump.

RS: And the rest is history. That is a brilliant story.

AMc: Yeah, it’s true. 

RS: Podcast over. Fantastic.

AMc: Yeah, we can’t beat that. Let’s go and have a cup of tea.

RS: I know you’re a big fan of modernism. I’m curious: Do you feel that punk was a modernist ideal?

AMc: That’s a very good question. I think because I studied art, and I was into art and I knew my art history. I did my A-level thesis on Dadaism. I saw punk as an attempt to be musical Dadaism. To say, if this is what logic has musically arrived at, all this, prog-rock indulgence, then we want to smash it.

We want to go back to simplicity and challenging authority. It was the thesis that it challenged authority. Now the reality is that the Sex Pistols were managed by a guy who had been making his living with clothes design, but of course, the clothes were part of being alternative; we’re going to look like this.

The one thing. I think a lot of people who are young now don’t understand is what life was like before postmodernism. Because you just mentioned modernism, but postmodernism is a whole new world. It started to become evident by the late eighties and the nineties, when essentially all popular culture, not just music, but all popular culture started to eat its history and regurgitate itself.

But when you look back to before that, you had rock and roll and you had the sixties pop, and then you had the hippie thing, and then you got the prog-rock thing, and this is new and that is old. It was also tribal as well. So, this is my new tribe, your old tribe. You can fuck off, go away. We’re not going to listen to you.

And the music you listened to, your haircut and your clothes. Defined your current tribe or the tribe that you associated with. Prog was fat and past its sell-by date by the punks or by people like me, who’d got into electronic music as my alternative. And we were like, no, that is old. That needs to go away and die. Now we are the future.

Of course, 10 years later, oh, we’re not the future anymore. Something else is the future, but it is linear. It went, this is new, you’re old. Then suddenly the new became old and something else was new. But then, by the late 80s, and 10 years after punk, we were coming to postmodernism where it didn’t matter anymore.

You could do anything. I don’t know whether punk brought that about or whether punk was part of the final death throes of linear tribalism, but certainly, it changed things, was it just another linear tribal thing? You’ll never know because it was one of the last things.

After punk, you had post-punk, and then you had electronic pop music. The next big thing after punk was British electronic pop music that grew out of the punk clubs and that decentralization of the London music industry. 

RS: I think you said it really well. The era that followed cannibalized the era prior. Essentially, punk devolved into something that didn’t look like it did when it started in 1975, ’76, and it then turned into something that was glamorous and shiny and glossy and kind of the opposite. That’s what intrigues me about the eras that followed.

Something you made me think about that I wanted to bring up. This is a confession. I’ve been an OMD fan for a long time from Electricity to today. What I have never appreciated – and I’m really sorry – is that I didn’t realize how many of your songs had a political overtone.

There was a reference to the song Stanlow I saw recently, and it made me think, “Oh, was Electricity about alternative ways of powering the world?” I’m like, “Oh, I’m a stupid idiot. Why didn’t I realize that?” You were singing about Enola Gay and I knew that that was a B-52 bomber or whatever. But I never thought it was an anti-war song.

AMc: Bauhaus Staircase, the title comes from the painting. But yes, with Bauhaus Staircase, I was making an analogy of what the Nazis did to the Bauhaus. The fact that during lockdown, during the COVID crisis, it wasn’t just British governments, but many governments that furloughed everybody except the creative arts performance industries.

Which was very much them saying, “We don’t respect you. You’re not worth it. Get a real job.” There was a poster in Britain, that said, “Today, she’s a ballet dancer, but next year she could be an IT expert.” Essentially, your job in the performing creative arts is a drain on society and a waste of time.

Of course, the reality is, yes, when you’re in a pandemic when you’ve got an existential crisis in the world, you need to prioritize putting food on the table. But at those very times, you also need to feed your soul as well. And performing, when it was taken away from us, we all realized that going to art galleries and going to the theater and going to music concerts was really important to us.

