OMD star Paul Humphreys admits the group was sent into panic following the release of their fourth album ‘Dazzle Ships’.
Arriving in the spring of 1983, the record marked a departure in sound for the group – fronted by Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys – who, rebelling against record company pressure to duplicate their previous release, set about on a more experimental project, characterised by sound collages with political undertones reflecting contemporary global events.
It remains one of their most experimental records and although lauded now, was panned by critics at the time, leaving the band fearing for their careers.
“When we did ‘Dazzle Ships’, it was a little bit ahead of its time. The world wasn’t quite ready for ‘Dazzle Ships’,” Paul tells RETROPOP’s April 2023 issue, admitting that returns of the record seemed to outweigh its sales. “We had a joke in the band that it shipped gold and returned platinum, because I think we just confused our audience.
“We were always quite an experimental band; from the very early days, we were always true to our Germanic, experimental roots, but we used to sugarcoat our experiments because fortunately, Andy and I have a knack of writing a catchy tune. But with ‘Dazzle Ships’, we left it very bare.”
One of their main inspirations was German electronic group Kraftwerk, but at the time their equipment was hugely expensive and, operating on a limited budget, OMD had to get creative.
Paul adds: “We were like a junk shop Kraftwerk, because we used to buy stuff from junk shops and build things from it. I used to go around to my Auntie’s house and raid the cupboards for old radios that didn’t work – and maybe some that did work – then take them home, pull all the parts off them and make something else out of them on a little circuit board. So that’s how we started out, then as the technology advanced we followed the technology, and the more money we had from the records we sold, the more we could buy technology-wise.
“That’s why we ended up at ‘Dazzle Ships’ with our first sampler, because we’ve always pushed technology to its limits to see what it can do. We got the sampler and thought, ‘Right, let’s see what this machine can really do!’”
Upon its release, ‘Dazzle Ships’ entered the UK Top 5, but the singles from the LP fared not so well, with Genetic Engineering scraping into the Top 20 and Telegraph missing the Top 40 altogether. The response from the group and label was one of panic. “It kind of frightened us, because we never really thought we had a career in the music industry then all of a sudden we did – and we bought houses, we had people relying on us, we had staff,” Paul recalls.
“Then we thought, ‘Oh God, this is going to dry up and we’ve lost our career.’ So it panicked us into making ‘Junk Culture’ (1984), which was very safe and we made sure we had three hit singles on the album to keep our career. It wasn’t until slightly later that we started getting back to our experimental roots again, because we had to make a safe record just to rescue our career.”
Dazzle Ships (40th Anniversary Edition) is out March 31 on UMR/EMI.
Read the full interview in the April 2023 edition of RETROPOP, out now. Order yours or subscribe via our Online Store, use our Store Finder to locate your nearest stockist, or get Digital Copies delivered direct to your devices.
