OMD were always the most reasonable of electropoppers, and much of their eponymous 1980 debut album resembles a sixth-form music project with songs ranging from the endearingly daft (“Red Frame/White Light”) to the accidentally profound (“Messages”). Organisation, released six months later, is what they turned into after they had listened to Joy Division; few hit singles have been as darkly ironic as “Enola Gay”. But 1981’s Architecture And Morality was a commercial and artistic peak, a luxuriously bleak collage of avant-garde lullabies (“Souvenir”) and proto-ambient soundscapes (“Sealand”) culminating in the end of the world (“Georgia”). How the hell did singer Andy McCluskey end up inventing Atomic Kitten?
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