Off I go to see Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark at Sydney’s Enmore Theater. No. You can’t come. “Off I go” was a rhetorical flourish. I am not going anywhere. I already went and came back and the show already happened and is over…What, you’re already halfway there? Walking? In the rain? How inconvenient.
Question: What makes live music worth experiencing? Versus, say, listening to a better-recorded version of those same songs in your living room along with enticements as “you can change the volume to whatever you like” and “if you lustfully hurl your underwear in the direction of the singer’s voice you can retrieve and wear it afterward?”
Maybe it’s the energy. Maybe it’s the risk. You do not know what will happen at a live concert. You suspect and hope that a musical artist will play some songs, but even that is in the future, undecided and uncertain. Maybe they’ll walk onstage and shoot themselves in the head. Or you in the head. Maybe they’ll declare their newfound allegiance to the British National Party or show off pictures of themselves as AI-generated anime moe girls. The futures massed before us are legion and dark. Swifties get scalped for overprice tickets, but what they’re really paying for is knowledge.
Nothing so dramatic happened at 1,600-capacity Enmore Theater on February the 16th (where OMD played their second show of a two-night run). Instead, the risks I faced were of a more mundane stripe:
I was told my “seating” is in the stalls at row 0 in “number 6”. I do not know what any of this means. As I walk in, I see six doors marked 1 to 6, and 6 is obstructed. I am told that I need to go through door 2 to get to “number 6”, which is logical. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that.
I stood near the door, which was a mistake, as all night long people kept coming and going and I had to constantly side-eye the door for incoming traffic.
The fiftieth time I checked the door, a young woman standing between me and it glared at me, eyes full of steel, and pointedly walked away. I realized later that she probably thought I was trying to stare down the front of her blouse.
I stood behind a 6’6 man who was constantly coughing and sneezing.
In all, I would liken my experience to the Holocaust.
People will say I am overdramatizing, but I’m sure you’ll agree that my experience had chilling parallels with, say, Auschwitz. I rode a train. I was stamped on the wrist with a number. I was herded like cattle into an area. I was exposed to typhoid. I am currently writing a blog post that is sort of like a diary. I had to listen to an 80s British synthpop band. Really, the Holocaust similarities just keep on coming. I am a survivor. I beheld Eli Wiesel’s night firsthand.
Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark were sensational live. It was their first Australian tour since (I believe) the mid-80s. Singer Andy McClusky was six weeks removed from throat cancer. They filled the Enmore like an overflowing chalice with sound for two hours. Luminous rivers of sound.
This may not be the last time they set foot on Australia’s beaches (that part is undecided), but they absolutely played like it was.
Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark
…are an experimental electronic synthpop group from Merseyside (est 1978) by primary school friends Paul Humphreys and Andy McCluskey.
Their music is cold, austere, and history-haunted. Whereas a synthpop band like Tears for Fears is markedly internal (dealing with pain and mental illness), OMD’s most famous material is overtly external, dealing in world affairs and using them as metaphors for concerns of the heart.
They wrote songs about antiquated technology—telegraphs, dynamos, and steam locomotives. When they get touchy feely about a girl, it’s generally mediated through some cultural figure, like Joan of Arc, or Nicola Tesla, or Louise Brooks. Their album covers tend to be minimal, fussy pieces of Vorticist art. You get the sense that world culture could have stopped in 1940 and OMD’s entire career could still have happened.
The track their career launchpadded off—the John Peel-boosted “Electricity”—picks at social waste and overconsumption. But they had no solutions. They were more historians than sloganeers. They were not a particularly political band, unless in the sense that existence is political. “Enola Gay” is about whether a mother should feel proud of her Little Boy. The song does not take a strong stand on the issue. The man who flew the plain was told that if he did not drop the bomb, a ground invasion would kill five million surplus people. Was this ever true? It’s unclear. A trolley problem where the train and tracks are shrouded in fog. But the bomb still fell.
Musically, their early albums have an appealing lightness and lack of substance. They wisp. They drift. Even a raging pop monster like “Enola Gay” sounds like it was transmitted from some far-away station in some bleak battle-zone, corrupted and distorted by the huge gulphs of air it’s winging through. A track like “The Messerschmidt Twins” almost feels risky to listen to—like the song will break like a Seville vase if you do.
