OMD talk ahead of Brum shows

The Merseyside duo – singer Andy McCluskey and keyboards man Paul Humphreys – have sold around 40 million records and been described as being among Britain’s most important bands. Architecture and Morality, their 1981 hit, gave them their first platinum disc while four others went Gold. This autumn, McCluskey et al are up to their old tricks with the release of their 13th studio album – which entered the chart at number four.

And yet. And yet.

For all of their success, critics have always been a little sniffy about Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.

Andy acknowledges that truth. “The reality is that certain people still have attitudes and issues towards a band that plays synths. So we don’t get some of the national press. That’s always been the way. So we’ve always just gone our own way and done better than people would have expected anyway.

“That’s where we’re at. The first four albums were what we wanted to do. Then on the fourth one, Dazzle Ships, people thought we might have gone too far.”

From that point, OMD were on a treadmill and by 1989 they’d broken in two – just as Stateside success beckoned. The band had been feted as being synth-pop’s Beatles to Kraftwerk’s Rolling Stones. Andy was left behind to carry on as a solo artist, under the OMD banner.

“It’s hard to rationalise what happened to us. We are coming up to the 40th anniversary of a rolling musical accident. Paul and I started writing songs together when we were 16. We never dared to think about playing live. Even our mates thought it was rubbish. Nobody was more surprised than us when things started to happen. We got offered a contract and started selling millions of records.

“We suffered in the mid 1980s from chasing our tails and not writing the quality consistently. But I carried on without Paul in the 1990s, which was strange but successful. Then we got back together and next year the band will have been together for as long as we were the first time round.” During the 1990s, Andy was offered vast sums of money to hit the retro circuit. He could have taken offers from promoters to retread the old hits – but decided to say no. Instead, they made a gradual return and continued to be creative, making new music rather than trotting out the hits.

“We’re doing it for ourselves at our own speed. We just have to be careful that we trust ourselves with our quality and self-control. There is a pressure on us because of what’s gone before. But we’re in a very, very nice position.

“People think pretty well of us and we have respect. Our audience trust us. We’ve made two good albums since we’ve come back and it’s important for us that we make a record for the right reasons.”

Andy was determined that OMD would not become a tribute to themselves. “The whole ethos for us was to do something new. So the idea of being a tribute band wasn’t really for us. We got the engine running and it’s been an interesting journey.

“We were offered quite good money but we felt uncomfortable with doing just the nostalgia gigs.”

l OMD play Birmingham Symphony Hall on November 12. For tickets www.thsh.co.uk