Speaking to the ETV show Ringvaade suvel, the band's singer and co-founder Andy McCluskey said he is looking forward to the Tallinn concert. The band last performed in Estonia in 2020, and has been in existence around half a century, becoming prominent in their home country at the beginning of the 1980s. OMD also had a huge following in Estonia almost from the outset, something which the weight of Soviet oppression could do little to squelch.

It's an honor to talk to you because I have to give you a quick personal story – I grew up as a teenager listening to OMD and it was behind the Iron Curtain, during the Soviet era so all the Western music was like a symbol freedom for me. So for me it's actually incredible to sit down and talk to you. You're going to be back in Estonia in August. What do you remember from your last gig, and what kind of memories do you have?

You're always a bit nervous when you play in a new country, because you think how many of these people have ever seen us before? Probably not many, so they don't know what to expect, and we don't know what to expect from them. Having played once, and remembering the concert was great, I'm looking forward to August 29th.

There is kind of a unique bond between OMD and the fans of Eastern Europe. Why do you think your music resonated so deeply with the people from our neck of the woods?

One of these things perhaps I've always thought about our music is that most of our songs, particularly in the early days, the chorus was not words, it was a melody, so you didn't have to speak English to sing along with OMD. Maybe that's it. Since the end of the Cold War, we'd been able to come and play in some of the countries that we couldn't play in in the 1980s.

Unfortunately with that we have made a bunch of bootleg copies of your albums and you never got royalties from that – sorry about that!

It's ok. You're forgiven, just tell everybody to buy a ticket and come and see the gig [Laughs].

What about the name Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, it's quite a mouthful and it's a strange name for a pop band. What's the story behind that?

Well we weren't supposed to be a pop band: Paul [Humphreys] and I were writing music from when we were 16 years old, and frankly even our best friends hated it. So we finally dared, in 1978, almost 48 years ago, we finally dared to go on stage and play our songs.

What we didn't realize was we were actually writing very pop melodies, but wrapped in experimental ideas, and so the name of the band just came from – I used to write things on my bedroom wall, and we decided to do this one-off concert, we just thought well we need a weird name, as it was a weird idea, you know, two guys with a tape recorder playing songs that their friends don't even like [Laughs].

You guys kind of swam against the current, with a different style - even though you had some synth bands starting at the time as well.

I think the first two British synth bands that started were Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and the Human League, and it was before the internet, so we didn't know the Human League were there, and they didn't know that we were there; I think both of us had found our alternative music just before punk, because I got into German music in 1975 with bands like Kraftwerk and La Düsseldorf and Neu, and so that was my alternative. The good thing about punk was that there were lots of new clubs opened up all around Britain, and they had a policy of letting anybody come and play, so we didn't have to be punk – we could play our synthesizers and take a tape recorder.

But yeah it was pretty different at the time, we were definitely not a punk band.

What was crazy was that we started in '78, the Human League started just a bit before us, and neither of us I think thought we were ever going to be pop groups – we were just making our music, it was our hobby really. But suddenly when Gary Numan had hits, then everybody was talking about electronic music, and there was more and more and more electronic music and suddenly something that seemed a crazy idea in 1978 was the new international pop music in 1980.

I read about how much guys you have been influencing different styles of music, it's pretty amazing how many different bands have named the influence by you guys. I can understand the electronic music – Moby's going to be in Estonia as well. But then the Red Hot Chili Peppers have mentioned you, U2, and the craziest for me would be ZZ Top – totally different style and everything.

ZZ Top is my favorite one, and it's true – one of the first TV shows we ever did in England was at the beginning of 1980, we did a program called the "Old Grey Whistle Test", and they have live bands; we were live in the studio, ZZ Top were live in the studio, and we were all like 19 and 20, and thought we were the new thing, and we thought they were old-fashioned, beardy Texas blues rockers and we didn't want anything to do with them, but they loved us. We didn't know this, but years later someone said 'I was reading a book about ZZ Top and they credit you with helping them go electronic, to make the Eliminator album which is the biggest album they ever made, and they used drum machines and synthesizers, and also the way I move with my bass guitar, swinging the bass guitar, they copied that in the videos, and years later in the 1990s I got into a lift in a hotel in Paris with Billy Gibbons, and I went '"hey Bill I'm Andy from Orchestral Manoeuvres," and he was "Hey Dustin, this is the guy that gave us the move we ripped off," so I heard it from Billy's mouth – they did copy OMD; can you believe that?!

You've built such a massive legacy from the 1980s. When you decided to get together, did you feel any pressure writing any new material to live up to this iconic OMD reputation of the eighties.

The first thing was really just to play live and have fun and see if people wanted to watch us play live again, and it's been great – you know, people have been really coming to see us, and they have enjoyed the gigs and in fact our live audience now is probably bigger than it was 40 years ago. But after two years, we were kinda like "OK is this it now, we're just going to play the old songs over and over again. Are we basically just a tribute band to ourselves?" And that's when we decided to do the crazy, stupid thing and write some new music; we're going to work hard on it and make it good, and actually I think the four albums that we've made in the last 17 years, people have been saying that they're actually as good as the albums from the early 80s. The last one got to number two in the U.K. – that woman Taylor Swift stopped us from being number one [laughs].

Your own personal influences – who have been the main idols for your music?

When I was a kid there was not much music I liked to be honest. It was the Düsseldorf bands, Kraftwerk and Neu, David Bowie, Roxy Music and Brian Eno, and the Velvet Underground, and that was it. I really didn't listen to anything else than that. Those were the people that influenced me, and I still listen to that music. The music you listen to on your journey from childhood to adulthood, the first part of your life where you grow into being an adult, that music becomes a soundtrack to your life forever.

OMD are appearing at the Birgitta Convent ruins (Pirita Klooster) on Saturday, August 29.

The original "Ringvaade suvel" segment is below.

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