Greetings, welcome to our Classic Album Sundays event here at the British Library. I'm Colleen Cosmo Murphy, founder of Classic Album Sundays, and it's great to see that so many of you made it. Also, greetings to the viewers that are watching us from home as well. A special announcement, don't forget there's a really good Paul McCartney songwriting display that is in the British Library Entrance Hall. It's a great exhibition. I went to see it myself, some really, really cool things in there if you want to have a look. It's there until the 13th of March. And the British Library is also celebrating its season of sound. And tonight's guests have made an indelible mark in sound. Orchestral maneuvers in the dark formed in Merseyside in 1978, and they led the way as early pioneers of British electronic music, inspiring so many different synth pop bands over the decades. Think about Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys, Moby, LCD Sound System, the XX, Robin. And they've really been recognized not only for their kind of musical experimentation, but also their great pop sensibility, which has allowed them to sell millions of records worldwide. Their sounds has endured, and OMD are still making new music. In fact, they are going to work on a new album. Their last album was 2017's The Punishment of Luxury. And ahead of their performances at the Royal Albert Hall, which they're coming up on the 14th and 15th of March, will be joined by the band's founding members to take a look at one of the greatest albums of 1981, Architecture and Morality. So first we'll have a conversation with the band about the album to give us some context. After that, we will listen to the album in its entirety, uninterrupted, on this audiophile hi-fi, featuring these great loudspeakers from Downley Sound Labs. They sound fantastic. While we do listen to the album, I ask that you keep your phones off and to refrain from conversation, and just give yourself over to the music. Just turn yourself over to the album and give the album its full attention. If you're watching from home, we also encourage you to play the album using whichever formats available to you, whichever physical format or streaming option we can't broadcast the album due to copyright reasons. Once the replay finishes, just before 9 p.m., the viewers at home can rejoin us and you'll have the opportunity to ask the band your own questions. And for the viewers at home, there's going to be a little form underneath the video box that you can put your question on and we'll try to get to as many as possible. So without further ado, please give a warm welcome to Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphries. Hello. Hello, everyone. Well gone for making it. And he just made it himself. Well, thank you so much for joining us and I know that you have so much going on right now with a tour starting in the U.S. as well. So we really appreciate you taking the time to be here with us. When we look back at this album, I like to give it a little bit of context. And I want to take a look back to what Merseyside and Liverpool were like when you started the band in 1978. If you can give us a little bit of an idea of what the kind of music scene was like back then. When the city was bleak, I would say. The city was bleak anyway. But there was a very big, vibrant music scene, you know, and it all sort of centered around Erick's club in Liverpool, you know.  You know, they're all... Which is terrifying. Yeah, playing Tekko and the Bunny Man and Teardrop Explodes and China Crisis. And was there a lot of competition between the bands? Was there friendly rivalry or was there a lot of support? It was friendly rivalry because we were all in the same boat. We were all kids. Nobody knew the music, nobody had a record deal. And it was a case of, you know, you'd be playing there and everybody would be as far back from the stage as they could get. Nobody was uncool enough to come down the fence.  You just knew they were all saying that under their breaths, you know. But it was amazing. I mean, the month that we played, we played in October 1978. And the Bunny Man and the Teardrops, they played on other Thursdays in that same month. All the first gigs. Their first ever gigs. Wow, that's incredible. Now was Roger Eagle also DJing there as well? Was he one of the DJs? He was like the owner. He was the owner. But the music that was played there by the DJs was quite eclectic, as I heard. And it really kind of influenced a lot of different bands as well. They basically, they wouldn't play anything that was popular. Right. So they played a lot of old rock and roll and rock ability that you'd never heard of. A lot of kind of underground dub reggae. And then, yeah, being the summer of 78, we were in the club and Norman Killen played Warm Leatherette by the normal. And it was life changing for us.  And so I went up and said, what is that? And that's the normal. Their English is on mute records. And so I came back to Paul and was like, literally, it was it was inspirational because it was like somebody's listening to what we're into and they've made a record. So it's like, it was a challenge. It was like, OK, maybe we should get out of my mom's back room. Which your mother was happy about. So, yeah, so that meant, OK, let's let's let's actually go and do a gig because they had this open door policy on Thursday night. But you were already into electronic music with craft work and knowing. I mean, how did you get into that? Because it wasn't it was quite simple, really. I had a record player that I built because I had an actual stereo record player, not the sort of mono down set actually, because I was a I'm a nerd. Right. So I welcome to my world. I was interested in electronics as a kid. So I built all our early instruments as well. And I built a stereo. So Andy used to go and take all this pocket money and go into Liverpool. Go to the German import section. Buy as much as he could. Come round to my house and we listen to it together. This is kind of a symbiotic relationship. I had the vinyl. He had the record down.  