OMD celebrating 40 years of synth-pop
The film “Pretty in Pink” and its star Molly Ringwald helped define the ’80s. The ending scene, where she gets her guy in the prom parking lot as OMD’s “If You Leave” plays in the background, still makes viewers swoon.
But it almost didn’t happen, according to OMD co-founder Andy McCluskey. The synth-pop band was asked to write a song by director John Hughes and spent months crafting the perfect track. But things had changed.
“John Hughes said, ‘Guys, I love the song you’ve written, but we have a problem.’ They had done a test screening,” McCluskey recalls. “The original ending is Molly Ringwald’s character ends up at the prom with Jon Cryer, not Andrew McCarthy. All the teenage girls went, ‘No, no, no, that’s her friend. She’s got to end up with the good-looking guy.’ They reshot the whole end of the movie.
“We then had a song that made no sense anymore lyrically because it was about her and Duckie (Cryer’s character). John said, “What are you doing today? Can you write another song?” Completely off the top of our heads, in one day, wrote ‘If You Leave.’ Sometimes you get lucky, huh?”
OMD has been riding that “luck” for 40 years. The band has sold million of albums around the world and pioneered a sound that combined electronic elements with pop sensibilities. A career-spanning box set is due in October. OMD performs Saturday at Smart Financial Centre at Sugar Land with Berlin and The B-52s, bands also celebrating their 40th anniversaries this year.
“We’re not doing anything terribly arty or weird,” McCluskey promises. “We’re just slamming out all the hits.”
Q: Can you wrap your mind around four decades of music?
A: You’ve gotta understand, this a 40-year, rolling accidental career. Paul Humphreys and I started as teenagers in his mother’s back room with a bunch of junk equipment and, in fact, things that Paul used to make, cannibalizing his aunties’ radios and things. Trying to just do experimental, weird music influenced by our German heroes. Our best friends thought it was crap.
Q: How did you make the leap to a full-blown career?
A: We dared ourselves to finally do a gig at a club in Liverpool. We called ourselves this preposterous name, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, because we wanted people to know it was weird and experimental. We were just gonna do one gig on Oct. 12, 1978. It just went boom. We did another gig and another gig and another gig. Seven months later, we had our first single out (“Electricity”). Just over a year later, we were supporting Gary Numan and we went on to make our own album. We had our first hit in 1980. There’s nobody more surprised than we are that it’s gone 40 years.
Q: What memories do you have of playing Houston?
A: I’ll tell you what comes to mind: NASA and humidity. I can remember years ago, back in the ’80s, playing at the outdoor venue AstroWorld. I have played in Phoenix when it was 118 onstage. I was OK. AstroWorld, 90 degrees with the humidity? At the end of the first song, I felt like somebody had thrown a bucket of hot water over me.
Q: How does it feel playing the hits today?
A: The hit songs are the ones that really open the door for you. They’re your calling cards. I never get bands who go, “Oh, I’m so bored with my big hits. I’ve played it a thousand times. I’m gonna do an acoustic version of it tonight.” It’s disrespectful to the song that’s made you successful. It’s disrespectful to the audience who wanna come and hear the soundtrack of their lives. We play them as they should be. Knowing that “If You Leave” is about to start is like being a poker player and you know you’re about to lay down four aces.
Q: “Dreaming,” in particular, was all over Houston radio in the late ’80s.
A: For all the millions of records we sold in the ’80s, we signed a terrible record contract when we were 19 years old. We constantly had no money. Touring was supposed to help sell the record. It just lost money. We got to the end of the ’80s, I think by that stage we’d sold 12 million albums and 20 million singles, and we owed the record company a million pounds. The only thing you can do is release a best-of because that’s not gonna cost anything to record. But you need a new song. Once again, Paul and I went back into his studio that was in the garage of house and went, “OK, let’s write a hit.” We came up with “Dreaming.” We never really realized how big “Dreaming” was in the States until the band reformed and we came back to tour. It goes down as well as, if not better, than “If You Leave.”
Q: What’s your favorite song from each of your tour mates, Berlin and The B-52s?
A: It’s a cop out with Berlin because that huge, fat synth sound in “Take My Breath Away,” when that thing comes on, you get goosebumps. I always make a point to go and listen to that. My favorite B-52s song, which I always make sure I go and check out, is “Planet Claire.”
Q: OMD released a new album in 2017. Are there plans for more new music?
A: I don’t know when we’ll get ’round to doing a whole new album. A lot of bands of our age, they like touring, and there’s money on the road, and I think they feel obliged to say, “We need a new logo on the T-shirts, so we better create a new album.” But they don’t really have the hunger and the passion and the ideas for a new album. They put something together which is kind of a poor pastiche of themselves. I’m mentioning no names, but it happens, and you can think of bands. We’re not gonna release something unless we have a passion and a hunger for it.