Founder member, lead singer and bass guitarist Andy McCluskey admitted in an interview with ERR that the band had previously broken up, in the mid-1990s, out of frustration when work did not bear fruit.
This was in part due to the types of record deals signed in their youth. Now they have been back together again for 20 years, OMD, part of the second Merseybeat along with contemporaries such as The Teadrop Explodes and Echo & the Bunnymen, are older, wiser but still remarkably creative.
The last time you were here before [their most recent album, 2023’s] Bauhaus Staircase – in fact just before Covid hit. Any memories of that concert and Tallinn?
I remember feeling a little nervous, because you never know what people are expecting if they’ve never seen you live. We also didn’t know how they would respond to us, and we didn’t really know how well known our music was. So it was a bit of a concert of discovery, but I remember that it was a great gig, and that is why we’re really excited to be coming back again. Plus I also remember that I had a little bit of time and I thought that Tallinn was beautiful and wish I had some more time to see the city.
You’ll be back in the summer, it will be a lot better than in January, right?
I hope so although I know that the Baltic countries are very hot in summer and very cold in winter…
OMD. Source: Press materials.
You needn’t have been nervous, though, because I’ve noticed, especially with the older generations, that some people seem to be obsessed with everything that was synth. They love Kraftwerk, they love OMD, Depeche Mode and so on. And here they called it ‘futu’, which is for futuristic, for which there’s this interesting love in Eastern Europe, if you have sensed it?
Actually I think I do know what you mean. Because they actually couldn’t buy the records, unless they were bootlegs, bootleg cassettes. And we seem to have a lot of fans in Eastern Germany, not Western Germany, a lot of fans in Poland. The music was being heard, but I think there was a frustration that you couldn’t see the bands, or buy the original recordings. So I think at the end of the Cold War – although that does seem to have started again – after 1989, you know, the door opened, the dam broke and everybody was like “Yes: Now we can go and see these bands and have this music.” So you’re probably right, I should not have been so nervous, but having never been to Estonia before, we did not know.
The thing is, we don’t walk on stage and take for granted that we are going to get loved. We go out there and say “we are gonna earn their respect, we’re gonna play brilliantly and we’re gonna kick their asses…” (laughs).
Now 20 years since reuniting OMD – and that’s a longer run with OMD than initially – is a pop group easier to manage when everyone’s all grown up?
Isn’t it crazy? We are now back together longer than the first time. To be honest, [co-founder and keyboard player] Paul [Humphreys] and I started writing together when we were sixteen, we were together quite a long time. I think… hopefully when you grow up, you become a bit mellow, you don’t listen to the noise around you – very often people are talking in your ear and they have their own agenda to kind of start pulling a band apart. But one of the sad things at the end really was – at the end of the eighties – was that for all the millions of records we had sold, we had no money. Because we signed an absolutely terrible deal when we were 19 years old. Now we didn’t get into music just to make money, but if you don’t make money, you can’t run a band, it’s a business. I think we were just so depressed and exhausted at the end of the eighties, because we had sold so many records and we had nothing, we absolutely had nothing…
So now we’re back together, we’re more in control of it. We don’t have to make a record, because we have to make money, we make a record because we think we’ve made a good record. And we love touring. It’s actually rather fantastic to be in OMD these days. I can’t believe this year the band will be 48 years old. A band that got together to play one concert with a stupid name (laughter).
People say such wonderful things about us now, that we were one of the people who invented the… kind of popularizing electronic pop music, that we were influential and iconic. Certainly when we started playing in ’78 – though we started writing in ’76, we wrote Electricity when we were 16 – we never ever could have anticipated, that our crazy hobby in the back of Paul’s mum’s house, when she was at work on a Saturday, was going to be seen as something important in the history of music. But it was just what we wanted to do, maybe that’s the best way to write music. Because you’re not hearing it, you’re expressing yourself, because you’re not hearing anybody talking your language. It’s been an incredible journey, Sander.
Speaking of early days, in Liverpool there was this [popular venue] Eric’s scene that’s been much eulogized for its importance as well, did you feel a part of it at any point?
I’ll be honest with you, Eric’s was so important, if you like, it was like our generation’s Cavern Club. The most important thing really was that it gave us an opportunity to get on stage and to play things the way we wanted to. They had a policy and a membership, on Thursdays they had a free for members local artists’ night and incredibly so many bands took that opportunity. There was us, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Teardrop Explodes, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, A Flock Of Seagulls, Dead Or Alive. The interesting thing was – the club opened in ’77 …I think – there were no punk bands. There were no punk bands in Liverpool! We were all kind of art school weirdos who were trying to do something different.
Like [another Liverpool new wave band] Deaf School?
Deaf School was just a little before. Deaf School was also a kind of art band, beautifully conceived, quite creative, it wasn’t just ordinary songs, there was a vision. And the bands of our generation also had a vision of themselves.
