![]() ![]() PB: Andy, can you believe it is more than thirty years since ‘Junk Culture’ first came out?ĪM: Well, it is actually the thirty-first anniversary coming up but It was planned to be a thirtieth anniversary re-master of it, which Is quite amazing when you consider Paul and I were both twenty-three and twenty-four at the time we wrote and made It. Thirty years after I walked the three miles back from town because I'd spent all my money on ‘Junk Culture’, I was actually talking to the man that made it! ![]() Putting me down gently - and I am a big lad myself - I said, “What was that for?” to which he enthusiastically explained that I had the same t-shirt that he had. This gargantuan fellow charged the full length of the VIP enclosure at the front that we were in, and picked me up in a big bearhug and that's when I felt it go. Eight or nine years ago I went to a festival at Knowsley Park on Merseyside, wearing an OMD-T-shirt. ![]() Amazingly they all joined forces again in 2006, and by 2009 they were releasing new material and going back on the road again. The four lads from Liverpool, Andy McCluskey, Paul Humphreys, Martin Cooper and Malcolm Holmes, were at the forefront of a changing time when they released their first single, 1979's ‘Electricity.’ But It didn't go all to plan as they split In 1989 when the others went on to form the Listening Pool, leaving McCluskey to make the brilliant ‘Sugar Tax’, but by 1996 he had had enough and called It a day. From the self-titled ‘Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’ to ‘Organisation’ (both 1980), ‘Architecture and Morality’ (i981), ‘Dazzle Ships’ (1983), ‘Junk Culture’ (1984), ‘Crush’ (1985), ‘The Pacific Age’ (1986) and on through ‘Sugar Tax’ (1991) and the new albums, such as ‘History of Modern’ (2010) and ‘English Electric’, they have consistently churned out brilliantly catchy pop. Still recording to this day and still out on the road, OMD are to a lot of people the best pop band ever to come out of 80’s Britain. So, imagine my delight when our editor sent me a copy of a new expanded version of OMD's ‘Junk Culture’ to mark thirty years since the making of the original, and then imagine my delight of delights when he told me we had an interview slot with front man Andy McCluskey. I went on to buy everything they ever did, and still now look out for the special promo or foreign copy that I haven't got. I played their eponymous first album and second album ‘Organisation’ both to death. I remember when I was bought my first serious hi-fi the first record I played was ‘Enola Gay’ because no other record I had at that time ( my collection was expanding rapidly ) sounded like that. They caught my imagination back then, and they still put the hairs on the back of my neck on end. One minute I had a fishtail the size of the Market Square, and the next I Ska'd up with a Harrington, and the next I was in a pair of Bowies and a box jacket! But all the way through my teen years and for a long time after I followed Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. As a kid growing up In Nottingham, I had fad after fad and confused myself, never mind my poor mum and dad. For this writer this day was a special day. ![]()
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