Vintage Synth Trumps with OMD

Releasing their first single ‘Electricity’ on Factory Records in 1979, OMD are one of the leading lights of the innovative Synth Britannia era with their exquisite hooks and fascinating unconventional lyrical gists that included phone boxes, planes, oil refineries and historical figures.

Often using beautiful melodies to tell of terrible things, even when love was in the air, there could be a twist; in a 1992 co-write with Karl Bartos, ‘Kissing The Machine’ imagined a romantic liaison with a sexy AI robot, a Sci-Fi situation which today is close to becoming fact!

Inspired by their love of KRAFTWERK, NEU! and LA DÜSSELDORF, the Wirral duo of Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys realised their passion for European electronic music after the purchase of a Korg M500 Micro-Preset synthesizer. With numerous hit singles and albums across the world, OMD released their most recent album ‘Bauhaus Staircase’ in 2023.

2026 sees OMD’s ‘Summer Of Hits’ tour visit a number of outdoor locations in the UK and Europe. But a special indoor date takes place on Sunday 28th June at Brighton Centre, arranged by JOY Concerts as part of its NHS My Music series. Bringing a number of major live shows to venues across Sussex while raising funds to support local NHS services, 100% of profits from ticket sales and merchandise will support NHS projects across the seven hospitals of University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust directly benefiting patient care, staff wellbeing and hospital environments across the local community.

The constant throughout the 48 year career of OMD has been Andy McCluskey; he kindly sat down on a call with ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK for a round of Vintage Synth Trumps and have an enlightening conversation about instrument technology, artificial intelligence, new music, obscure B-sides and much more…

The first Vintage Synth Trumps card is a MemoryMoog…

I actually do own a Minimoog that somebody painted white before I bought it, so it looks like some sort of kit Moog! I quite like the sound of the Moogs but you do have to leave them on for a quite a while to let the oscillators settle down and stop drifting, although maybe that’s part of the charm that they create their own harmonics, drifting out of tune with the oscillators *laughs*

That MemoryMoog… is that a digital one?

Yes, part digital… FIAT LUX had one and the producer Zeus B Held who produced FASHION, DEAD OR ALIVE and John Foxx, it’s his favourite synth… the MemoryMoog was Moog’s last polyphonic synth before they went bankrupt! *laughs*

OMD were not really a Moog band, we were definitely a Korg and Roland band, almost exclusively Korg and Roland, largely because they were cheaper than bloody Moogs!

You seem to have had two periods of acquiring hardware synths, first to equip The Motor Museum and then for the OMD reunion? Have you always been purposeful when buying synths as opposed to collecting them for the sake of it?

Yeah, I’m not really a collector for the sake of collecting, they take up so much bloody space! Funnily enough, when you talk to younger bands now who are “purists”, people like Martin Swan from VILE ELECTRODES and the MIDI-hell on stage, they are like “why haven’t you got your old synths… oh dear, what happened to them?” – they never stayed in tune, I don’t like to MIDI, you had to write down notes of every sound you’d created, otherwise you wouldn’t remember how get the sound back! And quite frankly, they took up too much space and they were too heavy to carry around!

I’m sitting in my programming room here, it’s all “in the box” in my G5 and I’m happy about that. Actually, I don’t have that many bass guitars either! But I’ve just had my original Fender Jazz bass put back in its original colours! That is my 1974 bass that I played on ‘Enola Gay’, ‘Souvenir’ and ‘Joan Of Arc’; when we had the exhibition in BIM in Liverpool, this was black but when I bought it, it was sunburst blue and red.

So as this IS the one that I played, I thought for the sake of putting it on display, I would get in back in the same colour. The company that made the scratch plate for me, I asked them for an orange one and they said “why?”… so I sent them a picture of me with it in the ‘Enola Gay’ video and they went “Oh my god! Tell you what, we’ll repaint the one that’s now black” and they even did the scratches to make it look exactly the same as when it was in the ‘Enola Gay’ video!

Are you using the Fender Jazz bass again?

