Disc of the day
Bo Diddley - Bo Diddley
Magnificent late-'50s singles round-up that keeps on giving.
Features Disc of the day
Orchestral Manoeuvres In the Dark
Dazzle Ships
(Virgin, 1983)
Million-selling pop-synth duo's musique-concrète homage to communism 'n' communication
By 1982 OMD had achieved something very strange. Formed in the late '70s by Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys - two bookish lads from the Wirral obsessed with valves, electronics and Kraftwerk - the band had crafted a unique brand of Northern, industrial pop music: uplifting and dramatic yet imbued with a sepulchral melancholy. Their third album, Architecture And Morality, had found them composing romantic electronic paeans to a 15th Century female warrior-saint and ambient laments for the doomed industrial world and selling over three million copies. But where next? Growing up in a radical left-wing household in Heswall in the '60s, his father a communist atheist, McCluskey was fascinated by the Eastern bloc radio stations transmitting to the west. Bunkered down in their Liverpool studio, The Gramophone Suite, with a brand-new E-mu Emulator, he decided that the new album would be a mid-Atlantic musique concrète of dying ideologies based around sound collages of short wave radio, speaking clocks and Texas Instruments' '80s miracle toy, the 'Speak & Spell'. The album would be called Dazzle Ships, at the insistence of [sleeve designer] Peter Saville, who had recently discovered Edward Wadsworth's 1919 Vorticist painting, Dazzle Ship In Drydock. But if the album's concept was fixed, that's more than could be said for the songs. Radio Waves dated back to 1978 while Of All The Things We've Made and Romance Of The Telescope had originally been 1981 single B-sides. But all contributed to the eerie mood of an album for which this was the single, and the mournful stand-out track, International, began with a short wave news sample concerning "a young girl from Nicaragua whose hands had been cut off at the wrists". Like much of the album it is eerie, breathtaking and deeply weird and, unsurprisingly, after the 3 million sales for A&M, Dazzle Ships struggled to shift a tenth as many. Plus, the band were losing money on each copy sold, thanks to Peter Saville's elaborate Vorticist-style packaging. The fallout from Dazzle Ships was a collective loss of nerve. "There was a withdrawal back from the abyss," Andy McCluskey told MOJO in 2007. "With our next album we got more careful. But it was like people didn't trust us anymore. We became exactly the type of band we didn't want to be." Few '80s pop albums still sound as daring.
Andrew Male
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 16/06/2009
Further Listening
OMD - Architecture And Morality (Virgin, 1981)
Heaven 17 - Penthouse And Pavement (Virgin, 1981)
Cabaret Voltaire – 2x45 (Rough Trade, 1982)
Previous Disc of the day
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Bo Diddley - Bo Diddley
Magnificent late-'50s singles round-up that keeps on giving.
6:00 AM GMT 20/11/2009
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Isley Brothers - The Brothers: Isley
The Cincinnati siblings bed into their heavy period.
6:00 AM GMT 18/11/2009
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Lee Morgan - Search For The New Land
The trumpeter's most soulful excursion entrances MOJO messageboarder.
6:00 AM GMT 16/11/2009
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