OMD’s fourth album, Dazzle Ships, is now extensively thought to be a masterpiece, however its radical, leftfield strategy price its creators pricey when it first appeared in 1983. Indeed, the document’s muted business success compelled the band into rethinking their entire strategy once they started getting ready their subsequent album, Junk Culture.
Listen to Junk Culture on Apple Music and Spotify.
“We’d pushed the envelope too far”
“Dazzle Ships had lost us 90 percent of our audience – we’d gone from selling four million records to 200,000,” keyboardist Paul Humphreys advised Record Collector in 2019. “We’d pushed the envelope too far and we were scared. We decided to rely on our songwriting craft, ditch the experiments, and write a few hits.”
In search of contemporary inspiration, OMD left their native Merseyside for pastures new. Initially, they decamped to Scotland, the place they labored on new songs and road-tested them on a brief UK tour, earlier than the Junk Culture periods started in earnest in a lot sunnier climes.
“We thought getting out of Liverpool might be good, so we went to [George Martin’s] Air Studios in Montserrat,” says Humphreys. “We were in this paradise setting in the Caribbean and we’d stop work at 5pm and go down to the beach where we’d hear calypso reggae bands. We got influenced by our surroundings – that’s where ‘Locomotion’ came from with the steel drums.”
“We decided that we were going to take time”
An irresistible slice of sunny, radio-friendly pop, “Locomotion“ turned Junk Culture’s lead single and it instantly reversed OMD’s business slide, hitting No.5 within the UK the week its father or mother album was first launched, by Virgin, on April 30, 1984. The lilting “All Wrapped Up“ and the spacy, reggae-flavored “White Trash“ additionally bore the stamp of the band’s Caribbean sojourn, but whereas Junk Culture’s second UK Top 20 single, “Talking Loud And Clear“ was additionally conceived in Montserrat, it mirrored the sound of OMD’s newest little bit of equipment reasonably than their expertise of island life.
“It was actually our demo of a fantastic machine we bought called a Fairlight CMI,” bassist/vocalist Andy McCluskey advised The Huffington Post in 2017. “It was the first programmable computer for making music. It was an extraordinary device, but we loaded up a bunch of random sounds into the computer to demo it, and ‘Talking Loud And Clear’ came out of that.”
Junk Culture additionally featured two additional hits, courtesy of the windswept ballad “Never Turn Away“ and the eminently catchy “Tesla Girls“ – a celebratory paean to the inventor and father {of electrical} provide programs, Nikola Tesla. However, whereas the album had a notably poppier sheen than its predecessor, songs such because the world-weary “Hard Day“ and the atmospheric, instrumental title observe confirmed that OMD have been nonetheless ready to indulge their pure quirkiness.
“The catchiest, poppiest album we’ve ever made”
The band’s fanbase definitely felt they’d acquired the steadiness proper: Junk Culture entered the UK album chart at No.9 in the identical week that Ocean Rain, by OMD’s Liverpool contemporaries Echo & The Bunnymen, additionally landed within the Top 10. Reviews have been additionally largely constructive, with UK weekly Record Mirror dubbing the album “smooth, warm and powerful” and The Guardian declaring it to be “a cheerful dose of pop, dance styles, and even R&B and Latin influences to produce an unusual and catchy set of songs.”
Later going gold within the UK, Junk Culture introduced OMD proper again into competition and gave them the momentum they wanted for the rest of the 80s: a interval of intense exercise throughout which period their subsequent two albums, Crush and The Pacific Age, made vital inroads within the US.
“There’s still a few interesting and unusual tracks in there, but we were definitely leaning towards a slightly more cautious approach,” Andy McCluskey mentioned, reflecting on the making of Junk Culture in 2017. “However, the album is a really amazing collection of really bright and well-crafted pop songs. We decided that we were going to take time and we were going to have some hits… It is the catchiest, poppiest album we’ve ever made.”
Listen to the perfect of OMD on Apple Music and Spotify.