I mean, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Teardrop Explodes and ourselves all played our first gigs in Eric’s within three weeks of each other. We invented ourselves to play at Eric’s. Like the film says, “If you build it, they will come.” Without Eric’s we would not exist.
Speaking of young bands trying to make their way. These days – I don’t know if you’ve noticed – in the 2020s there’s a sort of 80s synth aesthetic is really back in fashion. Especially in the States, groups like Nation Of Language and Magdalena Bay, have you noticed such a trend?
(Laughs) I know personally, because they told me, that Nation Of Language are huge OMD fans.
They sound like they are!
But you know, they sound like Nation Of Language as well. Nobody works in a vacuum, we all stand on the shoulders of our predecessors. Without Kraftwerk, and Bowie, and Roxy Music, and The Velvet Underground, and Neu!, and Brian Eno, OMD wouldn’t have sounded like OMD. We weren’t trying to copy them; we were inspired by them.
You know you’re right, now we’re in this kind of post-modern era, where there is nothing new, therefore nothing’s out of fashion. You can create your own sound built out of any piece of popular culture. It’s not just music, it’s film, it architecture, it’s fashion, art.
OMD. Source: Press materials.
I have met people who have said “Oh my gosh, we love you, you’ve inspired us”, it makes me really warm. Because when we first started, we felt like we were swimming against the tide. You know, particularly with journalists, but also the radio, they did not think that synthesizer music was real music. It wasn’t “masculine” enough, it wasn’t authentic enough, it wasn’t sweaty enough… it wasn’t rock, basically. It took a long time to change that attitude. It’s interesting you should mention America now, because in the late ’70s and early ’80s the American radio and press attitude to what we were doing was: “limey fggts’ music” (laughs). “You just press a button on your synth and it writes a song,” yeah I fckng wish it would. If there were a button on my synthesizer that reads “hit single,” I’d be pressing it all day long, but there isn’t! (laughs).
It goes the other way round too: How was it for you when your influences said that… I mean [German composer and Kraftwerk contributor] Karl Bartos has praised you and even Paul McCartney at one point said how you were a great songwriter.
I hadn’t heard that! I really need to find that quote. Well, Karl and I are friends; after he left Kraftwerk, we wrote music together. It was quite incredible: I was 16 years old when I was sat in the Liverpool Empire, in seat Q36, and it was the first day of the rest of my life, as the 16-year-old Andy saw Kraftwerk play. I didn’t think I could do what they were doing, because they were so amazing, but I just went, that’s what I want to do! At the time all of my friends were into Genesis and The Eagles and Pink Floyd, I was like, no, I have found something new, I want to go in that direction.
I’ll go back to one specific OMD album, that I find interesting through all the years, it’s [OMD’s fourth album] “Dazzle Ships” that was so bold and adventurous. It has since received a lot of love and you’ve come back to that with live outings and deluxe editions, yet back then, after that album OMD turned decidedly safer and more pop oriented. In hindsight do you regret that or feel you had to get away from the weirdness.
I think because we started as a hobby and we never expected anybody to want to buy our records, we were on this crazy journey of “well we’ll do what the hell we like doing”. And amazingly, people buy it. I mean, “Electricity” was pretty unusual at the time, the “Architecture And Morality” album was pretty unusual, it sounded different to anything we’d done or other people had done. We felt every time we change direction and try something new, people come with us. We tried something new with “Dazzle Ships” and I think we just got – as Andy Warhol would say – a bit more than 15 minutes ahead of the fashion. And people found it difficult to listen to. As the years have gone by, and as we all have become more capable of multi-tasking and also sonically, people now listen to “Dazzle Ships” and go “well, what was so weird about that?” It’s musique concrète, they cut up speaking clocks from around the world, but they did it beautifully. It was very political, and stripped down – if you’re going to write a song about nuclear war and dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima – if you’re trying to get people to take some medicine, put some sugar on the pill and perhaps “Dazzle Ships” didn’t have quite enough sugar on it for people (laughs).
Soon you’ll be marking your 50th anniversary: Any special plans for that?
We are going to be doing a very big tour, so this summer will be the last time we’re touring until 2028. There’s an idea for an album with us working with other people. Asking people we admire and respect to come to sing with us or play with us. I can’t say anything more yet, cause I haven’t done anything concrete, but that’s the plan and it would be a very fun and exciting way to celebrate our anniversary.
And quite modern – everybody seems to be doing it.
Yeah, the important thing is that we will write the songs. One of the problems, you know Sander, is that whenever musicians get together, they always have very busy diaries, difficult schedules and they get one day to work together and then not everything is gold. In fact nine times out of ten it’s not gold (laughs). So they end up releasing something that isn’t their best ideas, but that was the only thing they could do on the day, but these will be our best ideas and we’ll invite people to come and celebrate with us.
—
Follow ERR News on Facebook and X and never miss an update!