So yes, I’ve been being political for a while. I’ve just never been very banner-waving. I’ve often been quite political, but more metaphorical with my lyrics. 

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RS: I was going to say subversive, maybe.

AMc: The crazy thing is, Richard, going back to this punk thing. I was a very serious, incredibly precious, and pretentious artist when I was younger. I was going to art college to do conceptual and installation art. I took a gap year and I started a band instead.

But as I confidently said to Tony Wilson, “We are an experimental band.” However, I hadn’t realized that unconsciously we’d been welding the glam pop tunes of our early teen years to our Kraftwerk mentality and when I listen to Electricity now, I just think that’s a fucking catchy tune.

We thought we were being experimental at the time. I thought I was going to change the world by making new, more interesting music. I wasn’t going to use the word love. I wasn’t going to use cymbals. I wasn’t going to let the drummer play his drums. He wasn’t going to play a kit. He had to do the bass drum at one time, snare drum at another, and anything else. Because I didn’t want that clatter.

I had this incredibly strong ethic and I thought I was going to change the world. I look back now and I think what a naive little idiot you were. How did you really think you were going to change the world with your music? But without that mentality. I wouldn’t have written the lyrics. I wouldn’t have written the music. We wouldn’t have done what we did.

I’m not discounting Paul Humphreys, but Paul Humphreys is an intuitive musician. And the great thing I’ve always loved about Paul is he does what I tell him to. So, if Paul thinks I’ve got a great idea, he just comes along to the party and writes a great tune on it.

So, it’s been wonderful working with him. But I was the ideas man. I was the one who said, we’re going to sound like this. We’re going to sing about that. We’re going to do this.

Paul was there to help me make it happen because, without him, it wouldn’t have. And that was my way of trying to change the world, which seems ridiculously naive, but you know, did punk change the world? Did we change the world?

RS: You impacted the world for sure and you inspired people maybe that is another way to put it. The music and then the packaging specifically inspired me and brought me to where I am today. There’s a relationship between all of this. Did it change the world? I don’t know.

Did it inspire people who went out and did it? Who sought change? I think, yes, maybe.

AMc: No, I think you’re right. What I’ve realized as I’ve grown up is most music doesn’t deal hammer blows, but it can inspire people. It can gently change directions of things, but it’s interesting as well, because, to your American listeners, many of them would still only know us as the band who did, If You Leave, and they’ll go, “Why are they talking about deep art and experimentalism and changing the world?” So, they’d have to go and listen to our catalog and realize, oh God If You Leave, is the outsider amongst their catalog, They have to go back and realize where we got our influences from.

Listen, Vince Clark openly admits we invented Depeche Mode. They heard Electricity in a club in Basildon and went, right, “We’re doing that.” 

RS: There are so many bands who were inspired by you.

AMc: There has been a catalog of lovely people who said that we’ve inspired them over the years, and it’s been amazing.

RS: Piggybacking off that, what inspires you today? Musically, and creatively, what gets you excited today? Anything?

AMc: If you’re aware of our musical outputs recently, increasingly I’m leaning on my art history heritage. So, a lot of paintings, a lot of things. We had a song a few years ago called Night Cafe, where effectively I name-checked about eight Edward Hopper paintings in the lyrics, you know, how deep can you go for a dive?

So, I would say that a lot of art. Visual art inspires me. But again, being honest, I’m on record of saying that Bauhaus Staircase is probably the last Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark album.

I’m talking to you from my programming room. I just don’t see, now that I’m 65, I don’t see myself sitting in here every day, drilling down into my psyche and my soul. To try to come up with something that’s going to be as good as the last thing.

Because  I’m very proud of the records we’ve made since we reformed. And I feel like the response to them justified my efforts. Do I want to sit in this room for another two or three years and grind out another album? Or do I want to go out and smell the roses that I spent planting for the last several decades? Metaphorically.