So she was working on a Saturday. So Saturdays. That's why we were at his house, because there was nobody that would annoy with the music. But from the night out, the neighbors that we used to really annoy. But that's wonderful. Now, your first single came out in factory in Manchester. Wasn't there a bit of a rivalry between the two cities with between Liverpool and Manchester? How was that viewed from your from the local it was difficult for us, because I mean, we were sort of a rural band. So we weren't like considered that the people from Liverpool didn't really consider. We were outside as even in Liverpool, right, the wrong side of the river. Yeah. And also, we we were horribly on cool looking.   Cut your hair. So we style yourself. So we did. So we did.  But yeah, they refused to sign us. They didn't sign us. And so we I mean, the funny thing is, many of you will probably know this story, because we thought it was always apocryphal, but we found out it was true that we finally spoke to Lindsay Reed, who was married to Tony Wilson. And apparently, yeah, we we sent in a cassette because we met him, our second ever gig, we met him at the factory. And he used to present bands on the local news. And we thought we're trying to flag on, you know, and she gets in the car and she says, oh, what's what's what's all the cassettes in the bag? Love said, I'm taking into the tip.  The people want to get on the telly. It's all it's all. And she she leared to him and oh, well, Kesterman is in the dark. That's a stranger. Put it on. He said they played the club the other week. They're rubbish and not interested. Yeah, Tony didn't really like it. That's a hit. It was electricity. That's a hit. So sign them. Is what you said. So we went, all right, love, just for you. I'll sign it. That's how you got a record deal. That is a true story. We did believe it. Fished out of the bag on the way to the tip. We got a record. It's a true story. We didn't believe it, but Lindsay came to one of our shows recently. We said, look, you've got to tell me if this is true or not. I mean, yeah, I'm Tony was very good at rewriting history. So the next week when we met him, he goes, you guys are the future of Tony. Typical Tony. Little did we know we were on the way to the tip seven days earlier, but you know. He didn't tell you that. He didn't tell us that. Well, I want to just talk quickly about your second album because obviously it's a very pertinent track to what is happening today. The organization named after Ralph Hooter and Florian Schneider's first collective before they did crack work. I mean, do you find it number one that it's kind of important to pay tribute to the people that inspired you or the people that paved the way in electronic music? Yeah, I think so.  We sort of went back to our roots on the last album. Yeah, I mean, no, we've never made it out of time. Listen, nobody creates in a vacuum. You find inspiration. And obviously, you know, Kraftwerk changed our lives. I mean, one of the things that we don't often mention enough, I think, is that the other band from Düsseldorf, Neu, were actually as influential because... That's very important. What we didn't realize was that unconsciously we were welding the two things together. We had Kraftwerk's melody and kind of ideological kind of simplicity, but we had Neu's kind of energy and emotion, and I think that the two...  We weren't doing it consciously, but I'm sure that that was an element. But I think also, I mean, if we had lots of money when we started out and we went to poor boys from working-class families, we could have bought synthesizers and probably would have sounded a lot more like Kraftwerk than actually we could because we didn't have the technology to be able to sound like Kraftwerk. So we had to use whatever we had, whatever I made, whatever we could buy from second-hand shops to try to create an electronic sound. But of course, it didn't sound at all like Kraftwerk. It sounded like OMD, so... Yeah, but it still had a polished sound. And do you think that people... Because the sonics are really great on your records. Do you think that people maybe had a misconception that you were actually a posh band, in a sense? Or did people understand that you had working-class roots? Because class being such an important thing here in Britain. I think with the incredibly pretentious name. I think a lot of people thought that maybe we were some kind of, like, you know, English lit students or something. No, it was just... I don't know how we ended up with getting such a clear vision. When we started out, when we were 16, I mean, it was very, very ambient. I mean, I had an upside-down bass guitar and he literally was cannibalising his aunt's radios for the circuit boards. For the parts, for resistors. None of their radios ever worked ever again. They wised up and they stopped lending them, didn't they? But basically, we were just making the weirdest ambient noises that just, you know...  