THE FOLLOWING IS AN INTERVIEW WITH ANDY McCLUSKY, LEAD VOCALIST WITH O.M.D. THIS INTERVIEW TOOK PLACE IN JULY 2004.
Interview by PAUL GOODWIN

HOW DID O.M.D. GET ASKED TO SUPPORT GARY NUMAN ON THE ’79 TOUR?

Andy McClusky; If my memory serves me right when we released our single “Electricity” on Factory Records in May of 1979 Gary was still working in the Beggars Banquet record shop and he bought a copy of the single and liked it. When he was looking for a band to support him on the tour later that autumn he thought about us. He actually came to see us play a Factory gig at the Nashville rooms in London. I think what clinched it for us was the fact there was just the two of us, a tape recorder and some keyboards so we didn’t take up very much space and they could just throw us on there in front of the curtain and we weren’t going to interfere with his stage set. Gary had a huge stage set and he wanted to keep it hidden behind the curtains so nobody saw it when the support act was on. We got asked if we wanted to do it, it was great for us because we were still on Factory but there was interest after that from other labels. After that tour we got offered a contract with Din Disc records

DID YOU ENJOY THE “TOURING PRINCIPLE” TOUR?

Andy McClusky; I have to say Gary and his people were very, very good to us, we were a band that had no money, we didn’t have to buy onto the tour which was very unusual, especially for a major sell out tour like Gary’s. Normally it would have cost around five to seven grand to buy on a tour like that. And he allowed us to travel in his coach with him, his band and his entourage as well as carrying our back line in the trucks so we were really well treated. For the tour we invested in some new pants and shirts, just one each and at some point in the tour, I can’t remember when but I think it was at Wolverhampton Paul and I were back stage getting ready to go on and Gary’s mum Beryl came up to us and said “Lads, you’re not going out on stage in those shirts again are you?, come here quick, I’ll iron them for you.” So Gary’s mum ironed our shirts for us back stage at Wolverhampton! Gary even said we could borrow some of his keyboards when it came time for us to record our debut album so he was just spectacularly generous to us throughout the whole tour. I also remember Gary getting his white Corvette and he was so enamoured by it he ended up driving himself to the gig whilst everyone else was on the tour bus and Gary was basically buzzing around. The tour was a fabulous experience and of course little did we know that exactly a year later we were going to headline all those same venues doing our own sell out tour when “Enola Gay” was a hit. 

DO FEEL THAT THE TOUR HELPED THE BAND’S PROFILE AT ALL?

Andy McClusky; Oh absolutely, at that point none of the electronic groups like us, The Human league, Ultravox and Cabaret Voltaire had crossed over into the charts in anything like the way that Gary had. We were all on small labels doing small numbers of indie singles. It took a while to get out of the shadow of Gary because as far as the radio and media were concerned Gary Numan had invented the electronic pop song and we were all just copying him. So yes, the opportunity to support him did in the long run help to raise the profile of the band.

WHAT DID YOU THINK WHEN YOU SAW GARY NUMAN AND TUBEWAY ARMY FOR THE FIRST TIME ON TOP OF THE POPS?

Andy McClusky; It was quite strange really because having been in a band and playing for almost a year. When I saw Gary Numan on that important Old Grey Whistle Test, I remember thinking well that interesting but f***in’ hell! Hang on a minute, who’s he? Where’s he come from? How come there’s a guy I’ve never heard of getting on a mainstream T.V. show doing the kind of stuff that we’ve been doing for a year. I’ll be honest with you, at the time there was this element of “S**t, where did he come from.” I mean we’d been playing these punk clubs for a year and we’d never even heard of Gary or Tubeway Army and there was a little bit of jealousy to be perfectly honest. But once we met Gary and toured with him we became acquaintances and friends and you just don’t think like that anymore but I have to say I was a bit shocked and a little bit jealous.

There was probably also a little bit of frustration and jealousy from all the other synthy bands like the Human League and Ultravox who’d actually been going longer than Gary had. The Human League had started before O.M.D. and I know that they were a bit miffed that we started having hits before them. Depeche Mode actually started because they were in a club in Basildon and they heard our single “Electricity” and they went “S**t, lets do that.” The funny thing was of course that a year earlier when I’d been in Eric’s Club in Liverpool, Paul and I had heard “Warm Leatherette” by the Normal, which was Daniel Miller and ultimately Depeche Mode went and signed to his label. So it was a nice kind of triangle of influence really.