The defining OMD album, Architecture and Morality, has a lovely haunted fragility, full of scratches and dirt and swirls of Mellotron ambience. It’s big—with conceptual dance pieces and 3/4 waltz and lavish experiments—yet also very small. The kick drum remains as an anchor to postmodernism, and sometimes it seems to be thumping alone, a heartbeat with nothing to beat against. Only the dark.
A band as frail as OMD has the disadvantage that they can easily be blown over by dominant market trends. German bands like Kraftwerk were their defining influence in the 70s. Tracking forward through their discography, you can see various trends come and go. There’s the detuned snare sound of Bowie’s Low is replaced by the massive noisegated crash of imperial-period Duran Duran. Fairlight CMI synthesizer appear in their middle years (when they enjoyed a short-lived commercial breakthrough in the US). They doggedly kept the “Glitter beat” in service well after its sell-by date on tracks like “Sailing the Seven Seas”. Then, in their later years, they lost identity, lost popularity, and lost their way.
At their biggest they were successful, but not too successful. Their label joked that they were band that “sold gold and returned platinum”—referring to unsold copies of their experimental Dazzle Ships album that were returned from retailers. They never fit in. Their early albums would have sounded very commercial to any cluey fan of German space rock. They were a bit too energetic, muscular, and working-class to pull off the Spandau Ballet-style sophisti-pop they tried later. In a shabby, genteel way, they wear outsider status well.
McCluskey and Humphreys have a kind of “Matt Parker and Trey Stone” relationship. Most of the famous OMD songs were written by McCluskey. He is a far more present member of the band, performing for the press and falooting around on stage (while Humphreys tends to stay behind his wall of synthesizers). But the albums released after Humphreys quit in the 90s are universally seen as the band’s worst. Whatever he does, it seems incredibly important that he remain in OMD.
The Show
I got there at about 7:30pm.
The opening band, The Underground Lovers (Moda Discoteca), was half-finished with their set. They seemed like a loud psychedelic dance group, projecting freaked-out fuzz over the Enmore. The guitarist had an Orange amplifier. No doubt there was a Boss HM2 pedal or two on stage. I did not form an opinion on them one way or the other.
Then OMD took the stage.
After the pre-recorded track “Evolution Of Species”, they took the stage to thunderous applause, then launched into “Anthropocene”, the lead track to their new album Bauhaus Staircase.
Andy McClusky bounced around on stage in fine, effervescent form. He called out a man in the front row who wore a Fender bass T-shirt and was (apparently) miming along to the bass parts to every song. He exchanged banter with Paul Humphries. He made us wave our hands. He started the wrong song and then laughed about it.
Over two hours, we got through an enormous amount of OMD’s back catalog (certainly, most of the parts that are seen as good). The one omission was Dazzle Ships, which wasn’t a glaring omission. It has its fans, but it’s not full of songs the proverbial mailman whistles. It would have been nice to hear “Telegram” though.
This was my chance to hear classics like “Secret” and “So In Love” in a new way – loose, dreamy pieces took on a new weight and life when they reverberated against 1,600 bodies, backed by loud modern kick drums. Fluttery weightless birds reborn as huge phoenixes. “Enola Gay” always seemed a bit depthless on record but landed like a bomb live.
The tracks off Junk Culture remained loud and gaudy. “Tesla Girls” is one of the band’s great songs, whether live or dead. Just an incredible workhorse of a dance track. A song like “Locomotion” never really clicked for me when experienced in .mp3 form, but made a lot more sense with the crowd singing along.
The “Joan of Arc” / “Joan of Arc (Maid of Orleans)” duology is one of my favorite songs, and the canonical OMD track for me. It was wonderful to hear it live. McCluskey is an atheist but effortlessly conjured a kind of suffusive religious awe.
Although the band was obviously playing to a heavy backing track, they do have live drums. The band’s most famous drummer, Malcolm Holmes, is sadly not in touring condition a the moment. In his place was Stuart Kershaw, playing the (often surprisingly strenuous) drum parts. Show-closer “Electricity” has a very quick eighth-note hi-hat beat—his wrist was whipping so fast it blurred into a solid streak of light under the stage lights.
