Thursday, October 23, 2008

My friend Walter and I have spent the last two weeks swapping e-mails of '80s music videos that have shown up on the YouTube. It has been an often embarrassing, but truly enjoyable, walk down memory lane, including videos of songs we didn't get to see on the old 24 hour Music Television channel. Here is the latest find, "Messages" by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark:

And here is Walt's response:


Very nice!

I love the good ol’ early eighties abandoned warehouses.

That would be Paul playing Andy’s bass. Interestingly, I wonder if Paul is also left handed as is the bass – he makes a pretty convincing left paw if he ain’t.

I guess Andy was too be busy being moody and the bass would have covered up that tie – I’m glad he did his side-step-in-one-place-dance towards the end though.



To explain, we both loved OMD back in the early '80s, and stuck with the band after the horror that was "If You Leave". We all went to a concert on their "Crush" Tour and got invited back to the Tour Bus to hang out with the band, so watching the video is much more personal. Andy McCluskey, singing in the video, plays the bass and Paul Humphreys plays keyboards, so we were shocked and amused to see Paul riffing out Andy's bass line. Andy and Paul were huge Kraftwerk fans - as were we - and the band's earlier work fills that same space in electronic music history between the Moog and the Emulator. Other old videos I found are their first, "Electricity" (based loosely on Kraftwerk's "Radioactivity"), the live version of "Enola Gay" from Urgh! A Music War, the Scandinavian epic that is "Maid of Orleans", and the great-tune-turned-silly-video "Telegraph". Love that YouTube!

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