Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark are either :

(a) The silliest, most ridiculously-named band in the history of pop
(b) Responsible for some of the most unusual, classic synthesizer ditties ever to make the charts
(c) An enduring outifit capable of sustaining a career over 20 years, regardless of fickle trends and fashions
(d) All of the above

or...

(e) A bunch of pretentious idiots with naff haircuts, dependent on wimpy little keyboards and tinny drum machines, who ought to have been fed to the Rock'n'Roll lions at birth

Okay, so (e) is not an option here. Sorry folks.

The year is 1979. Punk is the dominant musical and cultural force in Britain. Yet a separate breed of acts would emerge, inspired by the austere technology-assisted experimentation of bands such as Kraftwerk. The original Human League line-up - before half of the band broke away to form Heaven 17 - and OMD (thank God for abbreviations) were the first really successful exponents of the genre in this country.

Fast-forward to 1988, and OMD had amassed enough singles to warrant a Best Of collection. 18 of them feature on this Greatest Hits CD - only 14 on vinyl, though that's almost an irrelevant fact now of course - with the remaining three of their 21 UK releases (up to that point) omitted.

It begins with Electricity, which never managed to grace the charts at the time. The song is, however, a perfect example of early OMD. Lyrics about energy sources (Nuclear, HEP, Solar) were set to a bustling mix of real bass guitar, synthetic rhythms and rather plinkety synths. This blueprint was repeated with Messages, their breakthrough Top 40 hit single in early 1980, but with added oomph in all departments. Messages wasn't the follow-up to Electricty, that honour going to Red Frame, White Light - a song about, yes you guessed it, a telephone box. It's one of the *missing* singles from this compilation.

The next four hits, sequenced chronologically, all made the UK Top 10...and probably rank as OMD's best-known and loved recordings.

Enola Gay, named after (and based on the story of) the US aircraft which dropped the Atom Bomb on Hiroshima after the end of World War 2, entrenched itself in the charts at the end of 1980. Driven by a pulsating bass and drum pattern, it was (and still is) a fantastically catchy tune. "This kiss you give is never ever going to fade away...." sounded at first like your typical love song lyric, and that was the entire song's masterstroke - taking a potent subject and putting a twist on it, so without closer inspection it appeared to be about nothing more explosive than a boy/girl relationship.

Souvenir was something quite different...an atmospheric, gossamer ballad sung with an endearing tentativeness by keyboardist Paul Humphreys, and not the recognised lead vocalist Andy McCluskey. Lacking an actual chorus, what it possessed instead was an achingly beautiful melodic refrain. Not until 1983's ill-fated Dazzle Ships album, would OMD's singles rely on a more traditional chorus for the main hook. Somehow, perhaps due to its suitability as a soundtrack to the anguish of teenage summer love's fallout, Souvenir shot to # 3 in the UK charts in September 1981.

More historical imagery was to follow with not one but two successive singles about Joan Of Arc. The first was an insistent slice of synth pop, replete with hand-claps and soaring power chords. Joan Of Arc (Maid Of Orleans) was a stranger beast. Atonal rumblings and dronings gave way to a bontempi-organ style waltz with what can only be described as an early 80s synthesizer's approximation of bagpipes. The Human League doing Mull Of Kintyre, possibly. Despite this, the song was simply majestic, and swiftly landed in the Top 5 of January 1982. OMD were from Liverpool, and not the Highlands of Scotland, but Andy McCluskey sounds pretty Scottish all the same...so we'll forgive them.

What would pop music be without those obligatory blips in a successful band's career? 1983 was OMD's blip. They chose to make an experimental record about Czechoslovakian Speaking Clocks and various other industrially-related topics. The tunes were often still there, but so obtuse and downright bleak was the setting that they immediately found themelseves cut adrift from the mainstream. Genetic Engeineering, an oddly compelling montage of cacophony and melody, made # 20 on their name alone, but Telegraph wasn't so lucky, falling short of the Top 40 completely. Ironic, really, since the latter was far more direct and catchy than anything they'd released since Enola Gay. Both are among the 4 *bonus* inclusions on the CD edition, with Genetic Engineering tacked on towards the end of the disc rather than slotted in between Maid Of Orleans and Telegraph.

