#Omd full album plus#

“In fact, in typical Mal style, he seemed to be fine the day after the attack,” McCluskey adds. His doctors won’t let him but more importantly his girlfriend won’t let him.”

“He is now, fortunately, but he can’t play live any more. Afterwards it was such a shock that we didn’t want to do anything until we knew that Mal was completely alright. “Thank God the paramedics brought him back to life. “He’d been our drummer since we were kids at school and it really threw us,” Humphreys recalls. It would lead to the band contemplating their future and indeed life itself… Photo by Mark McNulty The band played Toronto in July and in 45-degree heat drummer Mal Holmes had a cardiac arrest, his heart stopping for more than three minutes. The tour to support the album was going incredibly well with sold out shows around the world, but then everything fell apart in just 180 seconds. With the release of English Electric in 2013, OMD were not just properly back, they were back in the Top 10 and seemingly nothing could stop them. “The next album was more focussed and with a certain vision – it got the engine going even more.” “ History Of Modern was just starting the engine going again and Andy and me were getting used to writing together again,” says Paul. It is always risky for an old band to make new music but the resulting record, 2010’s History Of Modern, hit the UK Top 30 album charts, an encouraging sign that sealed the reformation deal so now the fully recharged Andy and Paul started work on its follow-up, English Electric. “We were conscious of the nostalgia thing,” says Paul, “and after a year or so of being back together we thought ‘are we becoming a tribute band of ourselves’ so we decided to do the dangerous thing and make a new record…” Yet in 2006, that classic line-up reformed to play several gigs which went so well that McCluskey and Humphreys decided to record a new OMD album. “We were perceived as an 80s synth band at the height of grunge and Britpop,” he says, “so we were banging our heads against a brick wall.” McCluskey had success with singles like Sailing On The Seven Seas but begrudgingly stopped OMD completely in the mid-90s. It was a band that many thought could never take the stage again after an acrimonious break-up in 1989 that left McCluskey with the name and the other three to form The Listening Pool.

#Omd full album plus#

They’d had fantastic reviews for English Electric, their second album after the reformation of their original line-up of co-founders Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys plus band members Mal Holmes and Martin Cooper and were enjoying a world tour. In 2013, life could not have been any rosier for Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark. Four years after that, in 2017, Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys talked to Classic Pop about the realisation and meaning of being pop stars of a certain age… By Andy Jones In 2013, OMD were enjoying renewed success with the old line-up of the band, but then tragedy struck.