EVERY band celebrates success in its own way. For Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, following the colossal triumph of their 1981 album, Architecture & Morality, the good times involved settling into The Gramophone Suite, their down-at-heel “sonic laboratory” in central Liverpool, and firing up the shortwave radio to eavesdrop on Eastern Europe. “We used to have a few drinks and start scanning the shortwave radio,” recalls Paul Humphreys. “We’d put one of the tape machines into record and just see what happened randomly, then make notes of things, mark the times, wind back and cut them out. That was all part of our mad experimental blast.”
This electronic tapestry of call signs, radio waves, news items, tones and pulses became the bedrock of OMD’s glorious puzzle, Dazzle Ships. Inspired by musique concrète, the Vorticist art movement, Cold War paranoia, Eastern Bloc broadcasts, Kraftwerk at their most experimental and the brave new world of sampling, the band’s fourth album was many things: bold, beautiful, hubristic, confounding, ahead of its time – and quite shockingly unsuccessful. Architecture & Morality had sold three million copies and spawned three Top 10 singles. In the space of just under 35 minutes, with Dazzle Ships, OMD lost 90 per cent of their audience, and almost lost their heads.
“It was a shock to us how massive Architecture & Morality was,” says Humphreys. “We were very young, and we lucked out because we did whatever the hell we felt like doing and every album got more and more successful. When we got to Dazzle Ships we thought, ‘Let’s just do a musique concrète album and write songs about the Cold War and get our shortwave radio out and get call signs from Eastern Europe and people will love it.’”
People didn’t love it – at least not at the time. Savaged by critics, the album