OMD bounced back with the surprisingly flamboyant Junk Culture album in the spring of 1984. Over-compensating for their commercial misdemeanour the year before, the tone was dazzlingly bright and breezy. Three singles from the album are included on The Best Of - the calypso-flavoured, anthemic Locomotion (# 5), the hushed nursery-rhyme feel of Talking Loud & Clear (# 11) and the more orthodox OMD of Tesla Girls, which took on the topic of electrical inventions. Its conceit - exemplified by lines such as "Now and then they'll watch TV, now and then they'll speak to me..but heaven knows their recipe. Electric chairs and dynamos, dressed to kill they'e killing me" was a lightweight variation on the female personification method of lyricism employed on Enola Gay, and a fluffy one at that.

Junk Culture's fourth single, Never Turn Away, harked back to the sound of their 1981 hits, but it barely scraped into the Top 75 and doesn't even get a place among the extra 4 tracks.

America began to wake up to OMD and their peers around 1985. So In Love, the first single from that summer's Crush album, was more homogenised, and did better Stateside than in Brtian, where the band were fast becoming a fan-base act. Crush's next release - Secret - was a distant cousin of Souvenir, voiced again by Humphreys and buoyed by a charming tunefullness. It was, however, also slightly soppy. It fared no better than So In Love, settling in the lower reaches of the Top 40. A third single, the quirky La Femme Accident, failed to achieve even that. A rather clumsy 12" extended remix of La Femme Accident closes this CD, which is one of the few downsides to an excellent album.

In 1986, OMD were asked to write the love theme to the latest John Hughes movie Pretty In Pink, a guaranteed box-office smash. They came up with the pleasant but unremarkable If You Leave, which reached # 4 in the US but, tellingly, only # 48 in Britain. It was a watered-down re-write of So In Love, and signalled a slight change in musical direction.

From now on, the drums would be not only be more prominent but also completely real, and very crisp-sounding. That immaculate snare drum thwack would almost overshadow their next album, The Pacific Age. The 12" version of We Love You (the album's second single, though not a hit) stands as the apex/nadir of this approach. Needless to say, it has dated quite horribly. Forever Live & Die, on the other hand, is such a gorgeous song - Souvenir, part three to all intents and purposes - that it survives wholly intact. The escalating harmonies on its "I never know, I never know, I never know why..." chorus still sound wonderful. If all the elements of OMD's sound, from every point in their career, were fed into a computer, the end result would doubtless sound a lot like Forever Live & Die. It has all their hallmarks, pumped up with mid-80s studio production values.

A customary brand-new song (or brand-new in 1988 at any rate) - Dreaming - completed the collection. Almost unnervingly commercial, with its boppy and simplistic approach, it did thankfully still sound like OMD. It would have made an excellent closing track on the CD, too, but for some reason chronology was jettisoned on the second half of the disc and three of the four extra tracks come after it. Why put Telegraph in its correct place between the 1981 and 1984 releases, but not the others? It's a strange tactic that means the lingering memory of the CD once it's over is of elongated and disjointed 12" mixes of lesser OMD tracks.

The next ten years of OMD saw just three new studio albums, recorded after McCluskey and Humphreys split less than amicably in 1990. McCluskey won the battle to continue using the name (Humphreys and the other three main members became The Listening Pool) and enjoyed an unexpectedly well-received comeback with 1991's Top 3 single Sailing On The Seven Seas and platinum album Sugar Tax.

In 1998, Virgin Records issued an *updated* version of this Best Of album, called "The Singles Collection" with its own distinct artwork and track-listing. Sailing On The Seven Seas, Pandora's Box, Dream Of Me and Walking On The Milky Way - the new OMD's biggest hits of the 1990s - were added, at the expense of the least successful 80s tracks which had made it onto the first retrospective.

As such, this Best Of is no longer the definitive OMD collection in terms of representing their complete output. Nevertheless, it does reflect a seminal British synth-pop band at their creative peak.