The biggest challenge was being separated from OMD co-founder Paul Humphreys, who was on lockdown in France. “I found myself in this room,” he says, of his home-based studio. “This is my programming room at home, and I just went and fired up the computer and said, ‘All right, Andrew, you’re totally bored. There’s nothing else to do. You can’t go out. You better start doing music.’”is an edgy, powerful, electro-pop triumph – fulfilling all your house/techno/EDM dreams.
For a start, John Hughes was obviously an anglophile when it came to his music choices for his films and I have a theory about this. If you think about John Hughes’ what they call Brat Pack movies, all the kids who are the stars of the movies, the storyline always revolves around people who were outsiders. They weren’t the cheerleaders. They weren’t the jocks. They weren’t the popular, pretty people. They were the weirdos and the misfits.
Yes, of course, we’ll studio in LA. We’ve hired in some equipment. Our engineer, Tom Lord-Alge, had flown over from New York because he was going to do the mix with us. We just sat down. For the first time in our lives, we sat at a piano because we had none of our equipment. Paul started playing chords, and I started writing lyrics. It was like old Tin Pan Alley-style of songwriting. It was nuts. By the end of the day, we got in Fairlight computer equipment. We’d laid down the track.
We play it live in the States, and everybody goes nuts for it, but nobody bought it because it was pulled off the radio and out comes “If You Leave.” The next thing we know, it’s everywhere. I can remember driving around LA and going, “Oh, it’s on that station. Oh, it’s on that station. We never got played on that station before. It’s on four radio stations simultaneously. Wow, I think this could be a hit.” premiere. We got in the limo.
We just got lucky. Normally, not everything you do is gold, and nine out of 10 times, you’ll make a dog’s dinner out of trying to do something in one day. We have this knack of doing things that can be quite emotional, quite melancholy, but soaring melancholy. It’s sad, but it’s also uplifting at the same time. We just seem to happen to do that.