Nowadays it’s regarded by many fans as their masterpiece, with some comparing it to Kid A in the way it attempted to dismantle pop and rebuild it as something altogether new. ‘We were only supposed to play one gig – that’s why we had such a stupid name’ … McCluskey and Paul Humphreys as OMD in 1983.
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“Virgin Records joked at the time that it was their only record that shipped gold and returned platinum.” “It was almost career-ending,” says McCluskey. That album, Dazzle Ships, stands out now as OMD’s most bold and bizarre, one in which they moved away from their synth-pop roots to a more avant-garde approach that incorporated musique concrète and bursts of shortwave radio. “It was definitely the tail wagging the dog.” McCluskey recalls him being so inspired by Edward Wadsworth’s 1919 vorticist painting Dazzle-ships in Drydock at Liverpool that he asked them if they could write a song and album of the same name to match his sleeve idea. Saville’s artistic influence over OMD is a great story in itself. In fact, he thinks his love of Wade’s paintings might be connected to the black, thermographic design Saville produced for their debut single, Electricity, which shared not just a starkness but also a three-dimensional quality thanks to the way Wade applied his paint. Yet this was actually the start of a great working relationship between the two men, with McCluskey describing him as the “artistic big brother I never had”. McCluskey laughs recalling how the label’s famous designer Peter Saville took him to one side and said: “Your music sounds like the future but you look terrible. But their music – romantic melodies aligned with icy, robotic backdrops – caught the attention of Factory records. And in a way they should never have been pop stars – compared to the cool customers on the Liverpool scene that formed around Eric’s club (Echo and the Bunnymen, Dead or Alive, Teardrop Explodes), McCluskey stood out with his huge afro and baggy clothes. They were only ever going to play one gig (“that’s why we had such a stupid name”). Photograph: Maurice Wade/Courtesy of Andy McClusky & Trent Art Gallery that’s your sound, so celebrate it.’ And so that’s what we did.” “Still, one of the things I loved about Brian Eno is that he said, ‘If you’ve only got a load of cheap junk, the chances are you’re the only people with that particular collection of cheap junk. “Everyone said it was future pop, but the only synth we had was from my mother’s catalogue,” says McCluskey. (Another essay on Dada, which was written in a dadaist style, also failed to impress the teachers.) He toyed with the idea of studying fine art at Leeds, and recently realised that if he had done he would have been there at the same time as Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside, and Dave Ball and Marc Almond of Soft Cell – who knows what band may have emerged? Instead he formed OMD with his friend Paul Humphreys: McCluskey on a cheap left-handed bass played upside down, Humphreys making weird noises from machines built out of his auntie’s dismantled radios. “That’s because on 24 June 1975, on my 16th birthday, I took all my money and bought a bass guitar: end of painting!”īut McCluskey did complete his A-level art in which he got an E after writing an essay declaring all wall-hung art to be dead. “My son asked why all my paintings were done in 19,” he says. ‘Hushed tranquillity’ … Burslem, Staffs Potteries.
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He describes Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery as his “home from home” and as a teenager he would finger-paint his own swirling, psychedelic oil paintings in homage to JMW Turner (you can see a couple of these in the exhibition catalogue). “Straight back I get an email from him going, ‘All right mate! I don’t actually own anything by Maurice Wade but why don’t I? I need to get one of these yesterday! Where can I get one?’ We’ve told him if any more come in he can have first dibs.” McCluskey shares an agent with Williams so got in touch to ask. “I am hoping people will read this article and go, ‘I think my nan’s got one like that over her mantelpiece,’” he grins, before telling a story about a framer at a gallery who thought he might have framed a couple of Wades for another Stoke native, Robbie Williams.
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He’s hoping the noise around this exhibition may help to reveal where more of Wade’s paintings are hiding. But McCluskey is keen to point out that Wade is not a “northern artist” in the tradition of LS Lowry: “The way he painted was, frankly, just less sentimental.” In a sense these paintings work as historical records of a bygone Britain – the houses on 1961’s Hot Lane, for instance, are no longer there. “The stillness in his canals,” marvels McCluskey. McCluskey playing with Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark in 2019.