And it was only when some friends from school were selling off a cheap Vox organ and an electric piano that that's when he started actually playing keyboards. And literally, you know, I was learning to play bass and he was learning to play keyboards as we were writing songs. And we wrote electricity when we were still 16. That's amazing. When we wrote electricity, I could barely play it. I mean, it took me eight. It's a really tough melody. Well, I think a lot of the bands... I still can't really do it. Have you seen this live? I think a lot of the bands that were your contemporaries at that time was the same thing anyway, so it was very inspirational in the sense that you didn't have to... Coming out of Prague Rock. And it was the punk sensibility as well, you know. You didn't have to play, you just had to have something to say. But you didn't want to be perceived as a punk band, did you, from the start? No, I mean, the thing is, we had actually found our alternative in 75 with the German music before punk kind of hit. We liked the punk ethos. As Paul said, it's like, you know, well, you're playing three chords and we're playing with one finger like that. It's like punk on synths, really. And the great thing was, though, that the new wave clubs gave us a place to play. Yeah. All the punk clubs opened up around the Northern Orleans.  No, there wasn't. We were all pretentious. I mean, look at the names of the bands from Liverpool, all of us completely pretentious. Fabulous names. Let's talk about the song. It's not on this album, but on organization, Anola Gray, because I think it's with the Russian invasion into the Ukraine. I think this song may be more pertinent than ever. What inspired you to write this song? Sadly, things don't seem to change. I really genuinely thought I was never going to see another war in my lifetime in Europe, so I'm very... Hopefully not a nuclear one. But, yeah, hopefully not a nuclear one. He alluded to the fact that he's a geek, I'm a geek as well. He used to build model railway scenes. I mean, the whole back...  And I had to keep soaring bits off to give us more room. Yeah, and I had an entire air fleet hanging from my bedroom wall as I used to build airfix models. And so if you're interested in aeroplanes and I was always fascinated by the, well, morality in inverted commas of warfare, that people in a time of war, the moral compass is almost 180 inverted.  And so I was just fascinated by the moral dilemma of one. If you're interested in aeroplanes and moral dilemmas of warfare, you come to an older game. I mean, and to the day he died, Colonel Paul Tibbetts, who flew the plane, believed that, you know, by killing 140,000 people, he saved 5 million. And he always believed it was the right thing to do. So that was... His moral certainty was remarkable. I don't think I could do it. I always see black and white. I see all the different sides of everything. But I haven't been in a war, so... Maybe that's what he had to do to convince himself and to not go crazy. But, you know, at least he did a nice thing. He named the plane after his lovely mom. She must have loved that, yeah. Thank you. Wonderful. That's it, you know? But also, you know, because we grew up in the 60s and 70s, and we, you know, it was very close to the Second World War, and our parents were in it. I mean, my dad was a prisoner of war. He was held in the black forest, forced to be a lumberjack for the Nazis, you know? And so my mom was a corporal in the army.  So we've always been kind of fascinated by war. That's why we have the Messerschmitt twins. That's why we have bunker soldiers. I mean, there's a kind of a theme going through a lot of our early stuff. So we're kind of getting out of all that war. We don't celebrate war, but we were fascinated by it. And yeah, we were born not long after the Second World War, which, you know, still kind of informed a lot of people's attitudes in the UK when we were kids. When you set about to record your third album as your follow-up to Organization, what would become architecture and morality? Did you have a certain kind of creative mission or any kind of thematic kind of concept that you were working to? What was in your head before you set foot into the studio with what you wanted to do? We were basically, I mean, our kind of whole reason for creating a band and being in the band was to always try to do something new and challenge ourselves and push musical boundaries. So we'd done the first album, which were songs we'd written from like the age of 16 to 19. It was kind of like Garage, Synth, Punk. Then the second album, I'm sure, was unconsciously influenced by Joy Division. It was a lot darker and more melancholy, apart from Inola Gay, although the subject matter was dark. And then when we got to architecture and morality, we were, again, we just wanted to change the sound again. That was our mission, to be different. Right, we've done that, we've done that. Now we're gonna do something else. And we didn't know where we were going, but we were just trying to always do something different. We had some new toys. We had a melaton, so we could play choirs and strings and things. Sounds that we hadn't had access to previously. That always influenced us, the technology, because the technology of synthesizers was advancing quite quickly in that time. And the synthesizers were getting cheaper and more interesting and more exciting. So we were kind of, we were getting a bit more money, so we kept buying new synths. And you're always inspired by new possibilities.  