Live Review: Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Usher Hall, Edinburgh – HeraldScotland

THE dancing started early. Second song in and Andy McCluskey began to reel around the stage, pummelling his guitar when not pummelling his chest, throwing his arms up into contorted positions and generally owning his dad moves.

Theres a secret to that, he told a busy Usher Hall. Make sure your kids arent watching when you dance.

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark returned to Edinburgh for the first time in 30 years last night to play their 1981 album Architecture and Morality, perhaps the highpoint of their back catalogue.

Age has not wearied them. Confident enough to begin with an extended version of the epic album track Sealand, they presented a buffed-up, at times beefed-up, take on an album that is now 40 years old, before launching into a greatest hits package, fronted by McCluskeys potent voice and "distinctive" moves.

It made for a compelling spectacle. Accompanied by Stuart Kershaw on drums and Martin Cooper on keyboard and saxophone, original members McCluskey and Paul Humphreys added a professional sheen to the OMD default position of esoteric subject matter allied to leftfield pop hooks.

The result could be incongruous at times. Their hit Enola Gay, a song about the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima after all, has now become a clap-along anthem. But in a way that sums up everything that was beguiling and baffling about OMD then and remains so now; the ambition for the work allied to the sugar-coated rush of their pop nous.

First time around that sugar-coating would get thicker and thicker as time went on and songs like Tesla Girls and Sailing on the Seven Seas always felt like naked assaults on the charts (though tonight the latter in particular was given an impressive refresh).

As a result, the night peaked early with the performances of the hits off Architecture and Morality (the sublime Souvenir, Joan of Arc and Maid of Orleans, prefaced by should-have-been-a-single Shes Leaving), the high watermark of the bands achievements, the moment when ambition and achievement seemed best balanced.

But in the end what you took away from the evening was the sight of two men in their sixties reliving their long-ago youth and looking like they were having the time of their lives doing so.

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Live Review: Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Usher Hall, Edinburgh - HeraldScotland