DO YOU THING THAT GARY DESERVED THE BAD PRESS HE RECEIVED?

Andy McClusky; No, I mean, one of the things that was noticeable even from the very beginning was that for whatever reason he just got an absolute mauling from the press for everything, I mean the music press just loved to hate him. Once I got to know him and we did the tour, you’ve got to bear in mind also that Gary’s music was very different to ours but it was very good and he was a nice guy, you begin to feel personally involved and I thought “Who are these bas**rd’s, they don’t know him, we’ve met him. Why are they saying all this s**t about him? I really thought the British press reaction to him only hastened Gary’s unnecessarily swift end of his big years in the early part of his career because he just got murdered out there. I think the attitude of the British press was that they accused Gary of being one minute in a punk band and then all of a sudden he’d just put on a new suit and basically ripped off Ultravox. I think the press liked to portray him as a sort of charlatan. I think they thought he was just acting and pretending and there was no real belief or substance in it.

IT MUST BE VERY HARD TO BE SUDDENLY THROWN IN FRONT OF A CAMERA AT SUCH A YOUNG AGE, AS I UNDERSTAND IT BOTH YOU AND GARY WERE ONLY JUST INTO YOUR TWENTIES AT THIS POINT.

Andy McClusky; It’s very hard, people are expecting, especially when you are doing something that is perceived as being different and groundbreaking, a very intellectual answer to their questions. The bottom line is, for me at least was when I was asked why we did what we did musically I always felt that it was intuitive, an unconscious thing that was within me. So to turn round to the media and sort of blurt out “Oh, it seemed like a good idea.” Just wouldn’t do as an answer for the media and it wouldn’t have won us any favours in the business. I find that we would have to psycho-analyze our music after the fact and then come up with quite frankly cock and bull stories about how such and such song came about. You’re trying to intellectualise what is really someone’s subconscious and intuitive thought processes. It’s one of the things that has always amused me about interviews is the way in which you have to invent an answer that sounds more intellectual and inspired than “Der, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

WHAT DO YOU THINK, LOOKING BACK, ABOUT THE WHOLE GARY NUMAN PHENOMENON?

Andy McClusky; I think, like many people, once you’ve have gone out of fashion you got to be in the wilderness for long enough for you to be perceived to have finally paid your dues or be forgiven. Or another generation comes along and doesn’t remember what you were perceived as ten or twenty years ago. And then you are allowed to be perceived and slightly more objectively from a historical aspect. Gary had, during those wilderness years, started to rebuild his credibility and people are now looking back, without all the press crap that was thrown at him twenty odd years ago, at those first couple of albums and how radically different it was to everything else that was in the charts saying there was something that really stood out. I also think the Sugababes song also hasn’t hurt him either. I must admit though I’m not all that familiar with Gary’s mid and later material but I do know his music has become a lot more gothic and aggressive, almost an electronic version of heavy metal.

AFTER “Messages” BECAME A TOP 20 HIT THE BAND HIT A CREATIVE STREAK THAT CULMINATED IN A FLURRY OF HITS THROUGH THE EARLY 80’S, WHAT WAS THIS PERIOD LIKE FOR BOTH YOU AND PAUL?

Andy McClusky; It was quite amazing and obviously we were delighted but because we were young we really didn’t grasp what was going on. We were doing exactly what we wanted to do, nobody was telling us what to sound like so we were making songs that had a bit of this and a bit of that. We moved from the very early synth pop into more gothic stuff on our second album, and went all sort of choral and ambient for the third album. So basically we were doing just what the hell we felt like doing and amazingly it was like we had the Midas touch and we just kept selling more and more and more. By the third album, which by the way sold something like two and a half to three million copies. (In fact two of the singles from that album went on to be multi million sellers for us). I don’t think we realised just how big we were and how well we were doing. We lived on a day to day basis Paul and I, we’d get up and either be in the studio, on the road or a TV show. It all just became the norm because it all happened to us quite quickly. The strange thing about O.M.D. was both Paul and myself started to get into electronic music when we were sixteen, Paul was the only one of my gang that was interested in doing it with me and it helped that he had a little bit of electronics knowledge. I’d go ‘round his house on a Saturday afternoon and we’d write songs when his mum was out at work. Meanwhile the rest our mates were into Genesis, Pink Floyd and The Eagles and they thought what we were doing was utter crap. Paul and I were interested in music that really didn’t trouble the charts; we liked experimental and underground stuff like Kraftwerk and a few other German bands. We liked these bands because we thought of ourselves as an experimental band so we never thought that we were doing something that we could make a living out of, that we could sell records and have hits with. In-fact when our manager at the time said we were a pop group both Paul and I were aghast, we’d always thought of ourselves as an experimental band. When we finally dared to go on stage with just the two of us and a tape recorder without our mates messing the songs up with lead guitar solos and drum and everything we were really surprised when after a couple of gigs we were at the Factory in Manchester and we met Tony Wilson and he offered to do a single on Factory records. We were just like “Great, whatever.” Then we got a deal with Din Disc records, who were a subsidiary of Virgin records, and we both thought isn’t this great, these mad people giving us money. So we built our own studio and made a record. We did this because we thought if we don’t sell any records at least we’ve still got the studio. We never, ever thought that we would sell records so Paul and I were in this utter dream from ‘78 thru to ‘82. We’d look at each other sometimes on a TV show when we were about to go on and without even saying it and we’d have this look on our faces that basically said “How the f**k did this happen?”