Would that inspire the lyrics and the themes as well, the actual sonics, the sounds you would get out of the melaton? The lyrics always came on top of the music. The music was written first, but I would always be researching or collecting ideas for lyrics. But I made a point, I never write down words that were going to be lyrics. I would just collect ideas and phrases and information. You know, when I did Enola Gay, when I did Joan of Arc, I went to the library, got books out and started making notes. No internet then? Yeah, no Wikipedia. I was just, you know, basically collecting information as though I was making notes to write an essay. And then we'd do some music and at some point I'd go, it merged the lyrics. Maybe I could sing that on that. Yeah. And then because you hadn't written the lyrics or got a melody or anything, then organically, the lyrics would come out of the music. I don't, just because we don't and I don't know how people do it, I have no idea how people write the words first and then put the music to it. We've never done that. It's always the other way around for us. Always the other way around. The lyric and the lead melody is quite often the last thing we write on the song. Really? Which is the thing that most people will do first.  But that's usually the last thing. Well, it's so interesting because you do, of course, everyone just said this about you and it's so evident in your music. You have one foot in, you know, Sonic and musical experimentation and the other foot is in crate pop songs. Although you do twist those conventional song structures anyways. We only do it because we don't know what we're actually doing. Well, I was wondering. We don't know what the conventional song structure is. That's funny, are you unlearning it? Or are you unlearning it? We never learned it. We never learned it. I mean, Stuart, who now plays drums for us is a, he actually went to music college and he analysed these things. He just was like, oh, do you know what? Do you know why that really works? It's because you've got just two notes in the court here and then you add the fifth when you go to the course and then the seventh and I'm like, it's like, really? Really? Oh, well, I had no idea we were doing that. It just felt right to us, you know. That's interesting. We're instinctive.  And we got kicked out of the recorder group in school with nine. So we didn't even learn to play recorder when we were kids. In fact, my mom had, she was quite proud of it actually. She had my report from the music teacher that said, Paul Humphries has no aptitude for music whatsoever. And she put it in a frame on a wall after my first top of the pot. Yeah, after you were successful. She wasn't very impressed by it to begin with. Exactly, yeah. I was in the doghouse to begin with. That's amazing. So you spent like a couple of months recording with Roger Manwearing as production. Richard Manwearing, yeah. And then you also had your own gramophone suite as well. So what were you doing in your own studio as opposed to the bigger studio manner? When we first signed a deal, it was a seven album deal.  So we thought we would never get taken up for the other six albums after the first one. So we thought, let's spend the advance on a recording studio so that when we get dropped by the label, we'll have a business. That's a smart idea. We were budgeting for failure. Budgeting for failure, yeah. So we had this great studio, which was brilliant in a way because we had a place to work that was technically really good. And so we did the bulk of all the first four albums, wasn't it, in the gramophone suite. And then we get them to a certain stage and then we go into a professional studio to finish them. Either we would rerecord, which was usually traumatic because you're so used to your demo, the new record sound difference. Or what was usually better was we had a 16-track tape machine. And when you put it onto a 24-track tape machine, they kind of panned out and you'd get eight more tracks so you could overdub and change things and add them. That worked best when we could actually use our tape and embellish it rather than have to start again. But the thing was, because there's always been two of us in the writing process, even when we were kids, we used to have to write using a tape recorder because we couldn't do everything. We only had four hands. So we would put some drums or something on the tape recorder. No, completely. This is one of the things why OMD songs, again, we didn't know the rules. It was just the practicality. They're linear because we'd just lay down four minutes, the same all the way through. And we would go, and we'd go, oh, we'll do this and then we'll do that and then we'll drop it out and then we'll change the melody. But it's always like, you know what I'm saying? It's the same four chords all the way through. Messages is one sequence that's going all the way and we just change what's going on playing with it. So we always wrote on tape.  We were learning, we were writing Bunker Soldiers. And we just had this baseline on the tape which is, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And then we'd wind it back again, da-da-da-da-da. And we were trained by, what should we do? And about five hours later, his mother came down and just went, it's a nice song, but do you know any others? Because it was just the same, wind the tape back, wind the tape back. She's very patient, my mom. Aw. But she lost her patience then. She lost her patience then. What was the mood like in the studio when you were recording that album? Are there any stories you could share? Well, it was great. Because we worked at the Manor Studios, which was Richard Branson's place that he charged us full price for. Thanks Richard. On the label, but you still charge us full price. But it was a fantastic studio because it was like we were in our own world.  