Junk Culture

OMD’s 1984 hit album receives the treatment recently afforded to its two predecessors, Architecture & Morality and Dazzle Ships: remastered from the original ½ inch reels and cut at half speed by Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios.Still very much active (their last album – No. 2 in the UK, No. 7 in Germany – was issued in 2023), Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD), founded by Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys, emerged from Liverpool in the late ‘70s and are rightly regarded as one of the more original of the so-called ‘synth pop’ outfits of the following decade.Notably also one of the more successful, they have enjoyed at least 20 hit singles across Europe and beyond, with total sales of around 40 million records to date.Junk Culture is their fifth album, released 30 April 1984. It featured another Peter Saville-designed sleeve but was a consciously more melodic effort than its experimental predecessor (Dazzle Ships) and was a significant success, charting across Europe and hitting the top 10 at home in the UK.Produced by the band and Brian Tench (with additional contributions by Tony Visconti), it was recorded at a variety of locations including AIR Studios in Montserrat, which had a newly-acquired, state-of-the-art Fairlight CMI sampler keyboard, and Wisseloord in Hilversum, Netherlands.As intended, Junk Culture returned OMD to the upper reaches of the singles charts too, with ‘Locomotion’ (top 5 in the UK and top 10 across Europe), ‘Talking Loud and Clear’ (No. 11 in the UK, top 5 in Belgium, the Netherlands and Ireland), and the club hit ‘Tesla Girls’ (No. 21 in the UK, No. 8 in the Netherlands). All three remain live favourites.Reviews at the time were generally enthusiastic. Robin Smith of Record Mirror observed, “…a living, breathing, musical menagerie filled with a hard core of ideas culled from virtually the four corners of the world… Smooth, warm and powerful.” Robin Denselow of The Guardian afforded Junk Culture similar praise, noting a diverse record that is “bursting with life and enthusiasm” and “an unusual and catchy set of songs”.The passage of time has upheld these opinions and, if anything, bolstered the record’s stature. Junk Culture is now widely regarded as one of strongest pop albums of a strong year, an imaginative journey both lyrically and musically. Almost four decades on Paul Scott-Bates of Louder Than War assessed it as: “simply one of those timeless albums… a worthwhile addition to any music collection whether [an] OMD fan or not.”We’ll leave the last word to Andy McCluskey, who in 2013 said: “Junk Culture has wonderful songs on it. Perhaps it’s not got the deep, conceptual, intellectual and musical experiments but the songs are great. [And it’s] possibly the tipping point of our career in terms of the quality of our music. It is the catchiest, poppiest album we’ve ever made, and it’s the last one we made where we were in complete control and had time to do it."