They even dug a track or two out of the fraught Humphriesless period. “Sailing the Seven Seas” was pitched a bit high for McClusky’s throat, and he asked for the crowd to sing loudly to the chorus. They didn’t do “Walking on the Milky Way”, which famously killed the band. McClusky pulled out all the stops writing it, and when it failed to make a commercial impression he took it as a sign that the band was now truly finished. Within a few years, he was Svengali’ing a girl group.
They played quite a few tracks from their new album, Bauhaus Staircase. “Anthropocene”. “Verushka”. “Look at You Now”. “Pandora’s Box.” I have to be honest: have not listened to this album. The song did not make an impression, but maybe for the same reason The Underground Lovers also didn’t: because I lacked a context for it. Opinion to come.
After a three-song encore, we left. I immediately reaped the reward. I rode the train back. I thought about what I had seen. I do not expect to see OMD again, and if I do, it may not have all of the same members I saw tonight. They’ve lost their drummer. Who knows who’s next?
The screen behind them played a selection of music videos and other assorted footage. They had stacks of synthesizers and samplers with them on stage—at one point Humphries had to explain to McClusky how to work some bit of signaling or patching. The band is manna to the “40-60 year old audio engineer demographic”. Every time the lights swept out over the crowd, hundreds of bald middle-aged scalps gleamed.
Despite McCluskey’s infinite reserves of energy, the band also seemed very old. Hunched over their synths, the effect was weirdly poignant: like withered old men, sucked of vitality by terrifying mountains of silicon that were lifeless but also ageless. But they were no older than a good whack of their audience, and the rest will get there in time.
Maybe this is where the interest in history comes through. At the end of the day, the only way to escape death is to flow out of your body and into the books, the cenotaphs, the records. Into an afterlife that is a date and a footnote. Heaven knows the recipe.
I read Stephen King’s Lisey’s Story when I was young. I didn’t get much out of it. The incessant baby-talk (“smucking”, “bad gunky”) felt stickily tiresome, like wading through a saliva-splattered ballpit. The pacing was languid; the plot mushy and oversentimental. It felt like a personal work written for Tabitha Spruce King, with me as an outsider, unwanted and begrudged, sitting at their table and being resented for it.
I read it again now and enjoyed it more. It’s not as inaccessible as I thought. I can better see what King was trying to do. It takes themes he explored at thirty, and lets the (different, dimmer) light of seventy gleam over their cracks and hollows.
The plot basically combines Misery (one of his more successful books) with Rose Madder (one of his less successful). From Misery, we get the idea of an psychopath fan who’s obsessed with a famous writer. The twist here is that the famous writer (Scott Landon) is already dead, and the stalker’s rage and entitlement settles on his bereaved widow, Lisey. That adds an interesting dynamic. In Misery, Paul Sheldon at least had some power. He’s the only one who can write the Misery Chastain romance stories his captor loves, so she’s forced to keep him alive. Lisey Landon, on the other hand, is not her husband. She’s just a person who shared a bed with him. Through the world’s eyes, she’s a person-shaped mirror, a window to her husband. Mirrors cannot create; only reflect. They also cannot die; only be smashed. This heightens Lisey’s victimhood: her husband’s fans and enemies grow obsessed with her, but never actually regard her as a person.
From Rose Madder, he takes the idea of an magickal dreamworld that can be accessed using chintzy artifacts. The otherworldly land of Booya Moon (which Scott introduced Lisey her to while he was alive) is useful. Injuries heal swiftly. It might also be a good place to hide a dead man, or lose an unwanted living one. But it’s ultimately a dangerous place to be. This is because of what lives there: the long boy.
The long boy is one of King’s better inventions; one of his most direct forays (along with “N”) into Lovecraft-style horror.
It is not bound by the same rules as most of the things in Booya Moon. It can reach into the real world somehow (using glass surfaces and mirrors as portals). It has marked Scott as its prey, and has spent a long time searching for him. Occasionally he sees its face in glass, peering around and looking for him.
In the end Scott’s thing had come back for him, anyway—that thing he had sometimes glimpsed in mirrors and waterglasses, the thing with the vast piebald side. The long boy.
Long before we see it ourselves, we hear it, in a second-hand way. Scott knows the sound it makes, and imitates this for Lisey.