Last summer, we got asked to play the 600th edition of ‘Taratata’, the French equivalent of ‘Old Grey Whistle Test’ and because my other basses were in America for a tour, I took the Fender Jazz bass to a guitar tech called Ross Scott who got the pick-ups rebound and completely replaced the electrics because it sounded terrible! The original pick-ups had been replaced in the 90s with noiseless pick-ups, but they were so dull because there was no top end! He got his mate to rewind the pick-ups and I played that live at ‘Taratata’ on ‘Souvenir’ and ‘Enola Gay’, it sounded fantastic.

Here’s another in the room, THIS is THE Korg Micro-Preset, that IS the one that we got from my mum’s catalogue that we painted black! It wasn’t working when we reformed… so you know the story of myself and Paul bidding against each other on eBay!? *laughs*

I got that one and after we sampled it, I got someone to cannibalise the good bits to fix the original one up which had broken keys and some of the electrics weren’t working. So it’s 99% the original, the one which we did ‘Messages’!

How did you come to support JOY Concerts’ NHS My Music which will benefit hospitals and community care initiatives in Sussex?

Quite simply, they asked us. We thought it was a very good cause and would like to support it. It fitted perfectly into the fact that we are touring this summer doing festivals, so we thought we’d come down to Brighton and have a party there to celebrate all of the amazing things that this is supporting.

This date is part of OMD’s ‘Summer Of Hits’, how are you choosing the setlist?

Basically, we going to play every hit single barring ‘Genetic Engineering’ because it’s a bast*rd to play on stage! *laughs*

‘Walking On The Milky Way’ will be back in the set. Obviously when we’re doing our full gigs where we are the headline act, it WILL be other things as well so we’ll probably still do ‘Veruschka’. It’s not going to be only hits because I think we’ve only had 16 or 17 hits, although that’s not bad for most bands! *laughs*

Has the OMD audience increased and changed since all the various adverts and syncs recently?

I don’t know if it’s just the adverts and the syncs but certainly the age demographic has expanded. When we first reformed, it was predominantly the fans from the first time around who’d come back to see us again. I don’t exactly know why, but now it seems that it’s a broader demographic. It could be because there’s newer bands out there that reference OMD as being influential, it could just be because in this post-modern era, there’s nothing “new” so there’s nothing “old”, nothing in-fashion, nothing out-of-date! *laughs*

So if you’re considered to be “iconic” within your genre which it seems we are, then people will come and find out about you and I’d like to think that we’re good live. So once people have seen us, they come and see us again. It’s just kept growing ever since we reformed in 2006.

Next card and it’s a Roland Juno 106… I know you had a Roland Jupiter 8 and some of the smaller Rolands?

The 106, we never had one of those but I use the 106 in my Roland Cloud Group quite a lot when I’m writing songs these days because I do like to go for the analogue synth sounds, although these are digital-analogue. I defy people to tell the difference… the purists say you can but you can’t!! We had the Jupiter 8 and they were unbelievably heavy those things! We got a bit lazy and we used a lot of that on the ‘Junk Culture’ album, ‘White Trash’ is ALL Jupiter 8! I still use Jupiter 8 from the plug-ins as well.

It’s quite fascinating with the Juno 106 and that series of synths, it’s the one that’s still knocking about as the vintage synth on stage, do you remember MIRRORS had a Juno 60?

I was so sad that MIRRORS split up, I thought they were so good. But listen, the Roland Juno, the reason why it’s still used is because it’s not as heavy as a Jupiter 8 and it’s cheaper! DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH JUPITER 8s GO FOR ON eBAY?!!?? *laughs*

WALT DISCO have got their third album coming out this year, I’ve got everything crossed for them because I think they’re a brilliant band and it’s so sad to see great new bands not make it!

Would you like a recommendation? Have your heard A THOUSAND MAD THINGS?

A THOUSAND MAD THINGS, no but I’ve written it down Chi so I’ll check them out!

So in hindsight and yes, it was a long time ago but was it a mistake for OMD to get a Fairlight?

No! Absolutely not! There was no problem with the Fairlight, it allowed us to write songs… there’s nothing inherently wrong with any type of instrument, NOT EVEN A LEAD GUITAR! It’s what you play on it! It wasn’t the Fairlight but the situation we were in that made for some issues with particularly ‘The Pacific Age’ album but also to a lesser degree ‘Crush’.