And you sat at this baronial table, the video from Made of Orleans, that's the dining room at the studio. And they had a full-sized snooker table and it was just like, people making breakfast for you. And do you want something else? We'd like something else. We'll bring it into the studio. It was unbelievable. It's a totally different way of life. But we did work hard. I mean, we worked really hard. And it was, yeah, it was an amazing experience. I mean, for us because, you know, Paul said we didn't think we were going to get past the first album. So to be making a third album and having already had hits, it was like, wow, you know, we're just making this up as we go along and people are actually buying it. Great, you know, results. But we didn't have to follow anybody's rules. You know, the record, the amazing thing is the record company just left us going on. Yeah, they said, we'll do what you do. We won't interfere. You know what you're doing. We trust you, you know. Yeah, we just phone up and say, right. We didn't trust ourselves, but they trusted us. That's really great. And we, because we made records in a kind of weird way, we didn't really want a producer. So we'd done some work in a manner and Richard Mannering was the house engineer. So we said, can we just go in with Richard who will make it sound good? But we'd be in control. But we will actually produce it. Well, because we, you know, I mean, things like made of all-e-on, the bass drum we made of all-e-on is not a drum kit. It's a gigantic big military. It's just going boom, boom. And Souvenir, it's a rotatom. It's just boom. And it's like, most producers are going, no, you can't do that. You can't do that. And we were like, well. Why not? There's nobody here to say, no, we're going to do that. Yeah, that's great. So it was really, really wonderful. It was an amazing, amazing place to be, you know, working class kids to be in this mansion. And we found it a really creative atmosphere. You know, we did such good work there.  You know, we had not emptied the barrel at all.  We were allowed to make records. It was our job to write songs and play them.  So we knew we were on the right track. So we just thought, you know.  I mean, you know, the title track, Architectural Morality, you know, we made it up in the studio and we just went, right, we're going to make some noises and then.  Yeah, smash some stones and some bottles and things in the studio and just did it. It was just anything we wanted. And when we wrote Made of Orleans, it was, you know, it was too short. So we're like, we need to extend it. Well, maybe we could kind of create this sonic landscape and then the song will emerge out of it. And yeah, massive hit single, bigger selling song in Germany in 1982. And it starts with 30 seconds of distortion. Yeah. I mean, how we got played on the radio, I have no idea. We're definitely not going to play it now. It's incredible. I think a lot of DJs used to skip the intro. Did they? They kind of dropped the needle a bit further in. They only played the intro when we went in to do the interview. Is that what it was? Yeah. And then they were talking to us and I had the volume pulled out. I love the Sonics and Sealand. I mean, that one is my, my favorite song. And it reminds me, well, actually it was kind of another nod of the hat to Noi, wasn't it? Because they have a song of Sealand. That's right. But it really sounds like that kind of David Bowie low or another green world that has that kind of a feel to it. At the very end of that song, there is this kind of, it almost sounds like a train on a train track. Maybe going back to your train sets, but it's almost like a metallic kind of sound. What is that? Goodness knows what we use that. Don't remember. 40 years ago, we were making it up as we went along. I mean, this is, this is part of, you know, when we come to play songs that we haven't played for a long time, we have to go back and get the multi-tracks. Because we're looking at each other going, what did we make that sound with? I don't know. How do we do that? What is that sound? And so we actually have to sample them off the record to put them into the keyboards. So, I mean, Sealand was, there's a place in Southwest of the world, and it's called Sealand. And we'd done Standlow, which was on the other side, which is an all refinery. So Sealand, yeah, Noi song. And I like the kind of the fact that it was somewhere sort of that liminal kind of between the land and the sea. And also being a history buff and knowing that, you know, Bronze Age people used to, you know, put things into the water because it was, you know, where the gods lived, sort of between the land. So that was, we were trying to conjure that, I think. And we just created this, you know, we just, again, we just laid down a drum machine for a long time, then played the drum and that was it. And then we'd like, can we just do a bit of this and then we'll do a bit of that. And then I go, well, we've done that for three minutes. So let's do something else. And it's just, we just literally made it up as we went along. And it was, but it's a beautiful song. And we, I remember we did it with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra a few years ago. I remember going to the