JUNK CULTURE – THE FIFTH ALBUM BY ELECTRO PIONEERS ORCHESTRAL MANOEUVRES IN THE DARK – HAS JUST BEEN REISSUED IN A TWO DISC DELUXE EDITION WHICH FEATURES MATERIAL ADDITIONAL TO THE ORIGINAL 1984 RELEASE.
In its time JUNK CULTURE followed the much-misunderstood DAZZLE SHIPS (1983) – on which the band had taken their experiments in electronica to new levels. JUNK CULTURE has often been viewed as a tipping point – a deliberately commercial album which led to the decline of the band as they played the mainstream game. While there is an element of truth in that (see hit singles TALKING LOUD AND CLEAR, LOCOMOTION and TESLA GIRLS), songwriters Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys continued to try and twist expectations of pop music on what was, perhaps, the band’s last truly great work. The title track – which opens the album – is an excursion into instrumental electro-dub fusion, and the band’s use of the (at the time) new technologies available to them led to some interesting experimentation. The new edition of JUNK CULTURE adds more of the band’s esoteric material in the form of b-sides, 12″ mixes and previously unreleased tracks from that era. In this new edition of The Mouthcast McCluskey looks back at both JUNK CULTURE and DAZZLE SHIPS, explains why OMD made “utterly utterly shit videos”, and ponders the fact that (despite selling a mind-boggling number of records worldwide) by the end of the 1980s they were a million pounds in debt to their record label…

Order the deluxe edition of JUNK CULTURE here