OMD’s fourth album, Dazzle Ships, is now extensively thought to be a masterpiece, however its radical, leftfield strategy price its creators pricey when it first appeared in 1983. Certainly, the document’s muted industrial success pressured the band into rethinking their entire strategy after they started making ready their subsequent album, Junk Tradition.
Take heed to Junk Tradition on Apple Music and Spotify.
“We’d pushed the envelope too far”
“Dazzle Ships had misplaced us 90 % of our viewers – we’d gone from promoting 4 million data to 200,000,” keyboardist Paul Humphreys informed File Collector in 2019. “We’d pushed the envelope too far and we had been scared. We determined to depend on our songwriting craft, ditch the experiments, and write a couple of hits.”
In quest of recent inspiration, OMD left their native Merseyside for pastures new. Initially, they decamped to Scotland, the place they labored on new songs and road-tested them on a brief UK tour, earlier than the Junk Tradition periods started in earnest in a lot sunnier climes.
“We thought getting out of Liverpool could be good, so we went to [George Martin’s] Air Studios in Montserrat,” says Humphreys. “We had been on this paradise setting within the Caribbean and we’d cease work at 5pm and go right down to the seaside the place we’d hear calypso reggae bands. We obtained influenced by our environment – that’s the place ‘Locomotion’ got here from with the metal drums.”
“We determined that we had been going to take time”
An irresistible slice of sunny, radio-friendly pop, “Locomotion“ turned Junk Tradition’s lead single and it instantly reversed OMD’s industrial slide, hitting No.5 within the UK the week its mother or father album was first launched, by Virgin, on April 30, 1984. The lilting “All Wrapped Up“ and the spacy, reggae-flavored “White Trash“ additionally bore the stamp of the band’s Caribbean sojourn, but whereas Junk Tradition’s second UK High 20 single, “Speaking Loud And Clear“ was additionally conceived in Montserrat, it mirrored the sound of OMD’s newest little bit of equipment relatively than their expertise of island life.
“It was really our demo of a unbelievable machine we purchased referred to as a Fairlight CMI,” bassist/vocalist Andy McCluskey informed The Huffington Submit in 2017. “It was the primary programmable pc for making music. It was a rare gadget, however we loaded up a bunch of random sounds into the pc to demo it, and ‘Speaking Loud And Clear’ got here out of that.”
Junk Tradition additionally featured two additional hits, courtesy of the windswept ballad “By no means Flip Away“ and the eminently catchy “Tesla Ladies“ – a celebratory paean to the inventor and father {of electrical} provide methods, Nikola Tesla. Nevertheless, whereas the album had a notably poppier sheen than its predecessor, songs such because the world-weary “Arduous Day“ and the atmospheric, instrumental title monitor confirmed that OMD had been nonetheless ready to indulge their pure quirkiness.
“The catchiest, poppiest album we’ve ever made”
The band’s fanbase actually felt they’d obtained the stability proper: Junk Tradition entered the UK album chart at No.9 in the identical week that Ocean Rain, by OMD’s Liverpool contemporaries Echo & The Bunnymen, additionally landed within the High 10. Evaluations had been additionally largely optimistic, with UK weekly File Mirror dubbing the album “easy, heat and highly effective” and The Guardian declaring it to be “a cheerful dose of pop, dance types, and even R&B and Latin influences to supply an uncommon and catchy set of songs.”
Later going gold within the UK, Junk Tradition introduced OMD proper again into rivalry and gave them the momentum they wanted for the rest of the 80s: a interval of intense exercise throughout which period their subsequent two albums, Crush and The Pacific Age, made important inroads within the US.
“There’s nonetheless a couple of fascinating and strange tracks in there, however we had been undoubtedly leaning in direction of a barely extra cautious strategy,” Andy McCluskey mentioned, reflecting on the making of Junk Tradition in 2017. “Nevertheless, the album is a very wonderful assortment of actually shiny and well-crafted pop songs. We determined that we had been going to take time and we had been going to have some hits… It’s the catchiest, poppiest album we’ve ever made.”
Take heed to the perfect of OMD on Apple Music and Spotify.