rehearsal, it was like a play through. And they got to the end and they did this unbelievable end on it and I was crying, beautiful. Yeah, it is, it is beautiful. Souvenir, as we should talk about, you wrote that one is one of your, one of your hits. I mean, funny enough, it was the, it was the first time that we started using choirs. And I owe it all to Dave Hughes, actually, who was in the band earlier and who was in the band Alec, I love you. Because that song wouldn't have existed without Dave because he started doing film music and he was working at studio down the road and he was recording a choir. And the choir was so good that they, he paid them for three hours, but they'd done it in two hours. So Dave said, you're not going home yet. So you're gonna sing long notes for me, all of you to do and sing several octaves of long notes as long as you can make them. And you've just recorded them. And then one early evening, I got knocked on the, I don't know why I was there by myself, but he knocked on the Grammophon Suite studio door and said, look, I've got all these tapes of these choirs and I know you can make loops of them so we can, you know, so they're endless. If you make the loops, I'll let you have a copy and you can use them and I'll take, we'll both have a copy of them if you make the loops. So we did the loops and then he went and I thought, yeah, these choirs sound really good. And so I just printed all these notes that lasted four minutes, just every track was a note. And then I just started blending these notes and then just souvenir appeared.  I was playing the mixing desk, yeah. That's an F, that's a G, that's a C. And he said, you don't know anything about music. There you are now. But you know what, it's all by ear. We do it all by ear. I mean, when we're writing together, you know, Paul's usually the one who's playing the melody and I'm sitting at the desk and he'll play a phrase and I go, I like that, but can you go, no. And I don't know what note is, I'm just hearing. Can you go, no, no, no. I like the third phrase, bring it to the second phrase and then it's completely off the top of our heads and we don't even know, I don't even know what note he's playing.  It's always been intuitive. It's just, does it feel right? Does it sound right? And then with Souvenir, you know, when I'd done the choirs, there was so sort of dense in harmonics because of all the beautiful voices. But the tune just sang itself to me, really. I could hear the tune in the choir and so it was very easy to go, I could just hear it. Wonderful. And then it was done really quite quickly, done in a day. And a big hit. And then we have writing about Joan of Arc. I mean, you said you earlier, you were a history buff and I think there's always been some kind of intellectual element to a lot of your lyrics, I would say. I don't know if you... Pseudo-intellectual. Pseudo-intellectual cap. But thank you for dropping the Pseudo. Kind of. Why Joan of Arc? I mean, this is 550 years after she passed away. Well, we taught France, didn't we? Yeah, we were touring France and the support band said, oh, this is like the Joan of Arc tour you're playing in. So when I went back to the library and... I wrote Made of Orleans first.  You can understand why I didn't think it was working at the time. So I decided to write and... I was determined I was going to have a song about Joan of Arc so I scrapped that, write another one. And in fact, the song Joan of Arc was written on the... I don't know, something like the 550th anniversary of the day she died. And I thought that was the one that was working and literally Paul and Malcolm came into the Gramophone Suite when we were packing up to go to the manor studio. We were talking about the songs that we were going to do. And yeah, I think you said what's happened to the 3-4 song. And I said, it's not working, that's why I've written the other one. And then Malcolm just went, well, if you let me play drums then I'll make it a hit. And he did and it was. Typical Malcolm. So, yeah, but typically as well it was like, again, the bass drum was played separately and then the snare drum was played separately then the floor tom was played separately and Malcolm came out, now how are you going to do that on stage? Yeah, exactly. And then the end. It was like all of that, you know. He somehow managed it. Yeah, it was just literally I was determined to have a song and we ended up with two. Why two songs about Joan of Arc? Well, because one wasn't working so I wrote the other one. But why her as a topic, I guess is the answer to the question. Do you know what? I think the more I read about her, the more I got fascinated by the difficulty of understanding because it's as if though she's mythical and also she's invested with all sorts of meaning dependent upon who you talk to. You know, there are feminists, there are nationalists, there are everybody comes in with their own agenda and will spin her because very little is really known about her definitively. So everybody can take her and spin the story to their own agenda. And so it's like the more I read the less I knew, which to me again was this grey area. I became fascinated by this kind of like, well, you know, she can be anybody I want her to be because even the historians write about her in a different way. And yeah, I mean, I'm trying to go back to when I was, you know, 21, 22 and get into my head. I was just enjoying being in this space where I was swimming in these currents of like, I want to write something about Joan of Arc and she did this, but I don't know. But again, I personalised it, you know, I wrote about as though it was somebody I knew.  