were part of eight-piece prog rock band The Id, with
long hair and fl ares. Hearing Autobahn by Kraftwerk
was “the fi rst day of the rest of our lives”, according to
Andy. “Paul and I thought, ‘This is the future’, and all
our musician mates thought Kraftwerk were shit.” Paul
adds: “The reason we became a duo and used
Winston as a drum machine is because nobody else
wanted to play our weird electronic rubbish.”DEATH TO THE DALEK
It wasn’t until Eric’s DJ Norman Killon played The
Normal’s Warm Leatherette that Andy or Paul realised
anyone else was making electronic music in Britain.
Weeks later, fellow Wirral band Dalek I Love You
performed at Eric’s with a drum machine, tape
machine and synths. The two events made the pair
emboldened enough to step aside from The Id to play
as Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark at Eric’s
Thursday night try-out show. It’s only in hindsight that
the pair are able to assess why there was enough of a
buzz about OMD to be snapped up by the then-new
Factory Records.
“It was only a few years before that we’d been
12-year-olds watching Slade and T-Rex on Top Of The
Pops,” Andy explains. “We had absolutely no intention
of grandly claiming, ‘We’ll write a new form of pop
music with electronic melodies’, because we thought
we were an entirely experimental art project. But we
had three-minute glam-pop songs in our DNA.”
Typically for OMD’s fringe status, it was Tony
Wilson’s wife Lindsay who told her husband to sign the
duo, somewhat against the Factory boss’ instincts. “We
owe our entire career to Lindsay,” insists Paul. “Tony’s
enthusiasm was so infectious and exciting, andday. They were 10 reasonable variations on the same
idea and another that Paul had dismissed as “some
noodling I did as I got to Runcorn”. That “noodling”
was the killer melody of what became the album’s lead
single, Metroland.
Any arguments in OMD now tend to be confi ned to
football. Andy, drummer Stuart Kershaw and
keyboardist Martin Cooper are Liverpool fans, while
Paul supports Manchester United. “Can you imagine?”
laughs Paul. “A die-hard United fan growing up in
Liverpool. My family were United for generations, so
I had no choice. Football is the hardest part between
us. I’m an outsider in a band of outsiders.”
Paul’s comment is throwaway, but OMD have
always been DIY outsiders. As lads from the Wirral,
they were on the fringes of Liverpool’s Eric’s scene,
despite going every week. Although they were playing
an early version of Electricity, back then Paul and Andy
Since OMD reformed, they’ve adhered to a strict policy of keeping their songs
as minimal as possible. “We used to record on 24-track machines,” explains
Paul Humphreys. “When we got back together and examined those old tapes
to work out how to play the songs live again, what struck us is how minimal
everything was. Even with that basic amount of equipment, and all the crazy
samples we used, a lot of our songs were so simple that we’d only use 15 or
16 of the 24 tracks. Less was defi nitely more.”
Paul believes a lot of modern pop falls victim to becoming too cluttered.
“With all the tools producers have now, you can end up with the tyranny of
choice,” he argues. “You’ve got so many possibilities that you can get lost in
them. You end up throwing so many ideas at a song that you fi ll them up with
noise just because you can.”
The keyboardist believes that OMD’s minimalism is why The Punishment
Of Luxury works so well. “Andy and I have consciously decided to strip
everything back again after we went back to the Dazzle Ships tapes,”
he reveals. “We tried it on English Electric and it’s worked for sure on
The Punishment Of Luxury, which is a very simple record. When we were
recording, we kept deleting stuff out to make the songs as bare bones
as possible.”
THE MINIMUM
OF LUXURY
“WE’RE A LOT CALMER
AND HAVE A MORE
LOVING RELATIONSHIP
NOW. WE’RE OLD MEN
WHO HAVE PUT OUR
I S S U ES A S I D E.”
PAUL HUMPHREYSAndy met Paul at Great Meols
Primary School in the 1960s