'I was very positive about the subject! I didn't expect someone like Monsanto to come along and say, 'Fuck it, we can make money out of cross-pollination.'' For starters, the first single was called Genetic Engineering. It wasn't as though OMD wrote conventional love songs to start with - Enola Gay was famously about Hiroshima, Stanlow about a power station - yet Dazzle Ships took off what McCluskey calls 'the sweet wrapper'. So when we sold 3m albums and the world didn't change, we were scared.' And somehow we believed that would change the world, the way people think. The music we made had to be interesting and different. 'It was the naive confidence of youth, the idea that music is that important. 'It sounds strange, I know, but we had been trying to change the world,' says McCluskey. Wait until you hear the next single - it's our Mull of Kintyre.' Maid of Orleans duly became another huge hit in the UK, and Germany's best-selling single of 1982. When Joan of Arc got rave reviews ahead of the album's release, McCluskey told Smash Hits: 'That's nothing.
Souvenir was first out of the block and made No 3.
Architecture and Morality, OMD's third album, had been a monster hit following its release in 1981, with any number of potential singles.