Can I just say by the way, we has issues with ‘Crush’ and with ‘The Pacific Age’, largely because we have painful memories of their inception; we never had enough time to finish them, we were always right up against it! So the first 10 things we wrote were the album and particularly with ‘The Pacific Age’, there’s at least 2 tracks which SHOULDN’T have been on there in hindsight!

The other thing that was a negative influence on our recollection of those albums was the European fans’ negative response to them going “oh, you’re making this because you want to break America, you’ve got much more polished (and that was partly down to Stephen Hague producing) and writing about American subjects”; but I wasn’t writing about American subjects because I wanted to break America, I was just fascinated and it was new to me, it was just a new thing to sing about.

So these two albums, that fact that we made them under the cosh and the original European fans weren’t that knocked out by them, made me feel negatively. I don’t listen to the old albums, but I was really pleasantly surprised when I went back to listen to ‘Crush’… I went “that’s a really good album”, yeah it’s not ‘Dazzle Ships’ but there’s some great songs on there!

‘Crush’ got the expanded reissue treatment last year, what’s happening with ‘The Pacific Age’?

With ‘The Pacific Age’, we are actually going to re-release it for its 40th birthday BUT we are changing it! 7 of the songs have been remixed by Tom Lord-Alge because the original mixes were absolutely bombastic, the kick drum and snare drum were SO bloody loud! You couldn’t hear anything else. So Tom has remixed 7 tracks, ‘If You Leave’ is going on the album because it WOULD have been on ‘The Pacific Age’ if it wasn’t for the fact that Paramount Pictures still owned it at the time and we couldn’t get the licence.

AND we’re taking off 2 tracks!! This is going to cause a real issue with people who will go “YOU CAN’T RE-RELEASE IT AND TAKE OFF 2 TRACKS!” but yeah, they shouldn’t have been on there in the first place! You know what, if you like the original, you’ve still got it! OK, you don’t have to buy this one! It always gets me so annoyed, people start spitting their dummy out but you’ve got the original! *laughs*

So ‘Stay (The Black Rose and the Universal Wheel)’ is coming off, it’s NOT a good song and ‘Shame’ is coming off as well! ‘If You Leave’ and ‘This Town’ are going on the album, they should have been on ‘The Pacific Age’ first time around and 7 of the tracks have been remixed. So it’s going to be interesting, I think it will p*ss a lot of people off but we’re putting out the album that we WANTED to put 40 years ago! *laughs*

Another card, and it’s a Yamaha CS60…

NO! YOU’RE PICKING OUT ALL THE ONES I NEVER OWNED! *laughs*

They were like battleships these big Yamahas…

The Korg MS20 was confusing enough for me! They had that template on it and then you ran out of templates and you couldn’t buy any more! And forget the jack plugs, I never understood how the f*cking jack plugs worked! Considering we were a synth band, I’m absolutely a luddite when it comes to synths!

So which was your favourite synth, the one perfect one for your ability?

What’s the black Roland, the one that had 2 oscillators?

That sounds like the SH-2…

I hated it when Roland started making the SH synths in that horrible grey plastic, but the black ones in the metal cases were great. I’m not a synth geek, I can’t even remember exactly which one it is but it’s probably the SH-2 because we had an SH-09 and an SH-2.

I’m still a huge fan of the Mellotron but I have a digital copy, not the original one where we had to mess around with the tapes.

The Korg Micro-Preset, it’s f*cking horrible! That’s why we rammed it down the Eventide Harmoniser and triple-tracked it to try to make it sound acceptable! It’s got all these presets on it like ‘String’, ‘Wood’, ‘Voice’, ‘Bass’, ‘Synthe 1’, ‘Synthe 2’… doesn’t matter which preset you hit, it just went “EEERK”! *laughs*

Out of the four albums since the 2007 I think ‘English Electric’ comes closest to the imperial legacy of the first four albums… now you’ve had some distance, how do you look part on the 21st Century quartet?

