One half of Onetwo is Paul Humpreys, who is also one half, and sometimes one quarter, of OMD, who began their life in the mid1970s as Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark, an exotic low tech Liverpool experiment in computer generated pop influenced by Kraftwerk and Neu! Their first single, Electricity, a manifesto made out of melody and rhythm about their serious intent to make wired pop with a weird drive, was released on the Factory label of Manchester, with a sleeve designed by Peter Saville that contained ideas about cool, mystery and post-punk secretive marketing that would influence Saville’s work with Joy Division and New Order. Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark tested, approved and distributed various ideas about the potential of electronic pop in ways that made them one of the key groups in the history of electronic pop music, alongside the Human League, Cabaret Voltaire and The Normal. OMD took sparky, warped and intensely entertaining electronic pop music into the British pop charts, and then all around the world, even into America. It cannot be underestimated how remarkable it was to see and hear such an individual group becoming a sort of pop art post punk Pink Floyd without doing the obvious or exploiting standard pop cliches. Nearly 40 years later, OMD still exist, and still wondering about the future, and what happens after the future.

One half of Onetwo is Claudia Brücken, of Düsseldorf, home to Kraftwerk, without whom etc etc. This helps make Onetwo a ghostly hint of what OMD might have been like with a female singer, as well as making Onetwo a ghostly hint of what Propaganda might have sounded like if they had been produced by OMD. Onetwo released a collection of five songs called Item and an album called Instead. Instead sounds plausible as a legitimate follow up to both Propaganda’s masterpiece A Secret Wish and classic OMD albums including Dazzle Ships, Architecture and Morality and Organisation – we would say that, but on the other hand, they all do seem to be part of the same exciting story, and the albums combine to form a soundtrack to the same series of movies, imaginary movies which cover a history of questing, liberated post war activity amongst those who had the sensibility of artists but decided to make pop music, and to make this pop music using machines.

Onetwo have supported Erasure and the Human League on various tours. They are currently working on new music, the follow up to Instead, with a working title The Origins of Artificial Intelligence. It will be released in the future.