Scott says, “Listen, little Lisey. I’ll make how it sounds when it looks around.” “Scott, no—you have to stop.” He pays no attention. He draws in another of those screaming breaths, purses his wet red lips in a tight O, and makes a low, incredibly nasty chuffing noise. It drives a fine spray of blood up his clenched throat and into the sweltering air.
[..]
“I could . . . call it that way,” he whispers. “It would come. You’d be . . . rid of my . . . everlasting . . . quack.” She understands that he means it, and for a moment (surely it is the power of his eyes) she believes it’s true. He will make the sound again, only a little louder, and in some other world the long boy, that lord of sleepless nights, will turn its unspeakable hungry head.
Later (or earlier, in a flashback), Scott is stranded in Booya Moon, and Lisey travels there to rescue him. Here, she briefly sees the long boy in the unflesh.
“Shhhh, Lisey,” Scott whispers. His lips are so close they tickle the cup of her ear. “For your life and mine, now you must be still.” It’s Scott’s long boy. She doesn’t need him to tell her. For years she has sensed its presence at the back of her life, like something glimpsed in a mirror from the corner of the eye. Or, say, a nasty secret hidden in the cellar. Now the secret is out. In gaps between the trees to her left, sliding at what seems like express-train speed, is a great high river of meat. It is mostly smooth, but in places there are dark spots or craters that might be moles or even, she supposes (she does not want to suppose and cannot help it) skin cancers. Her mind starts to visualize some sort of gigantic worm, then freezes. The thing over there behind those trees is no worm, and whatever it is, it’s sentient, because she can feel it thinking. Its thoughts aren’t human, aren’t in the least comprehensible, but there is a terrible fascination in their very alienness . . .
“A great high river of meat” is a vivid phrase. Stephen King should consider writing more words. He can be quite good at them.
But she finally sees the long boy’s face—or mouth, at least—near the end.
Then there’s movement from her right, not far from where Dooley is thrashing about and trying to haul himself upward. It is vast movement. For a moment the dark and fearsomely sad thoughts which inhabit her mind grow even sadder and darker; Lisey thinks they will either kill her or drive her insane. Then they shift in a slightly different direction, and as they do, the thing over there just beyond the trees also shifts. There’s the complicated sound of breaking foliage, the snapping and tearing of trees and underbrush. Then, and suddenly, it’s there. Scott’s long boy. And she understands that once you have seen the long boy, past and future become only dreams. Once you have seen the long boy, there is only, oh dear Jesus, there is only a single moment of now drawn out like an agonizing note that never ends. What she saw was an enormous plated side like cracked snakeskin. It came bulging through the trees, bending some and snapping others, seeming to pass right through a couple of the biggest. That was impossible, of course, but the impression never faded. There was no smell but there was an unpleasant sound, a chuffing, somehow gutty sound, and then its patchwork head appeared, taller than the trees and blotting out the sky. Lisey saw an eye, dead yet aware, black as wellwater and as wide as a sinkhole, peering through the foliage. She saw an opening in the meat of its vast questing blunt head and intuited that the things it took in through that vast straw of flesh did not precisely die but lived and screamed . . . lived and screamed . . . lived and screamed. She herself could not scream. She was incapable of any noise at all. She took two steps backward, steps that felt weirdly calm to her. The spade, its silver bowl once more dripping with the blood of an insane man, fell from her fingers and landed on the path. She thought, It sees me . . . and my life will never truly be mine again. It won’t let it be mine. For a moment it reared, a shapeless, endless thing with patches of hair growing in random clumps from its damp and heaving slicks of flesh, its great and dully avid eye upon her. The dying pink of the day and the waxing silver glow of moonlight lit the rest of what still lay snakelike in the shrubbery.
At the end of the book, the long boy becomes aware of Lisey Landon. She starts seeing it peering in mirrors, uncoiling muddily at the bottoms of glasses, just as Scott did. (Emphasis mine)
“Looks a little like dried blood,” Mike said, and finished his iced tea. The sun, hazy and hot, ran across the surface of his glass, and for a moment an eye seemed to peer out of it at Lisey. When he set it down, she had to restrain an urge to snatch it and hide it behind the plastic pitcher with the other one. […] They both laughed. Lisey thought hers sounded almost as natural as his. She didn’t look at his glass. She didn’t think about the long boy that was now her long boy. She thought about nothing but the long boy.