I think that ‘History Of Modern’ was a good restarting of the engine, there’s some good songs on there; but it was a bit hit and miss, it’s a collection of songs that were lying around for a while. I think ‘History Of Modern Part 1’ is great which is why we still play it live. Although I think the live version is better than the album version! *laughs*

From ‘English Electric’ through ‘The Punishment Of Luxury’ to ‘Bauhaus Staircase’, I’m hugely proud of all three, we put a lot of time and energy into those and I think it shows. The songwriting, the ideas, the sounds, I’m exceptionally proud and I would say those three are up there with the first four! That’s my personal opinion.

My favourite on ‘Bauhaus Staircase’ is ‘Don’t Go’ which came out as an interim single first, but the way it sounded and was structured with all that KRAFTWERK Synthanorma sequencer stuff, did it date back to ‘English Electric’?

Not quite that far back but it was written as a potential B-side for ‘The Punishment Of Luxury’. I really liked the sequencer, all we had was that and we didn’t have a lyric but when it changed chord, I had the “A-ha” part. I kept playing it, trying to think of a lyric and in the end, I said to Paul “Let’s not use this, there’s something about this is so good, let’s not do a half-baked version as a B-side, let’s just keep that”

So we hung onto it for a couple of years and in the interim time, I managed to get the verse vocal and then when Paul wrote the melody for the middle eight. I don’t know how we do this but when you reprise the melody, it fits! It dovetails across the lead vocal so you can play the melody and the vocal at the same time and they’re not really clashing with each other! If ‘Don’t Go’ had been released in the 80s, it would have been a massive hit! It’s a great song, I’m so proud of it *laughs*

Written in 1992, first released in 1993 with ELEKTRIC MUSIC and then reworked for ‘English Electric’, ‘Kissing The Machine’ has turned out to be quite prophetic, so have you experimented with AI yet?

Both Paul and I fully intend to buy some really high end AI software and programming. We have to check the small print because the last thing we want is for them to actually own what we create. We’re going to play around, we’re going to try. The thing about AI, there’s nothing inherently wrong with it, it’s what you do with it. Now if you use it to pastiche other people or make fake new videos that looks like somebody famous doing something they shouldn’t or never did, that’s morally WRONG! But if you actually programme it and this is the thing, it’s not actually going to do anything that you don’t programme it to do… and if it does, it will be absolutely sh*t because it will be filling in so many gaps that it will just be pants!

However, I have not yet heard any music written on AI that sounds to me like a pastiche of music because it can only work from algorithms and programming, so it can only generate what you’re telling it to do a pastiche of. There’s no capability (yet) for any kind of genius synapse like would happen in your brain, where for no reason that you know the reason of, you’re just going to go “I want to try that” or “why don’t I sing this?” or “why don’t I play that note?”; 99 times out of 100, it’s shit because it’s just a brain fart but just occasionally, you go “WOW! THAT SOUNDS GREAT!”

Even if you could programme AI to do that and “throw in a note that shouldn’t work” or “throw in words”, it still wouldn’t know if it was a stroke of genius or just a piece of sh*t! So I’m not worried about AI music taking over the world at the moment because I haven’t heard anything that’s really that good, but I want to find out!

Is there any new music coming up?

We do have a project that will hopefully come out next year in the “quiet” year that has a working title at the moment of ‘Requiem’. I’ve got all these pieces that are very linear and once Paul finally stops changing nappies and gets down to working again on these tracks, I need him to cut them up, look at this chord change and that middle eight to make the sort of thing he does on loads of things that I write. There’s no lyrics, it’s a series of very ambient funereal musical vignettes.

Is this the “piano” thing you mentioned at the 2024 talk event in Düsseldorf?

Yeah! But it’s not all piano, there’s now 5 pieces… the reason this has all come in my mind is that Andy Whitehurst who made all of the ‘Bauhaus Staircase’ videos has finally decided to try out AI and he made a couple of video demos to my music demos… I was just blown away, it re-inspired me! Now I am sitting in this room, doing more work. I don’t know what it’s going to be, I don’t know if it’s going to be a Bluray, a DVD, a video to download but it’s going to look and sound gorgeous.