Or do I just want to enjoy life? And the answer is I do. I don’t think I’m going to be able to find enough quality new ideas. I’ve got a couple of ideas, but I don’t think there’ll be a full OMD album. So, in the long term, I don’t quite know. I think there’ll be some new things. I might go back to being more experimental.

RS: Speaking of experimental, I know when you released Dazzle Ships, the record company hated it, and I know ultimately a lot of fans kind of disapproved. But for me, it’s one album I go back to constantly because it’s more than an album.

It feels like an entire piece of work. It has this larger-than-life personality. I’m sure at the time you thought it was a brilliant album, but has its meaning meant anything to you?

AMc: Going back to what I was saying about wanting to try and change the world. After we’d done Architecture and Morality, a lot of journalists were saying to us, “You’re selling millions of records now. You’re getting top of the charts. The world is listening to you. Why are you writing songs about dead Catholic saints and why aren’t you being more political and really changing the world?

Of course, the then 23-year-old McCluskey said, “Well you’re absolutely right, yes I’m not changing right, I need to be more radical.” Of course, it was compounded by the record company because they didn’t have a clue. They’d never worked with us before.

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So, they said the one stupid thing you say to a 23-year-old, Andy McCluskey, they said, “Yeah, you’re doing great. All you have to do is repeat the same formula as Architecture and Morality, and you’ll be the next Genesis.” That was the wrong thing to say to me. We’re not doing that. We’re going over there. We’re going completely in the other direction and we’re being more radical.

So, I sat there sampling my shortwave radio and of course, sampling had come in. We had an emulator that could sample things. So, we just made this album. It made sense to us, Richard, because we’d grown up listening to Radio-Activity by Kraftwerk, which mixed found sounds and songs. So, we were mixing found sounds and songs.

Some of the ideas on there I’m so proud of. The idea of time zones, I took from the News song from Radio-Activity by Kraftwerk where they just overlaid different newsreaders speaking. I took that idea, and I went around the world with it. I got people to send me recordings of speaking clocks from around the world.

I synchronized them all together, which was fucking hard using analog tape. Trying to spin them all at the same time. We were trying to be something different and boy did we fall off the edge of the cliff, economically. Virgin had a joke because they just assumed that we knew what we were doing.

So, we delivered this album and initially they went, we don’t understand it, but you’ve been having millions of sales, so we know, you know what you’re doing. It shipped gold and returned platinum. We lost 90 percent of our record sales from one album to the next. But now it’s considered the fractured masterpiece.

RS: It’s an album that just never gets old. I don’t know why that is, but it’s just how I perceive it.

I know you struggled quite a bit with that album cover design. 

AMc: Oh no, we didn’t, Peter Saville did.

RS: Sorry,you’ve talked about the fact that Peter Saville struggled with that cover.

AMc: For once in his life, Saville had plenty of time to deliver a sleeve. This is a classic tale of  the tail wagging the dog. It was Peter who said to me, “I have seen a Vorticist painting of Dazzle Ships in Liverpool dry docks and I want to do a Vorticist sleeve. Can you write a song or better still call your album Dazzle Ships?”

So, I did. But he had so long to work on the sleeve that he distilled it and distilled it till it was so minimal. When I saw it, I went, “That looks like a bad 12-inch.” And he had to go and get all of his research and work, take it to Malcolm Garrett, his old mate from college. And Malcolm went, “Okay, you’ve just made it far too minimal. You’ve got to go back to where you were collecting ideas and do something like this!”

Malcolm helped him go back to where he was with the original sleeve as far as I remember it.

RS: I wanted to talk about, how he was a big part of the band. Talk to me about your perception of his role putting OMD out there, making a name for OMD.

AMc: Oh, listen, the first album wouldn’t have sold nearly as many as it did without that sleeve that Peter designed.

For those who don’t know, it was a die-cut sleeve, like really bright blue and orange behind it. It was a grill cut, and it was just stunning. It cost us a fucking arm and a leg. Packaging deductions, those two words haunted me for years. Every time Peter designed something, it cost us money in packaging deductions.

