Inevitably, this did not come without its own attendant problems. They duly did exactly as people didn’t expect : partly as a counter-reaction to the exhaustive world tour and promotion chores that surrounded the last album they decided to erase the slate clean and start afresh with something totally different. The band’s original nucleus of Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys certainly felt that there was suddenly a new found pressure to deliver on the huge weight of expectation brokered by the runaway success of that preceding third album – which spawned three consecutive top 5 hits variously peaking at 3, 4 and 5 in the UK chart.Īndy was always the more forthright – and wryly humorous – of the two: saying words to the effect of ‘now that Architecture & Morality had made us into bona fide pop stars people were expecting us to turn into the next Genesis’.
Granted, any band who enjoyed massive global success with their previous breakthrough album (in this case 1981’s commercial watershed Architecture & Morality – over 3.5 million sales), would encounter the usual sort of dilemmas as to how exactly they would follow up something so universally adored and revered by fans.
These are/were just some of the adjectives deployed by confused music critics in their reviews of the waywardly strange and defiantly unorthodox fourth album by Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, Dazzle Ships, released in spring 1983 to a mixed reaction of raised and quizzical eyebrows, even from some of the fans.
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