Like the madman stalking her throughout the story, perhaps the long boy has marked her as a substitute for her husband. The man I truly want is dead and gone…but in his place, you’ll do.
I wonder where King got the idea for the long boy?
Worms as symbols of corruption and decay are too common to be worth discussing at any length. A mindworm or mindsnake is a more specific image, though.
Yes, the brain kind looks like a kind of worm, coiled around and around inside the skull, slippery and wet. Perhaps the metaphor extends further. In the 60s, it was actually believed that planarium worms could encode memories in their bodies, and transfer them to new bodies. In the late fifties, James McConnell of UMich conducted experiments that appeared to show that memory transfer via cannibalism was possible in planarian flatworms.
Chop a worm into three pieces. All three pieces will regrow into new worms, and each of those worms will have the same brain, including (supposedly) the same memories. Do worms store memories outside their brains, somehow? DNA and RNA are fairly informationally dense—the haploid genome of a human being encodes about ~720mb of uncompressed data—and other chemicals and proteins can also encode things. This, as I understand, is fairly well-accepted science.
McConnell apparently figured out something weirder. He used a painful electric jolt to train worms to contract their bodies upon exposure to light. Then, he chopped them to pieces, fed the body parts to cannibalistic worms called Dugesia dorotocephala…and they contracted their bodies to light, too! Confirmation of this has been slow in coming—this the type of science the replication crisis tragically stole from us.
(McConnell, by the way, has one of those all-timer Wikipedia pages. “McConnell was one of the targets of Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber. In 1985, he suffered hearing loss when a bomb, disguised as a manuscript, was opened at his house by his research assistant Nicklaus Suino.”)
King, at least, has been struck by the image of a wormlike thing that preys on the psyche and memories and trauma of its victims. Maybe there’s just something viscerally repellant about worms.
In any case, the long boy may not be a worm or a snake. The thing Lisey regards as such might just be an appendage. An adjunct to a large (perhaps vast) body, whose totality we do not see. And furthermore, that it doesn’t eat as much as capture—that its victims might still live on.
Lisey closed her own. For a moment she saw that blunt head that wasn’t a head at all but only a maw, a straw, a funnel into blackness filled with endless swirling bad-gunky. In it she still heard Jim Dooley screaming, but the sound was now thin, and mixed with other screams.
I like the long boy. It will never be as famous as Pennywise or Randall Flagg or [Insert Thinly-Veiled Metaphor for Republican Politician Here] but that’s good. The enemy of darkness is the light, and no horror creature survives too much media exposure. As the century spins on, the long boy will retain its mystery.
(Also, what happens when you chop OpenWorm into three pieces of code?)
In 2003, we enter what you’d call “late Helloween”—the Sasha Gerstner era.
It marks the point where my relationship with this band shifts from “unalloyed love” to an attitude more more careful and critical, more keenly aware of flaws. On paper, albums like 2007’s Gambling With the Devil and 2010’s Seven Sinners are really strong. They have many good parts! So why do I feel at arms’ length from them? They’re really subtly off. Something’s missing; or something’s present that shouldn’t be there. They’re made by a band that doesn’t feel like Helloween anymore.
I don’t listen to modern Helloween as much as the Walls of Jericho to Keeper II classic run, or the renaissance of Master of the Rings to The Dark Ride, but I would say I listen to their newer album harder, trying to pinpoint the source of my emotional discontent.
2003’s Rabbit Don’t Come Easy is easier to discuss. Blatantly weak, it might be the second or third crappiest Helloween album, and that’s a problem, because Chameleon safely locks up the title for first.
Many have described it as another Pink Bubbles Go Ape. Not quite. It has a stupid title, a stupid cover, emerged as a response to a lineup change, and a sense of being an inferior “we have Helloween at home” substitute. But the reason for its issues couldn’t be more different. Bubbles had a singer who didn’t want to be in a metal band and who was trying to change the band into the Beatles. Rabbit was made by the broken pieces of a band, just trying to exist, desperately still trying to be Helloween. “A band trying too hard to be themselves” is implicitly an admission that the band is no longer themselves, which is exactly the case here, as one of the most brutal lineup shifts in the band’s history had just occurred.
