#Dazzle ships album full
Even this evening, as Dazzle Ships is performed in full for the very first time, there’s the sense that his pride is still a little dented by its under-performing singles. 300,000 is a healthy number today but in 1983 it shocked the band into pruning their experimental tendencies in favour of a transatlantic commercial sheen on the following year’s hit-stuffed Junk Culture.įor McCluskey at least, hit singles rather than album sales appear to be the yardstick for measuring OMD’s success, a point he alludes to whenever I’ve seen the group live. As Bob Stanley noted in the Guardian, on its original release Dazzle Ships lost OMD 90% of their audience, selling a mere 300,000 compared to Architecture & Morality’s 3million. It wasn’t that Dazzle Ships lacked songs but that those it did include, among them some of the band’s strongest, were broken up by radio idents (‘Radio Prague’), speaking clocks (‘Time Zones’), sonar signals and obtuse electronic howls (the title track). Their big-selling, triple platinum 1988 greatest hits The Best Of OMD wiped Dazzle Ships’ twin singles ‘Genetic Engineering’ and ‘Telegraph’ from view too (unless you owned the CD version, which back in 1988 almost nobody did: CD players would remain luxury objects for a few more years to come). This selective history of the band wasn’t new either. “This is probably going to be the strangest, most esoteric collection of Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark songs you’ll ever hear in one show. As Luke Turner wrote on these pages, even in 2007 when OMD first embarked on the Classic Album tour circuit (playing their preceding hit album Architecture & Morality in full alongside plenty of fondly remembered singles), Dazzle Ships was left out in the cold, none of its tracks making their set-list.
If it’s a been a long journey for Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark to take from the Wirral to the Albert Hall, for their fourth album Dazzle Ships the voyage from 1983 release to 2016 Classic Album status has been even more circuitous.
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