Saturday, February 22, 2020

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark proves synthesizers can be warm


Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark: Messages



On February 22, 1980, fresh off a tour supporting Gary Numan,  Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark released their sparse self-titled debut album to mostly ecstatic reviews.

"How fine and different their melodies can be, how detailed and distinctive their song-structure," writes NME's Paul Morley. "There is a constant change in emphasis and dynamics. It's definitely dance music. Orch Man's debut LP is one of the best of the year." Melody Maker journalist Ian Birch called the record "Unpretentious, tuneful and unceasingly pleasant". 

The album came in specially designed award-winning high tech sleeves, with each batch in different color combinations.


Inspired by Kraftwerk, singing bassist Andy McCluskey and keyboardist Paul Humphreys used what they had available to record songs like their latest single "Red Frame/White Light" "Electricity" and "Messages". There's a terrific interview with the duo in a recent episode of the podcast Sodajerker On Songwriting in which they complain about the analog synths . 

A Fairlight CMI Series 1 cost at least 12-thousand pounds so only musicians in the same league as Peter Gabriel, Alan Parsons and Stevie Wonder could write songs on them. McCluskey and Humphreys settled for analog synths of a lesser quality.

"We used them in the old days when they went out of tune, you couldn't MIDI them up and they weighed a fricken' ton,"says Humphreys. " You had to have five or six of them onstage because each one had a different sound you were using."



At the time of the album's release, "Red Frame/White Light"  was the new single. It's about a telephone booth.

"We insisted one writing songs that were not the average thing to sing about," says McCluskey. " We wanted to make something different. We kind of followed Kraftwerk's blueprint really because they hardly ever wrote songs about love. It was always about antennas and radios."





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