In 2001, guitarist Roland Grapow was fired and replaced with Freedom Call guitarist Sasha Gerstner. Drummer Uli Kusch was also fired and replaced with basically half the drummers inside the Schengen Area. Two drummers are credited on the record—Motorhead’s Mikkey Dee, and At Vance’s Mark Cross—and by the time the record came out they were working with a third drummer, Accept/UDO’s Stefan Schwarzmann. The final drummer was the (excellent) Dani Loble, who remains with the band to this day.
Caught by the chaos of lineup changes, dealing with the aftershocks of an experiment that their label hadn’t liked (2000’s The Dark Ride) Helloween overcorrected here, becoming a silly, excessive parody of themselves.
Andi Deris shoulders the bulk of the songwriting. As usual, he’s responsible for both highlights and lowlights. Grosskopf (who never really wrote much of note before then) rallies and delivers what might be the standout song. The other members just kind of futz around. Gerstner delivers some good work. Weikath has no idea what he’s doing.
“Just A Little Sign” and “The Tune” (by Deris and Weikath, respectively) are bland fast songs that wash off me like water. They’re so flowery and trite they make “All Over the Nations” look like Walls of Jericho. Just nothing Helloweeney about them at all. “Something’s growing in my pants / As she looks into my eyes”. Great lyrics to start the album off with. Where’s Mr Torture when you need him?
They also highlight a pretty questionable production job by Charlie Bauerfiend. He overproduces the fuck out of Rabbit, . The guitar tone is heavily-processed and lacks bite. The drums have a fake, digital quality that almost sounds programmed—the kick drums have the overly present, clicky character of early Sonata Arctica.
Other songs, like “Sun 4 The World” tend to be meager, uninteresting, and mired in overbearing production and excessive double-bass drumming. “Never Be A Star” was apparently written in the “Perfect Gentleman” days. Not much to say about it. It’s barely adequate as filler.
“Nothing To Say” is an overlong dad-rock song with a skank beat in the pre-chorus (?!). What the fuck? “Helloween should not play ska” is the type of thought you expect you’ll go a whole lifetime without thinking, and here Michael Weikath is inflicting it on me at the tender age of 36.
He also contributes “Back Against the Wall”: an obvious leftover from The Dark Ride sessions that makes no sense whatsoever. Angsty, dark, mallgothy. It would have been the worst song on The Dark Ride. Here, it’s just a bit below average.
Having complained about Rabbit a fair bit, is there anything good about the record? Yes. Two songs more or less redeem it on their own.
The first is “Open Your Life”. Despite the flawed production and flower metal influences, it’s amazingly catchy. Sasha Gerstner has a writing credit on it. That’s another parallel point that could be drawn with Pink Bubbles Go Ape. The best song on that album was written by the new guitarist (Roland Grapow), too.
The second is Markus Grosskopf’s “Hell Was Made In Heaven”, which has such a crushing heft and energy to it. I think I have listened to this song on its own more than the rest of the songs combined.
Most of the tracks come across as desperate and calculated, bereft of great ideas, but possessed with a burning need to be Helloween. Again, Halloween as a parody of themselves. That said, there are one or two risks here, and these bomb pretty hard. So I’m not sure what they should have done.
One of the things I’d say about Rabbit Don’t Come Easy (and nu Helloween more generally). It sounds heavily like a fan‘s conception of what Helloween should sound like. That’s not a de facto bad thing. It is, however, a dangerous thing. Fans don’t know shit. Fans want a band to freeze themselves in amber, remaining the same forever. A fan of Walls of Jericho wouldn’t have wanted Kiske to join the band. A fan of Keeper of the Seven Keys I and II wouldn’t have wanted Kiske to ever leave, not even when he was clearly poisoning things. Bands that overly pander to their fans risk becoming a nostalgia act, irrelevant and absurd to anyone who’s not a fan.
I won’t say “fuck the fans”. I will say “half-fuck the fans”. Ultimately, the band’s artistic drive should come from within, not from whatever placard-wielding contingency is making the most noise in their fan club or street team. Fans are the result of a compelling creative vision. They aren’t—and should never be mistaken for—the source of that vision. The horse must go before the cart.