But his design was stunning. Peter’s the older brother I never had. So, I was a very self-confident, sometimes arrogant, pretentious little shit. And nobody could tell me what I should do when it came to my art, my music. Nobody’s going to tell me what to do. But Peter had been to art college, and I hadn’t.

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And Peter knew even more than I did, and Peter could do things that I couldn’t do. I intended to design all our sleeves. And as soon as I saw what Peter could do, I went, “Oh, no contest. You’ve got the gig.” So, Peter could talk to me with references. He could say, “I want this to look a bit more sort of angular I’m going to introduce this.”

I understood his language because I was steeped in art history, modernism, and 20^th-century art. He was very sweet to me a few years ago. He said, “Of all the artists I’ve worked with,” I mean, he loved working with Brian Ferry because Brian Ferry was his hero, but he said, “Of all the artists, I could talk to you and you knew what I was talking about. You got the references.”

So, I’m absolutely blessed to have worked with Peter.

RS: Do you think he helped define your image? 

AMc: Totally, because we didn’t have an image. We consciously wanted to not look like pop stars. We took the Kraftwerk angle of; we’re just going to look like boring bank clerks in suits and ties. We didn’t want to look like pop stars. We absolutely just wanted the music and the visuals to be what it was all about. So, people interfaced with OMD, visually, through Peter’s sleeves, not through the way we dressed.

RS: I was looking at your recent videos and the packaging for the new album and singles. It still seems important to you. Maybe that’s just because that’s the thing you love and it’s the thing that gets you excited. But I was really impressed by how they’re not just your standard music videos.

AMc: When you mentioned videos, Jesus, the one sad thing is that despite my love of visuals and working with Peter, the videos that we made for many of our early records were shockingly criminally shit, the record company’s attitude initially was we’ll make a video if it goes in the top 40.

So, for example, when Enola Gay went in the top 40, everybody was caught on the hop and we just had to go into the ITN news studios and do a performance against the green screen, which they threw up some clouds behind us and went, “Yeah, okay, one hour, two grand, that’ll do.” And then, you know, that’s the video for a 5 million-selling single. It’s bloody awful.

Then, of course, when the budgets go up, you get these frustrated Fellini’s. And because Paul and I were the main songwriters, how do we get both of them, into the video? ‘Cause Martin and Malcolm often didn’t want to be in videos. So, most of our videos have these bizarre love triangles.

If I was lead singing, Paul got the girl, or if Paul was lead singing, I got the girl – shockingly bad videos. But when I finally met the guys from Cine 1080 on this campaign.  It was, oh my God. I love what they’ve done for us this time round.

RS: I was like, Oh, wow.

AMc: Do you know what? Again, small label, low budget. We were given a budget of 10,000 pounds for two videos, which we knew were going to be animations. ‘Cause we don’t like to be in our videos anymore. And the guys from Cine 1080 delivered. They worked overnight. We put this onto a platform, just saying, “OMD, looking for a video.”

Andy Whitehurst (from Cine 1080) was a huge OMD fan. He loved Dazzle Ships. He was 15 when Dazzle Ships. came out and he was besotted. So, he went, “Oh my God, OMD, are looking for a video.” He and his company delivered over the weekend. They worked all bloody weekend.

They delivered the first 40 seconds of the Bauhaus Staircase video. And I just saw it and went, they’ve got the job.

RS: I think if I saw that ad, I would do the same thing. That’s amazing.

AMc: It’s been an amazing journey with them. So now we’ve completely blown the budget out of the water. I spent over five times the original budget, and we’re about to do a DVD and Blu-ray, which is how we’ll get the money back, but it’s going to be fascinating because people can see all of the videos in development, the early characterizations and the sketchy backgrounds and things.

So that’s going to be a making of the videos DVD, which is going to be good fun to do.

RS: Speaking of video. Have you seen the new Eno film?

AMc: No.

RS: Oh, you have to see that.

