- ORCHESTRAL MANOEUVRES IN THE DARK Junk Culture (Virgin)
- Week Ending 16th June 1984 (For 1 Week)
- Total Weeks On The Top 30 – 25
The 4th album to take the #1 spot on my chart was a first in itself, having climbed to the summit after 6 weeks on the Top 30. Originally released on April 30th 1984, along with other notable new albums by The Cure and Echo & The Bunnymen (if only I’d been as tuned into music back then, what a selection that would have been for me), Junk Culture experienced a bounce in June from the success of its second single Talking Loud And Clear.
An Our Price in the South-East, circa Spring 1984 (the new release racks at the front have copies of Ocean Rain and The Top, so quite possibly this photo dates from the same week as Junk Culture appeared on the racks.
The album has already been covered in some detail here on afdpj, with the Don’t Throw It Away feature going into the history of the record, its reception and how some quite typically OMD-esque demo material ended up sounding very different by the time Junk Culture was completed. Back in 1984, I was blissfully unaware of most of this, other than recognising its first two singles were a little perkier than the ones I remembered from 1980/81. But then a lot of music by well-known acts was experiencing a similar transformation in 1984.
Initial copies of the LP (including the copy I bought from WH Smiths in June 1984) came with a free, one sided 7″ single. Remember folks, only the A-side has any music on it. If you flip it over, DO NOT ATTEMPT TO PLAY THIS SIDE.
By now, I actually owned half of my current Top 10 albums, so my collection was slowly building although we’re still some way off from being able to keep up with (and afford) very many of the new releases every week. Junk Culture‘s reign was curtailed by a resurgent Human’s Lib the following week, but managed to stay on my chart for 6 months.
Ummm, Andy? I think we’re stuffed…
Amazingly few discotheques provide jukeboxes 