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We didn’t want all of that spillage and ambient room crap from a drum kit – we wanted bass drum, snare, hi-hat – all clean. No, it was to keep each individual one clean so that we could actually insist on him playing the pattern we had written and not vary it. Why is that? So you could chop them around? On stage he was allowed to play his kit but in the studio he had to play the bass drum on its own, then the snare drum, then the hi-hat – no symbol allowed. Poor old Malcolm had to play each drum individually. And if they were songs about relationships they were usually tortured metaphors! We wouldn’t even let our drummer use cymbals, they were cliché too!īasically, yes. We wanted to write about oil refineries and atom bombs and telephone boxes and catholic saints and warfare and space and politics. I can understand at the time why it bothered me, yes! This is the whole ethos – it sounds crazy now to think we were a pop group and were trying to change the world. I was really pissed off with myself but I just couldn’t find another single syllable word that would take its place! I’d fallen into the cliché! I was very angry and horrified with myself when I finally succumbed on my third album and in a single Joan of Arc to having to use the dreaded word ‘love’. That is distinctive.Īnother thing is to pick lyrical subjects that are not the usual pop music fodder. If you think of Electricity, Enola Gay, Souvenir – in a lot of our songs the melody was the chorus. There are verses but generally the melody is the chorus. Many of our songs use the synth melody as the chorus. This is a page we took out of Kraftwerk’s book, The Tornados’ Telstar as well.
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But fuck off, we’re not pop!’Ī good synth melody. So, after a week of being badgered by his first wife, Tony turned round to us and said, ‘Actually, you two are the future of pop music – would you like to make a record with us?’ And we said, ‘Yes, we’d love to make a record. Afterwards we cheekily sent him a tape with a note saying he seemed to quite like what we did when we went over and, ‘Can we get on your telly programme?’ We’d see the Human League on there and thought, ‘Fuck it, let’s try to get on!’ He listened to the tape and didn’t really like it very much but his first wife and Peter Saville thought it was quite amazing that these two kids from the suburbs of Liverpool actually wanted to be Kraftwerk. When we went to Manchester we met Tony Wilson. So then when they offered us to play in Manchester we thought, ‘Oh ok then, we’ll play two gigs’. We just wanted to say we’d played on stage once. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark was only invented as a band with a stupid name to do one gig! That was it. So after we played our first gig, the guys at Eric’s said he would try to get us a gig at the Factory Club in Manchester. We played our first gig at Eric’s in Liverpool and Factory Records had a reciprocal agreement with the place, which at the time we knew nothing about. Your first single was out on Factory wasn’t it? How did you fit in with that label and what was it like later going over to Dindisc (Virgin)? We were going to take a shot at it and were delighted to have the chance to make an album.
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It all happened very quickly but we didn’t really think that we would sell. I suppose synth-pop hadn’t become a thing so you were breaking the mould in a way… It could have gone either way?Ībsolutely! We played our first gig in the autumn of 1978 and we were talking to Dindisc Records from the summer of 1979. When we were given our first recording contract, we were so sure that they were never going to sell any records we thought, ‘Right, what we’re going to do here is spend all the money building our own recording studio here in Liverpool so that when nobody buys the record and we get dropped, at least we’ll have the studio! We just didn’t think that what we did was going to sell. We had no concept that we were going to be professionals in the music industry. So you were 16 when you wrote Electricity and there were only four or five bass notes in it… I remember our label asking us if we wanted to be ABBA or Stockhausen. Perhaps, largely unconsciously, what we’d done is distil out of Kraftwerk, Roxy Music and David Bowie a sort of catchy British electric pop thing. Yes! No one was more surprised than we were when what we thought was experimental music - and all our friends thought was shit - turned out to be great big fat pop hits.