AS THE ‘80’S PROGRESSED SUCCESS FOR O.M.D. TAILED OFF SLIGHTLY IN THE U.K. HOWEVER, OVER IN THE STATES THE BAND SUDDENLY SCORED AN ENORMOUS HIT WITH “If You Leave” A SONG THAT WAS INCLUDED ON THE SOUNDTRACK TO THE MOVIE PRETTY IN PINK. WHAT ARE YOUR RECOLLECTIONS OF THIS SUDDEN CHANGE AROUND AND THIS PERIOD IN GENERAL?

Andy McClusky; That didn’t happen out of the blue. We toured America from 1980 onwards but unfortunately we were on a label that really wasn’t terribly interested in the band, I mean we were not a priority act. We would go over and do a few sort of hip underground clubs but in reality for the first four or five years we couldn’t get arrested in America. Then we hooked up with American management and changed record companies. We’d finally got ourselves onto A&M records who absolutely believed they could sell records. I mean we worked hard, we toured and supported and we spent a lot of time in America until finally we got invited to do the song for the Pretty In Pink movie. We then had a monster hit in America, No 4, all over the radio and yet over here I don’t think it even troubled the top 50. So it was quite bizarre, all of a sudden in the mid ‘80’s our audience in Europe started to not buy our records and we started to sell more records in places like America, Canada and South Africa, although as regards South Africa, we didn’t know that at the time because of the apartheid ban. 

“Forever Live And Die” WAS THE GROUP’S FINAL TOP 40 HIT OF THE ‘80’S REACHING NO 11, WHAT DO YOU RECALL ABOUT THIS PERIOD AND THE TIME RUNNING UP TO THE “SUGARTAX” ALBUM OF 1991?

Andy McClusky; In some respects I view that time as some of the lost years. Although we couldn’t admit it at the time we had become exactly the kind of band that we never wanted to be, the type of band that we would have taken the piss out off. We were touring ‘round America, we were living the rock and roll lifestyle to every cliché in the book. We did a lot of support tours, big arena stadium tours with the Power Station, The Thompson Twins and Depeche Mode. We were building an audience in America but we were spending a bloody fortune. We were losing money hand over fist on tours that were expanding our audience but we weren’t earning any money in-fact we were losing money. We’d get back home after five months on the road and the record company would say “Well. You’ve got no money, you better go make another record, can we have it next month!” To be honest, I think we were scrapping the barrel. We’d had our fourth album Dazzle Ships kind of pull the rug on our Midas touch. We lost our audience completely, we went far too experimental and I think that more consciously than unconsciously we got more conservative, commercial and poppy which I think was the moment that we lost the plot. I think after that point the albums Crush and The Pacific Age are my two least favourite O.M.D. albums from the ‘80’s. I think we were getting a little bit desperate with “We should sound like this and we should sound like that.” “Forever Live And Die” was the only hit we had off that album. The one nice thing about it was we actually shot the video in and around Liverpool and it’s got a lot of footage shot from around where we lived. It was a good song and it did well but by the time it had come out we’d released a “Best of” because we were skint. Our accountant just said you either need to stop now or suddenly make an album that sells a million copies + because you owe the record company a million pounds. You are in debt to Virgin to the tune of one million. So we did the “Best Of” and we did the tour with Depeche Mode. It was frustrating because ten years earlier they had started because they’d heard our first single and there we were ten years later supporting them. We were getting $5000 dollars a night and losing money and they were earning enough to retire on. It was pretty soul destroying and at the end of that tour Paul turned to me and said “I’ve had enough, I wanna go home, stop touring and write songs.” Unfortunately, at that stage, he and I had started to think about changing the direction of the band and try to recapture what we believed we’d lost but where he wanted to go and where I wanted to go were two completely different directions. That’s when we started to drift apart, we started writing separately, we did some songs together and we looked at them and thought this isn’t working anymore. At the end of 1990 essentially we just packed it in. O.M.D. actually finished completely for about six months. Then it was Paul, Malcolm and Martin who came to me and said “Listen, we wanna carry on, we’ve been writing together. There’s three of us and one of you so we’d like to carry on using the name O.M.D.” I spoke to Virgin about this and they said “To be honest we’ve heard their material and we’ve heard your material and neither of you are writing great stuff but if anybodies going to carry on as O.M.D. its gonna be you because people think of you as the lead singer of this band. It you can come up with the material we’d rather go with you.” I hadn’t thought about carrying on as O.M.D. on my own at that point, that was suggested by the record company. I was like “really? You think I could carry on on my own?” And they said “You are primarily the voice and the live presence.” So I spent a good twelve months finally writing some good songs that eventually became the SugarTax album that emerged in 1991 and Virgin backed me and I think Paul was quite gutted that Virgin chose me and not him. It wasn’t something that I engineered. I wanted to carry on and to be truthful I was terrified of doing it on my own because all I’d ever known of O.M.D. was me and Paul.