I hope it can be released as OMD once Paul starts doing some work on it, he’s done work on one but he hasn’t played it to me yet. We are going to have to pitch it properly to people and say “listen, this is not what you’re going to expect from us, it sounds a bit like ‘4 Neu’, things like that”. I’d rather do that and be honest about it rather than say “It’s a lot easier not to write lyrics and not write a catchy melody!”; the people who like our more ambient B-sides back in the 80s will enjoy it.

It will be beautiful ambient music but the visuals will take it to another level. We did say ‘Bauhaus Staircase’ would probably be the last full studio album because Paul hasn’t got the time with 2 young children and why wouldn’t he want to sit in his swimming pool drinking wine in the South of France instead of writing music… smell the roses that you’ve planted over the last 50 years!

The ‘Souvenir’ boxed set had the ‘Unreleased Archive Volume1’ which recently came out separately on vinyl for Record Store Day 2026, will there be a “Volume 2”?

Unbelievably when ‘The Pacific Age’ reissue comes out, there’s going to be unreleased tracks that have been found! I thought we’d gone back through the archives and that there was nothing left! BUT THERE IS! So while there won’t be a standalone volume, there will be a separate CD and a separate vinyl album with ‘The Pacific Age’ of interesting unreleased things. 2 of them, I didn’t even remember and some of the others, I was like “Oh my lord!”…

I remember when I listened to ‘Unreleased Archive Vol1’ for the first time and really loving the ‘Liberator’ song and its “computer rock and roll” thing, why did you keep that under wraps for so long?

Oh, the chorus wasn’t good enough, I loved everything else and the line “Fell in love with a Liberator”, the verse was great and the backing track was great but the chorus wasn’t good enough!

The final card and it’s the ARP Axxe, I don’t recall you having any ARP stuff, or did you?

I love the ARP 2600 and I use it all the time, it is the sequencer in ‘Anthropocene’ and it’s also in other things… I’ve never had a real one but I love working with the one in my computer, I understand it. I start with a preset and then I start fiddling until I change the notes or whatever. Again, don’t ask me to plug jack leads in, I wouldn’t know what I was doing! *laughs*

PET SHOP BOYS did their ‘Obscure’ residency in April, would OMD ever consider such a run of gigs with no hits at all, it’s the complete opposite of ‘Summer Of Hits’?

How many songs did they do?

23 with 35 songs rehearsed…

So they mixed it up?

Yes, over the five nights…

…if I thought we could do five nights and charge the money THEY charge, then YES! *laughs*

There’s a dilemma with doing one-off shows… for example, we did the Royal Albert Hall the first time when we did all of ‘Dazzle Ships’ + ‘Architecture & Morality’, we lost money on that because so much work went into rehearsals. Normally when we tour, we’ve got a memory bank of songs that are in there, so we just play them once and we remember that. But when you have to go back and dig deep into your catalogue, you’ve got to do a lot of rehearsing. I like the idea is the short answer but it would have to make sense financially because otherwise, there’s so much time rehearsing which means crew, rehearsal venue hire etc, it’s not worth it, that’s the sad thing. What did PET SHOP BOYS charge?

£100 per ticket in the Electric Ballroom, 1000 capacity…

OK, yeah! That’s still a lot of money! *laughs*

Fair play to them… I mean, 5000 people came from all over the world to come see us play ‘Dazzle Ships’ at the Royal Albert Hall… we’ll think about it! 😉

The thing that’s on the horizon is we’re hoping to play with the Liverpool Philharmonic next year and we are looking towards 2028 for a MASSIVE tour because it’s our 50th Anniversary would you believe?!? Although that might start at the end of 2027 just to get it all in! It’s going to be a huge undertaking!!

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ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its grateful thanks to Andy McCluskey

Special thanks to Alix Wenmouth at Wasted Youth PR

OMD play Brighton Centre on Sunday 28th June 2026 for NHS My Music – tickets available from https://omd-brighton.com/

For other live dates on OMD’s ‘Summer Of Hits’ tour, visit http://www.omd.uk.com/

https://www.facebook.com/omdofficial/

https://www.instagram.com/omdhq/

Vintage Synth Trumps is a card game by GForce that features 52 classic synthesizers, available from https://www.juno.co.uk/products/gforce-software-vintage-synth-trumps-2-playing/637937-01/

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Text and Interview by Chi Ming Lai
1st May 2026