Dazzle Ships

john eden

male pale and stale
How to lose 3 million fans in one easy step

With just one album, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark more or less destroyed their career. And they weren't the only ones: the early 1980s were littered with commercial suicides. Bob Stanley finds out how it all went wrong


http://music.guardian.co.uk/pop/story/0,,2262624,00.html

Disembodied voices from the eastern bloc sit over recordings of time signal pips, speak-and-spell machines, wartime submarines. "It all made sense to us. We wanted to be Abba and Stockhausen. The machinery, bones and humanity were juxtaposed."
 

michael

Bring out the vacuum
I love 'Dazzle Ships'. I discovered early OMD stuff in the mid-90s and thought the first 4 albums (i.e. up to 'Dazzle Ships') were all pretty weird, alien and bleak for what is supposedly a pop act. It's really interesting reading that article and discovering a) how big they were before what I think of as the really straight pop stuff (If You Leave, I Never Know Why etc) and b) that 'Dazzle Ships' was viewed as a massive departure from what had come before.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
I never picked up on it at the time either - I was 14 when Dazzle came out and I hummed along to Genetic Engineering as much as I did to Enola Gay.

I think maybe my tasters were getting stranger as well, but perhaps that just shows how accepting a lot of people were of quite strange things in the charts back then - O Superman being a prime example.

I have a soft spot of OMD's later stuff like "talking loud and clear" as well. Possibly because I haven't heard it for 20 years.
 

Gabba Flamenco Crossover

High Sierra Skullfuck
I've never heard of this album before but it sounds ace.

How strange... in the early 80s, musicians could be as arty and conceptual as they wanted and still sell bucketloads of records. Now bands are shameless commercial whores and they still can't shift jack shit. I bet a lot of NME bands would dream about selling 'only' 300,000 records. The Klaxons probably didn't get much beyond that even after winning the mercury.
 
Not sure if Dazzle Ships was too weird...more like the record-buying public lost their appetite for more experimental pop after '82. whatever, it's a shame OMD lost their nerve after that.
 
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