AMc: What’s it called? I need to see that. I will. Eno: Big, big hero of mine. I used to say I counted on one hand, the people who inspired me, and Eno was on that hand, you know, Before and After Science and Another Green World and Here Come The Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy.

One of the things that Eno gave us was, and it’s kind of punk. He had traditional instruments, but he unconventionally used them. I read an article where he said, “If you’ve got a pile of secondhand crap, you’re the only people who are going to have that. So that’s your sound. Embrace it.” I went, “Thank you, Brian. We will.”

RS: Three different things I wanted to touch on. Let’s talk about AI. I read that you said something to the effect that the machinery used for songwriting now is beyond anything we could have imagined over 40 years ago. Everything is created on computers. But are you using AI? Is AI something that you’ve been using? Is it just an overused term? 

AMc: It is. To a lot of people who’ve seen our videos, they say, “Oh, AI. No, it’s CGI. It’s all created by computers. It’s all driven by human beings.

AI it’s algorithms. You collect a load of information, and you throw it into a blender and then you say, “Okay, sort out the bits that I’m programming to spit out and make it look like a human runs it.” Now, when it comes to music, I’ve heard AI music so far. And it is, it’s generic crap. I mean, maybe it’ll be used for background music elevator music, or commercials.

I don’t know, but particularly the one thing they can’t do is it can’t write lyrics. It cannot write lyrics. It comes up with appalling ideas. I’ve been to several websites, and it goes, oh yeah, you know, “80s electro robot music,” and the lyrics, they’re the appalling pastiche version of exactly what the bad electro bands were doing.

“I am a robot. I am so cold. I love you like a robot.” It’s like, fuck off. We’re a long, long way away from a computer algorithm, AI, emulating really great music. And this used to piss me off so much. When we were young, people used to say, “Oh, well, your synthesizer writes the song, and I went, “If it had a fucking button that said “hit single,” I would be pressing it all fucking day long,  but it doesn’t, I have to write the song. Paul has to write the song. We have to come up with ideas.

GarageBand writes the song for you. And how bad does that sound? These AI algorithms are just one step up beyond GarageBand. Now I know poets and literature writers and screenwriters are worried about studios programming in things like: Give me something that looks like a Spielberg film, but I don’t see it replacing us. Yet.

I know there’s ChatGBT, and my neighbor is a poet and writer, and he did a piece where he was interfacing with this and they were editing each other. He found it quite interesting, but I don’t think so. Not yet. I don’t think AI is going to take over the world yet.

It cannot think out of the box. It cannot think laterally, and it isn’t controlled by the spark of human creativity. You can program that for a million years, but an infinite number of monkeys writing for an infinite amount of time are not going to write a piece of Shakespeare. They never will.

Ultimately AI is just a sped-up version of that. It can crunch numbers faster than individual monkeys can write letters, but it’s not going to happen in my lifetime. However, I know that the companies who sell creativity. Oh, man. They’ve always wanted something like that. 

I can remember I worked with Atomic Kitten and their record company would never release anything without focus groups and the whole bottom line was like, right, see what the focus group says.

Once I lost control of the Kittens, it’s like, okay, well, who wrote the last number one and who directed the video and who designed the clothes for the girls and who produced it and who engineered it and who cut it at the cutting plant and who designed the sleeve and who directed the video, yeah, do all of that and copy it.

And even if it’s not a hit, I ticked all the boxes, so you can’t fire me. I’m just following the pattern and it’s so depressing, but they wish they could do without the artists. ‘Cause the artists are the difficult bastards.

RS: I wanted to, to go back to something we touched on a bit, the eighties and Pretty in Pink and America. What was that time like for you? Was it a whirlwind of craziness? 

AMc: I’m eternally grateful to John Hughes. If You Leave, doesn’t change the world. It was a well-crafted song and we’re eternally grateful to it because it did open the door for us in America.

It helped us finally break out of the alternative and college radio stations and start to sell more records and tickets, but it’s dawned on me that John Hughes’s musical tastes were very Anglophile for his “Brat Pack” movies, and it makes sense to me because all his characters are the outsiders.

