OMG! OMD still going strong
Synth-pop act will stop at Greek Theatre on its 40th anniversary tour
Back in October of 1978, Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys planned to play a one-night gig at a small Liverpool club called Eric's, so the duo came up with a band name, an unusual one, on a whim the night before their first show.
Calling themselves Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, the duo took the stage with a homemade synthesizer, a bass guitar and a tape recorder playing backing music, never imagining they'd one day be seen as synth-pop legends and pioneers of electronic dance music.
“When we started, we never anticipated it was going to be the next big thing or that it would continue in such a successful way for more than 40 years. We were just a couple of weirdo geeks who wanted to do something a bit different,” said McCluskey, vocalist and bassist for Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, or OMD, as it is commonly referred to.
With more than 40 million records sold and hit dance tracks like “Electricity,” “Enola Gay,” “Secret” “So in Love” — and perhaps its best-known hit, “If You Leave,” which appeared on the “Pretty in Pink” soundtrack — the band comes to the Greek Theatre on May 26 as part of its belated 40year anniversary tour.
“I still can't believe we're doing this,” McCluskey said during a phone interview. “We must still be doing something right, and it's wonderful to celebrate 40, although it's really been 43 1/2 years,” he added.
The beginnings
Before that fateful 1978 show, the lifelong friends bonded over their love of music and what McCluskey called a “symbiotic relationship,” when McCluskey would buy German import records with money from his paper route, and Humphreys, who was into electronics, built a stereo so the two could listen to songs in the burgeoning electronic music scene.
“We thought we could do this, too. But all we had was my bass guitar and Paul had nothing so he started making weird machines from the circuit board of his auntie's radio,” McCluskey said.
One of the machines Humphreys was building became OMD's first synthesizer; the 16-year-olds used it to write a melody that would eventually become their 1979 debut single and first international hit, “Electricity,” which has remained a dance club staple for decades. thanks to its catchy keyboard intro.
“It was done on this cheap organ, and that's how it all started, with just that teasey piano song,” he said.
After writing a few more songs, the friends were expecting to move on; McCluskey planned to attend fine arts school while Humphreys was going to pursue a career in electronics.
On a whim, they dared each other to go onstage for one night at Eric's, where new wave bands Echo & the Bunnymen, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Dead or Alive and Flock of Seagulls would also perform some of their earliest shows.
“We just knocked on the door and asked if we could do a gig doing our electronic music,” he said.
As they didn't expect the club owner to agree, they hadn't even come up with a name for the band yet.
“So we came up with that name for a one-night gig and we played six songs for about 25 minutes for 30 people, and so this one gig became two gigs and yeah, this hobby thing that was going to be one gig suddenly became a real band that was doing gigs, and we released a record and things started to explode really quick,” McCluskey said.
OMD has since released 13 albums and performed all over the world, including at festivals like Coachella in 2013.
Although the band formed more than 40 years ago, the anniversary tour was delayed due to the pandemic and unrelated factors that caused them to get a late jump on the milestone tour.
But the pair aren't sweating the delay. After all, they were never supposed to make it this far to begin with.
“We came up with the most preposterous name we could come up with and it didn't matter; we were only going to do one concert. And here we are 43 1/2 years later. Listen, it could have been worse,” McCluskey said with a laugh.