THE SUGARTAX ERA WAS A SPECTACULAR RETURN FOR O.M.D. WHAT DO YOU RECALL FROM THIS PERIOD?

Andy McClusky; Well, for one thing it just me and a load of people nobody knew! Interestingly enough, when I finally calmed down and stopped worrying what I was going to do “Sailing On The Seven Seas” was a classic example of O.M.D. doing what they do best which was we weren’t worrying about what sells, not worrying about what’s in the charts just doing something that felt intuitive and coming up with a mad idea just like writing songs about aeroplanes that drop atom bombs and what have you and basically just going for it. That song was just a mad idea that worked. I think, ultimately, that was what made that song work. It wasn’t trying to sound like anybody or anything else I just did it cos I liked the idea and the sound of it and it really took off.

HOW DID GARY NUMAN COME BACK IN TO THE PICTURE IN 1993?

Andy McClusky; We had a girl called Kim Hilton that worked for our management in Britain who used to go out with Kipper, Gary’s then guitarist. She said to Virgin that her ex boyfriend was touring with Gary Numan. So we just said “Wouldn’t it be funny if Gary supported us fourteen years after we supported him!” The question was asked and to our surprise he said “Yeah, I’ll do it.” It was quite surreal, because this time O.M.D. was the headline act and Gary was supporting us. I really enjoyed the tour; I made a point of trying to catch Gary’s set almost every night when I had the opportunity. I think it worked really well. I think that the audience that would’ve normally come to see us would also be interested to see Gary and don’t forget that Gary has always had a very loyal hardcore fan base with him that would always come to see him. So there would be a section of the audience that had come to see Gary Numan and then there would be our audience who would watch him because they obviously remembered him from the early ‘80’s.

WHAT DO YOU NOW THINK ABOUT THE WHOLE SYNTHERSISER MOVEMENT FROM THE EARLY ‘80’S?

Andy McClusky; I think obviously if you look at the history of popular music there was certainly something there at the end of the late ‘70’s that was clearly a brand new sound. Those were the days when kids grew up and said “I’m interested in music but I want to do something different.” So I suppose we were lucky that rock/ pop music was still a fairly young art-form. There were still certain things that you could and couldn’t do. There were still some gaps in terms of musical styles. When I started listening to music in the mid ‘70’s you had your pop and your disco and your rock and your reggae as well as the alternative stuff that Paul and I were into but there were huge gaps in the market. I mean now, its 50 odd years since Elvis and the big American rock and rock. Longer if you think back to Sinatra and that big band sound and it’s almost impossible to come up with a sound nowadays that hasn’t been done before. So I think, without blowing my own trumpet, that ourselves, Numan and some of the other people of our generation were doing something that was new and hadn’t really been done before the way we were doing it and it changed the face, globally, of popular music. Of course, everything has its time and by the end of the ‘80’s everything was moving on and the electronic thing had developed into techno and drum and bass and was more dance orientated. And then there was the backlash. The ‘90’s generation decided that they wanted to start playing guitars again. That for me was the hardest thing to come to terms with because what we tried to do was new and different and here it was being rejected by a new generation who dismissed it as old fashioned. So the ‘90’s generation chose to go forward by playing the very bloody instruments that we had rejected all those years ago!