They’re not the jocks and the pretty girls and the cheerleaders. They are the outsiders. And what do they listen to? They listen to English imports. They don’t listen to John Cougar Mellencamp, Journey, and big bands like that. They were into the English imports. All the music that John (Hughes) put in his movies makes sense to me because it was the soundtrack of his characters.

And when he asked us because we’d seen how successful Simple Minds had been with Don’t You Forget About Me when he asked us for a song, we were beside ourselves, yes, we will definitely write you a song.

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We went to Paramount, and we met him, and we met the characters who were lovely, the cast members. And we wrote a song based on what they asked us to do. And we came back armed with our two-inch tape. And he said, “Listen, got a bit of a problem here. Um, your song Goddess of Love doesn’t lyrically fit the end because I’ve changed the ending of the movie. Can you write me another song?” 

We were like, well, we’ve just arrived in the country with jet lag, and our equipment is flying into San Francisco. So, if you throw us in a studio tomorrow, we’ll try our best, but we’re going to have to hire a load of equipment and everything. So, we just went into Larrabee Studios in Hollywood. Tom Lord-Alge had come over to mix what we’d recorded and off the top of our heads, we wrote, If You Leave, in a day.

About three in the morning, we finished it. Jet lagged to hell. We sent a motorbike with a cassette to Paramount the next morning at 8 am after having very few hours’ sleep.  Our manager called the hotel and said, “Yeah, John loves it. Can you go and finish it?” And we’re like, “Oh, fuck. Okay.”  We went back in the studio and then a week into the tour with the Thompson Twins, we had a day off and we went down to LA and mixed it.

So it was completely off the top of our heads and it was massive. And I can remember driving around in LA after it came out and it came on the radio. And I went, jokingly, “Oh, dear, I’m so bored of that song. Let’s change the channel. Oh, it’s the same song. Oh, it was on four different radio channels.”

That’s when you know you’ve got a hit. It was unbelievable.

RS: Unbelievable. I’ve met so many people who were inspired by the music of that era in America. Everybody from yourselves to The Smiths to New Order to you name it, Simple Minds, any band that was featured in any of those movies around that time.

That’s like the soundtrack of my generation. Speaking of America and to wrap up, you’re about to embark on a pretty extensive tour in America. I was amazed that you’re still touring. Is it something that you love to do? Is it a necessity? You can’t give it up.

AMc: I love doing it. It’s been great to be able to play some of the new songs and they fit in seamlessly with the old songs. The audiences are getting bigger and bigger.

About eight years ago for the first time in my entire life, I started to earn more money from gigs than I do from royalties.  So yeah, I have no intention of retiring. Because of various medical issues, we had to postpone the North American tour. It should have been September and October.

But we’re coming back in May, June, and a little bit of July. Yeah, we’ll all be ready to rock by then and really looking forward to it. And, before our tour starts, we’re playing Cruel World in LA in the middle of May. And, if you look at the lineup of Cruel World, it’s a John Hughes movie soundtrack.

So going back to what you said about people still being influenced by it.

RS: I’ve not heard of Cruel World. Who else is playing, Thompson Twins?

AMc: New Order, Devo, Nick Cave – who wasn’t in a John Hughes film – but I can’t remember who else. It’s mostly bands from the eighties and mostly British. 

RS: I’m going to wrap it up and let you go.

I appreciate you taking the time. So, thank you. And I am grateful that I eventually managed to track you down again. It was really important for me to have you on the show. And I’m really grateful that you made the time. So, thanks very much.

AMc: No, just amazing. Don’t leave it another 30 years. Listen, take care of yourself, Richard.

RS: I will. Good luck with the vocals and everything.

AMc: Yeah, it’s great getting old, isn’t it? In my head, I’m still 24. I don’t quite know how the body got so old. 

RS: Appreciate it.

AMc: Alright, cool.

RS: Cheers. Bye.

AMc: Bye.

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