They just come out and you go, that's working. And then people read into it stuff that, you know, you've pulled it out of your subconscious and you have no idea why you wrote those words. You have no idea. Subsequently, when people ask you questions about it, you know, you can't do an interview and say, well, so tell us about Joan of Arc. Well, it just seemed like a good idea. That's the end of the conversation, isn't it? You've got to come up with some kind of, like, you know, after the event legitimising of a creative process that you have no idea what you're actually doing. I mean, that's the thing I love about songwriting. You just, you know, you can go into the studio in the morning and in the evening, you've got something that wasn't there in the morning that you actually were. And if it's good, it's great. Nine times out of ten, you go home and go. That was a waste of time. Should have got the pub. Now, the album opens with the new Stone Age and that song sounds completely different than the rest of the album. It does sound a lot more... We wanted to shock people as well with that. Why did you want to shock people with the opening song? Well, to say that we were doing something different, I mean, that was our kind of... our ethos, our sort of remit was to each album to try to do something different. And it's me playing guitar on it, which is pretty shocking. Yeah. I mean, again, inspired by Brian Eno. I mean, it's kind of like scratchy. He used to call it ostrich guitar. She's like... I mean, when I'm on stage, you know, if you actually watch me playing guitar on stage the rare times I play it, it is tuned to an open E chord. I don't even have to use my fingers. I just borrow it. Just one finger. And so, you know, new Stone Age, it's just literally... It's F and A. And I have it cappowed on the F, tuned to E. So it's just... The right chords are F, F major. And then I A it. It's idiot-proof guitar play.  So... I idiot-proofed the keyboards as well. I only give them three notes to play. Somebody should put a camera behind me one time on Forever Live and Die. I've got three lights. These are the notes you play. Every other note is switched off. I've deleted it. And I still play the wrong notes. Well, they're all the right notes, just not necessarily the right audio. But the other thing about New Stone Age was it was another song. It was a song that I was writing that didn't work. And then I had this idea, and I was impatient. I was in a hurry. And I went, all right, there's this song that's got a bass drum on it just going do, do, do, do. So I said, right. Switch off all the other channels, put it into record. Do, do, do, do, do. And then, so I wrote New Stone Age, and then as I stopped playing things and came out of record, these other channels... From the previous idea. So when you listen to New Stone Age, as you get to the end, it morphs into this completely out-of-tune other song. And that's why it sounds the way it does. Because that was on the stage. We all have to kind of morph into a new song. I know, because we've just done it as well. And Martin is always like, when do I come in with that? I said, it doesn't matter. Any time you feel like it after I've stopped singing, just because it all falls apart. But again, because we liked the fact that we were doing something kind of messed up and weird, we kept it and we just went, yeah, let it all fall apart. Let it morph into a completely different key that kind of goes churns and twists. We loved it. And it messed people's heads up.   Yeah, because it doesn't seem like the rest of the album. It doesn't... An opening song sometimes you think is how the album will mean to go on. And it sounds like... Nowadays, the record company would say first, but we were in this luxurious position to do whatever they wanted. And you sequence the album yourself? Always. We argue with each other, but we don't have to argue with anyone else. That's good. Do you remember any kind of decisions that you made? I think New Stone Age actually went first because it was so different to everything else. There's nowhere else to put it. We'll sequence the rest of it together. We put it together as a journey. It's a whole album to be played. We wanted a flow to it. The other thing is that we didn't used to sit in the studio and just try to write hit singles. And then the songs that weren't good enough to be hit singles were the album tracks.  That's great. That's going to be poppy. But we would consciously do something like this is never going to be a single. But we're having fun. There's lots of different styles and textures. They're not all songs better or worse songs. It was just like when we'd finished them, we'd go, that one might be a single, that one might be a single because they're catchy and melodic. And the rest weren't intended to be singles. And that's fine. They're not failed singles. They were always intended to be some songs for the album. Do you have a favorite song on the album, each of you? I mean, Sealand is great. But beginning in the end, I love, actually. And I love playing it just recently. We did it. Played it down the front. We all, we came down on, with little since, down the front of the show on the last tour. And all four of us in a row and very craft-working. And I played beginning in the end and it was just beautiful. I loved it. The funny thing is, actually, the song that, because Paul and I are very different, very different