WHAT OF THE FUTURE FOR O.M.D.? DO PLAN TO RESURRECT THE GROUP?

Andy McClusky; No, O.M.D. basically finished at the end of 1996. I decided, basically, after 18 years that it was getting impossible to know what to do, I’d had the immensely successful comeback in ’91 with the SugarTax album. That album sold millions and was a very successful album. The next two albums didn’t really do the business and I guess I was worried. I was listening to Britpop and once again I’d forgotten by own lessons like I had in the mid ‘80’s. I was once again listening to what was around thinking “Oh, should I sound like this or should I sound like that.” Instead of just doing my own thing I spent three years making an album called Universal that came out in ‘96 and that died a horrible death. The record company didn’t prioritise it and I thought “I’ve just spent three years doing that.” I wrote a song called “Walking On The Milky Way” which was as good as I could write as a song and Radio One wouldn’t play it because of the perception of the band. Woolworth’s wouldn’t stock it because Radio One wouldn’t play it and I just thought “I’m banging my head against a brick wall here.” So I stopped. I’m glad I stopped and I’m proud of what we did, I think we did some very good stuff and we did some stuff that, perhaps, in hindsight wasn’t as good as it should have been because we were allowing thing to influence our music that perhaps we shouldn’t have. But I’m pretty happy with the general score that we achieved and the general average of our musical output and I think that now, in a similar fashion to Gary, that people are now looking back and saying “Oh, you know that was an iconic, seminal band of an era and what they did was important in the musical historical time line.” Of course, now things have gone full circle with the rise of electro and I’m forever being asked to do those “Here And Now” tours.

HOW DO FEEL ABOUT THOSE KINDS OF TOURS?

Andy McClusky; I’ve very mixed feelings. However, from an audience point of view I can understand why it’s a good night out. You get to see half a dozen acts that you remember from when you were young, they’re all playing their hit singles so you go and see two and half hours of hit singles that remind you of when you were young and when you danced around when you were sixteen or eighteen years old and basically you have a blast. But from an artist point of view, it’s not going to resurrect your career, you’re not going to sell any albums so I don’t really want to do that unless I desperately have to and at the moment I don’t desperately have to. It’s rather like Groundhog Day. Going out and being the person I was twenty years ago singing the same songs I sang twenty years ago? I know your Sinatra’s and so on carried on for decades after singing everybody’s favourite songs and people went to see them and fair-play, I can understand them, it’s a living and it can be a decent living. I’m just glad that I stopped. I’m glad that I did Atomic Kitten and I’m glad that I’m working with new artists now. I’m not saying that I will never go out again on the road again, just for a bit of fun as O.M.D. but right now I just don’t see the point of trying to carry on as O.M.D. because basically we had our day. We didn’t survive like U2, I mean, U2 carried on making records and for whatever reason still managed to have relevance even beyond their own original era and not many other groups have. So I don’t want to go out of the road and sell a couple of thousand records and play to a few hundred people. I also don’t want to become every other Christmas kind of pantomime tour. I understand why people do it and I understand that some people just love performing and perhaps more importantly some people I think just need the money quite frankly.

IF A TV AD CAME ALONG WOULD WE CONSIDER THAT?

Andy McClusky; I constantly get asked for songs to go on adverts, films and compilation albums and I almost invariably say yes to them all. There was a very successful shoe advert. Clarke’s shoes did “shoes for boys” that had lights in the soles and they used “Electricity” for their ad. And although for a time people raved about the band and the song I think it would be very short sighted to think that an advert is going to re-launch a career. Basically bands belong in a certain time frame and then you grow up and your audience grow up and realistically you’ve got to keep going forward. I would still, bottom line, if I could wave a magic wand, still like to be in O.M.D. I would still like to be writing a new album every couple of years and have a hit and do top of the pops and feel like the old days. But in reality, rather like a football player, you get to a certain age and you’ve just got to hang up your boots and go into coaching and that is what I have done. 

I WISH YOU WELL ANDY AND THANK YOU VERY MUCH

Who would have thought that 25 years later I would still be talking about O.M.D. a band that was basically a hobby that got completely out of hand. It been nice to have been reminded about some nice memories.