Old friends return – and you’ll love them more than ever
OMD O2 Apollo, Manchester Touring until March 27 ★★★★★
Norah Jones Visions Out now ★★★★☆
If you’re going to spend half your life listening to music, you need some luck with the timing of your teens. When you’re 17, especially, there have to be new albums that are even greater than the sum of their tracks.
For me that meant Armed Forces by Elvis Costello, Fear Of Music by Talking Heads, Eat To The Beat by Blondie and the self-titled debut by Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark.
While those others were three or four albums in, Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys were absolute beginners. Both under 21, they mixed adult angst with childlike fun.
The album was planted on my turntable, the cover propped in front – a sliver of orange and blue, signifying something.
‘To this day,’ McCluskey says, ‘I think half the people bought it for the Peter Saville sleeve.’
Forty-four years on, these men from the Wirral are doing two sold-out shows in Manchester. They’re on a roll after reaching the top two for the first time with a studio album, the amiably intense Bauhaus Staircase.
They open with a track from it, which can be a passion-killer. And this song, Anthropocene, is a sobering look at the state of the planet. But it soon turns into something new to me: a climate crisis clapalong.
The atmosphere never falters. McCluskey brings the yearning vocals and the whirling arms. Often likened to a trainee teacher, he’s now more of a football manager, revving up his team. Humphreys and Martin Cooper supply the gleaming synth hooks, while Stuart Kershaw adds beef on the drums.
The stage design, like the music, is high-tech but heartwarming. As songwriters, OMD are a match for any of the musicians they influenced, from Vince Clarke to Pet Shop Boys. Messages, Souvenir, Joan Of Arc and Locomotion now feel like classics, while Enola Gay always did.
The evening ends where the story began, with Electricity, possibly the catchiest tune ever to get stuck at No99. The whole show has been like bumping into old friends and finding you like them even more.
Norah Jones’s last tour was frustratingly tepid, but at 44 she has found her spark in the studio. On Visions, working with Leon Michels from The Dap-Kings, she sings and plays the piano with a breezy freedom. It’s the sound of a parent for whom work has become the easy bit of the day.