Junk Culture, the fifth album from English electronic pop pioneers Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, is finally coming back to vinyl. The group is celebrating the 1984 release with its first pressing in over 35 years.
Out June 20 on UMR/Virgin, the collection has been remastered from the original ½ inch reels and cut at half speed by Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios. A pointed pivot back to pop after an era of boundary-pushing exploration, it features UK chart smashes like with “Locomotion” and “Talking Loud and Clear” and the club hit “Tesla Girls,” which appears in slightly altered form on the reissue. An edit from the Dutch studio Wisseloord, where Junk Culture was mixed, is subbed in for the original studio version.
“The final version we did for the original album was made out of the 12-inch extended version,” OMD’s Paul Humphreys explains. “For this reissue, we elected to use the Wisseloord edit version as it’s the same arrangement that we play live, and I think it’s the best one. The one on the original album goes around the piano riff twice in the intro but I think this Wisseloord edit was always the definitive version.”
Following the avant-garde experiments of 1983’s masterful but challenging Dazzle Ships, OMD sought to get back on the radio and the pop charts with Junk Culture. “We decided that we were going to take time and we were going to have some hits,” OMD’s Andy McCluskey once said. “It is the catchiest, poppiest album we’ve ever made.”
As Humphreys points out, they achieved their goal partially through a change of scenery after some sessions around the UK: “We thought getting out of Liverpool might be good, so we went to [George Martin’s] Air Studios in Montserrat. We were in this paradise setting in the Caribbean and we’d stop work at 5pm and go down to the beach where we’d hear calypso reggae bands. We got influenced by our surroundings – that’s where ‘Locomotion’ came from with the steel drums.”
Order the Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark album Junk Culture on vinyl now.
