Included were a clutch of the band’s most appealing tunes, including the bright, poppy “Telegraph,” the melancholic, New Order-esque “Silent Running” and the hymnal ballad “The Romance Of The Telescope,” but they were intercut with experimental outings employing sound collages from Speak & Spell machines (“ABC Industry”), sonar blips from wartime submarines (“Dazzle Ships, Pts II, III And VII”) and the fanfare-like introduction of “Radio Prague,” which OMD lifted directly from the Czechoslovak Radio foreign service.Īlso included was “Genetic Engineering”: a quirky, yet prescient slice of Kraftwerk-ian pop and a stalwart fan favorite, which provided OMD with a Top 20 hit when it was released ahead of Dazzle Ships, in February 1983.
Working with a suitably adventurous producer, Rhett Davies – whose first studio job was engineering on Brian Eno’s adventurous Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) – Humphreys and McCluskey thus assembled a remarkable 35-minute album. , the machinery, bones, and humanity were juxtaposed.” “It all made sense to us,” McCluskey told The Guardian in 2011. Indeed, having already conquered the charts, the idea of pursuing a radical new direction by making a record reflecting the Cold War-era paranoia rife in the early 80s, and peppering it with musique concrète and short-wave radio recordings from the austere Eastern Bloc, seemed perfectly reasonable to the Scouse synth-pop pioneers.
Of course, hindsight is a wonderful thing, and it should also be remembered that when they approached Dazzle Ships, OMD’s Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys were buoyed with confidence as their much-acclaimed third album, 1981’s Architecture & Morality, had gone platinum on the back of sublime electro-pop hits such as “Joan Of Arc (Maid Of Orleans)” and the lush, choral-enhanced “Souvenir.”
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