OMD

Royal Albert Hall, London

Rating:

Michael Bublé                                           Higher                                         Out Friday

Rating:

Figures lurk on a darkened stage. An industrial coastal landscape, festooned with lights, floats by on the screens behind. Machine-made music swells, stately and futuristic with an electronic pulse. 

Hang on. Someone scurries from the wings. He fiddles with something. The second synth comes in.

‘Welcome to the show, Martin,’ says Andy McCluskey to Martin Cooper, owner of the faulty instrument. ‘We’ve switched you on. What a great start.’

Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark always did somehow struggle to be cool, though they got the hard stuff right. British synth-pop pioneers, they graced the early 1980s with gleaming, yearning electronic music, like a Kraftwerk from the Wirral.

But where comparable acts ascended to superstar status, OMD ebbed away before emerging as hitmakers for Atomic Kitten.

But now they’re playing the first of two nights in a crowded Royal Albert Hall, with the 1980s eponymous debut album as a focal point. It’s a solid base, yielding invigoratingly bleepy post-punk nuggets Electricity, Messages and, for the first time in 38 years, anxious closer Pretending To See The Future.

The tunes convey a poise and grace that their sixtysomething composers sometimes can’t quite match. McCluskey alternates between a bass guitar and body-slapping, arm-cartwheeling dancing. 

Co-founder Paul Humphreys, mostly stationed smilingly at back-right, claims the stage to deliver a cheery (Forever) Live And Die, and also gets the night’s prettiest moment in Souvenir.

Otherwise, opener Stanlow drifts and glimmers, and Enola Gay, an anti-bomb song sung at a time of a renewed nuclear threat, remains the definitive synth-pop tune, crystalline and giddily heartbroken.

For all Canadian charmer Michael Bublé’s superstar credentials, it’s an unusual quirk of his career that his bestselling album is the 2011 Christmas one. Higher might not change that, but it’s a quality production, from the gold-monogrammed road on the cover to the smart coup of enlisting Paul McCartney as guest producer for My Valentine.

Elsewhere there’s a swish through Dylan’s Make You Feel My Love, a duet on Crazy with the song’s composer Willie Nelson and a mixture of jazzy standards and smooth originals.

One of the latter, Mother, is a thoughtful reminder that March 27 is coming up fast, but then every tune here, without exception, patiently and lovingly makes the case that Bublé remains the world’s premier fantasy boyfriend/son – delete as appropriate.