Electricity
How two young Kraftwerk fans from Liverpool bought a Korg synth from a mail-order catalogue and created an electro-pop classic
“As two teenage kids,” explains Paul Humphreys, “we wanted to be Kraftwerk. They were our idols.” There was one obstacle: Humphreys and Andy McCluskey were working-class Liverpudlians with limited musical experience and even more limited equipment. “Kraftwerk had all these incredible machines and we had next to nothing. We couldn’t sound like them, so we ended up sounding like OMD!”
“It was a complete pile of junk,” laughs McCluskey, recalling their gear. “All the instruments we owned, aside from a Korg synth, had cost us less than £100.”
After their first gig at Eric’s club – also intended to be OMD’s last – the duo, almost named Margaret Thatcher’s Afterbirth, were tapped up to play Tony Wilson’s Factory night in Manchester. The enthusiasm of Wilson’s wife Lindsay Reade, and Factory designer Peter saville, then secured them a one-single deal for the Kraftwerk-like “Electricity”, and they were shipped off to the studio with a very stoned Martin Hannett.
“When we heard the finished mixes of the single, I didn’t like either of them,” remembers McCluskey. “It took me some time to like what he’d done, because it wasn’t our original vision.”
Their partnership with Peter saville was a little more successful, however. “OMD are the test case of what the Factory principle had been intended to be,” says saville. “Helping to give exposure to a band who we thought were good, then through that exposure that might then help secure a long-term and proper recording deal. And that’s exactly what happened.”
“A lot of our friends thought the sounds we were making were shit,” laughs Paul Humphreys. “And so we didn’t have a great amount of confidence, we were just experimenting in my mum’s backroom. But we totally landed on our feet. We still believed we were no-hopers, though, even after we’d just signed a seven-album deal.” TOM PINNOCK
PAUL HUMPHREYS: Up until 1976, we didn’t really have any equipment. Andy and I were working-class boys; we wanted to be musicians, but we couldn’t afford any equipment to make music on! My hobby was electronics, so I built a lot of our noisemaking machines, as we called them, because they really weren’t instruments.
ANDY McCLUSKEY: “Electricity” was the first thing we wrote when Paul bought the selmer Pianotron – that’s the main plinkyplonk melody in the song. It morphed from another song called “Pulsar Energy” that had the bass part that became the breakdown sections in “Electricity”. We played it live with our band, The Id. It had guitar on it, and an acoustic drumkit!
HUMPHREYS: We’d had enough of The Id, which was an inflated eight-piece band, so we got rid of all the members until we became a two-piece, because we really wanted to be an electro band. We had Winston, our tape machine, who was our drummer, basically. I was playing organ and electric piano. We managed to buy a synth from Andy’s mum’s mail-order catalogue, a Korg Micro Preset. Along with Andy’s bass, that was all we had, which is why a lot of our songs were very simplistic.
McCLUSKEY: The selmer and the Vox Jaguar organ cost a grand total of £60. The Korg cost £7.76 a week for 36 weeks, that’s all we could afford out of our dole money.
HUMPHREYS: “Electricity” was definitely inspired by Kraftwerk’s “Radioactivity”.
McCLUSKEY: In the mid-’90s, I ended up working with Karl Bartos. I was having dinner at Wolfgang Flür’s flat, and there was Wolfgang and Karl and Emil schult, who did Kraftwerk’s artwork. In the hallway, there was a gold record for “Radioactivity”. so I started waxing lyrical about the Radioactivity album, and I said,
“I told Karl Bartos, ‘“Electricity” is just a faster, punk version of ‘Radioactivity’... ‘Ja, we know!’ he said” ANDY McCLUSKEY
“I’ll let you into a secret – our first single, ‘Electricity’, is just a faster, punk version of ‘Radioactivity’.” To which they all in unison said, “Ja, we know!” Oh God, it was that obvious?!
HUMPHREYS: Our first gig was in October 1978, supporting Joy Division at Eric’s in Liverpool [the poster in fact suggests they supported John
Dowie]. The guy from Eric’s heard we were doing some electro stuff, so he contacted us and said, “Do you wanna try your electro experiments onstage?” We thought, “should we? Dare we? Oh, go on!”
McCLUSKEY: Eric’s was an incredible, catalytic place. Everyone in the audience was in a band. People like ourselves, the Teardrops, the Bunnymen, Big In Japan, Wah!, the guys from Frankie Goes To Hollywood… They had a wonderful open-door policy for local artists – you got to play on Thursday night when it was free for members to get in.
HUMPHREYS: Roger from Eric’s said, “I need to advertise it. Are you called The Id?” “No no…” so we only had a few hours to decide. We went back to Andy’s house, where he used to write potential song titles on his wall, and there was ‘Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark’. It’s a silly name, but we wanted to stand out from all the other things at the time. But it could have been worse, because below it on the wall was ‘Margaret Thatcher’s Afterbirth’ – we could have been called that! MTA! I don’t think we would have got very far with that name – I mean, we struggled with Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark.
McCLUSKEY: I think there were less than 30 people in the audience.
HUMPHREYS: It was just gonna be one gig, it was a dare to ourselves. But the owner of Eric’s said they had this reciprocal thing with the Factory club in Manchester, and wondered if we wanted to play there.
McCLUSKEY: A few weeks later we went to Manchester and supported Cabaret Voltaire, and that’s where we first met Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus. Of course, we knew Tony from the telly ’cos he presented the
Granada Reports news programme. HUMPHREYS: We asked him if he’d put us on his show, and he said, “send me your cassette.” We did a rough version of “Electricity”, but didn’t hear back for a while. We recorded in Paul Collister’s garage. He became our manager because he had a tape machine and a van!
McCLUSKEY: He had a four-track Teac and a two-track Revox, so we put the kick drum and the snare and the white noise on four-track, then bounced them onto the Revox, then back onto the Teac, and then we recorded the bass and organ and keyboards separately, bounced them onto the Revox, then back onto the Teac, then we did the vocals. I can’t believe there isn’t more tape hiss. We played the kick, snare and white noise all by hand – we thought we were gonna get arthritis from hammering away on these keyboards.
LINDSAY READE: Factory Records hadn’t really got going, but Tony had a show on Granada. He used to put bands on there, so he got loads of demo tapes sent to him anyway. My memory is we were in the car and he was trying to get through a backlog of tapes. “Electricity” was one that went in the cassette player, and he was about to chuck it out, and I said, “No, hold on a minute, there’s something there.” so we played it again, and I said, “It’s pop, this could be in the charts.” I had a feeling about it. To be honest, he was rather patronising because he saw himself as the whole leader of the record side, but he had cloth ears if you ask me – his offering was A Certain Ratio, who I thought were rubbish! so he said, “All right darling, we’ll release it, then.”
McCLUSKEY: I think Lindsay got him to listen again, and then he played it to Peter saville and Alan Erasmus.
PETER SAVILLE: I distinctly remember turning up at [Factory HQ] 86 Palatine Road one day, and Tony handing me a cassette: “Have a listen to this. I don’t really like it, but Lindsay does.” she was very integral and involved with what was going on. I said, “Who is it?” And he said, “A couple of boys from Liverpool calling themselves Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark.” As soon as he said “Orchestral Manoeuvres”, I wanted to like it