Synth-pop has seldom sounded more daring

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark

O2 Arena, London SE10

★★★★☆

By Nick Ruskell

“Let’s do a song about the end of the universe,” beamed a jubilant Andy McCluskey, introducing History of Modern (Part 1) to an O2’s worth of equally delighted faces. “You’ve got to jump up and down now, to a song about the end of the universe.”

Plus ça change. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark now have almost five decades of serving up darkness, gallows humour and growing fear as catchy, danceable synth-pop bangers behind them. McCluskey and keyboard-toting co-founder Paul Humphreys are both comfortably into their 60s. And yet, in truth, not a lot has really changed for the pair, even as they delightedly noted that Sunday night was their first time performing on one of London’s largest stages.

Last year’s excellent Bauhaus Staircase album took in granite themes of fascist creep and a looming existential shadow. As it grappled with these heavy thoughts, it did so to music that prodded at the possibilities of electronics while also maintaining something joyful and vital, with a particular strain of Britishness running through it. Even Prof Brian Cox’s remark that it was like Kraftwerk via Wirral could have come from almost any point in OMD’s long career. Familiar as all this is, OMD continue to sound like they’re coming from both space and the future.

“I assume you already have your dancing shoes on,” grinned McCluskey as he introduced

Five decades on, OMD still seem like they’re coming from the future

Messages. Let’s talk about dancing, namely his. They are dad-shapes par excellence. You might point and laugh – and plenty have done, frequently – but clearly, nobody was having a better time than he. Plus, with the rest of the band static behind keyboards and drums, McCluskey is a singer with more space to fill than most. All the strutting and shaking merely made him a better frontman.

Not that he was the only thing to look at. While the band played on colour-changing lightboxes, behind them an enormous video-wall illustrated the songs with bright, verdant psychedelia (Tesla Girls), brutalist art (Bauhaus Staircase), mushroom clouds (the ironically effervescent Enola Gay) and Molly Ringwald (If You Leave, from the Pretty in Pink soundtrack). If it occasionally felt a little Tomorrow’s World-circa 1985, that’s because OMD were thinking like this back then, ahead of their time.

Given a big stage on which to breathe, new songs such as the dystopian-but-dazzling Kleptocracy sounded absolutely enormous. Meanwhile, older favourites – 1991’s Pandora’s Box and the mischievous one-two of Joan of Arc and Joan of Arc (Maid of Orleans), meanwhile, were a wall of sound that, in a modern age with more modern tech, sounded even more advanced than when they were first recorded. If the band’s Royal Albert Hall turn in 2022 was intentionally nostalgic, here even the oldest cuts looked firmly forward.

Throughout, McCluskey and

OMG factor: Andy McCluskey had his dancing shoes on at the O2