people. Very different mentalities, musically and everything. It's probably why we work. Mostly. Mostly. But the one song that isn't on this album that was written for this album then went on to the Dazzle Ship's album, the song that we both agree is actually our favorite ever album. Oh, yeah, your song is the romance of the telescope. That was a B-side. And then went on to the Dazzle Ship's album. So I think that would be my favorite song from the Architecture and Morality period. Although I have to say, I love navigation. I listened to it recently. It's a belting song. With your dog barking in the background. One of the old tapes from his mother's backroom, the camera and the dog was barking. I remember first time we went to Greece and Alex and George picked us up. They were the record company and they were also Maddow and Defant. So as soon as they were getting there, they were like, oh, we'll sign this, sign that. And then Alex goes, what are the lyrics to navigation? They put on the cassette and I'm like, because I can't work out what you're singing. And I said, I'm really sorry, Alex. There are no lyrics. I never finished the lyrics. The phonetics. The scatting. It's just a scat vocal. It's just like, one, one, one is all and two, two far away, three, three is all that is all. We usually do that to get the tune and then replace them with lyrics. But this was like, we needed a B-side. We've got this, it's not finished, have it. But I love. I love that it does that. One of my favourite OMD moments is I'm being completely egotistical now, but you wrote it, so it's all right. I can say that I like what you did. It's when it drops and it comes back in with the melody. I'm like, yeah, it's a beautiful moment. Something you made is just touching your own soul. And every time I hear that, I don't listen to it every day, but I just go, oh, that talks. That still talks to me. It still talks to me. Well, that kind of brings me to my final question before we listen to the album. When you look back 40 years to this album, and you're apart from it now, but you're still playing it, but you can take a look back to your 21-year-old selves and have perspective. How do you feel about the album now? I'm incredibly proud of it, personally. I still think it works. I still think. Sonically, production techniques have come on a long way since then, and it's a bit rough around the edges, but that's part of its charm, really. I mean, Richard Mannering managed to make a good-sounding record out of Aunt Madness. So that worked. It's still one of my favourite, if not the favourite record that we've ever made. I'm happy with it. When Colleen plays it, we're going to leave the stage because we will sit here going, God, I wish we could remix it. I mean, listen. Yeah, I mean, listen. You've probably heard the story before, standing on stage atop of the Pops about to do Joan of Arc, and it starts with boom, cha-cha, and I'm standing.  I really wish I could change the sound of that bass drum. And it's in the top five. We always think we could change it, but no, this... It takes about six to nine months after you've made an album. You can be objective about it. You're not just listening to it going, oh, God, I wish I could change that.  Now I see the overview, and I'm... Yeah, I mean, we're very proud of this.  Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Fantastic. Well, I'm going to put this album on. I asked that you make sure your phones are turned off and please refrain from talking. If you are going to make any comments on the music, just whisper. Don't project like an American. And... Listen, you won't hear yourselves anyway. Look at the size of these speakers. Exactly, exactly. We will see you later for some more questions. Thank you for coming out in a tube strike and making that happen. Appreciate it. Thank you. And thank you for your questions. Thank you. I've got a good job. But seriously, what did you think about the kick drumming, Joan of all? Too loud, right? A bit boxy, I thought. So we have time for some questions. Who would like to start? OK, very eager gentleman right there. Architect from Alte. That was a book.  She said to me, I'm reading this book called Morality and Architecture. It's a great name for an album. Why don't you do it? OK, thanks very much. As you do. We just moved the words around. And... Yeah, the name of the band...  And I used to go to Eric's all the time to see bands. And so we decided, OK, we're going to dare to go on stage. Just wants to do a gig as the two of us do in our songs. Just say we've done it. And so we knocked really sheepishly on the duck as you were talking about Roger Eagle. Roger Eagle was about nine feet tall. He was really scary. And we were like, we're going to knock on the door and we're going to hope Roger isn't in the office. He's going to repeat. Paul and Andy, we were in the aid and we were like, could we do a gig on Thursday night just like the two of us with the tape recorder playing our electronic songs? And they went, yeah, yeah, sure, what you called him in? Oh. I don't know. We haven't got a name.  So we went home and literally went to my bedroom and wore what I used to write things down. And an idea for a song title was orchestral manoeuvres. And I thought, right, it's two of us playing songs our mates not even sure about in a punk club with the tape recorder. We just want a name that's different. So we just chose a preposterously different name. The sort of name that no band should ever be called. Yeah. I mean, we kind of got lucky that we chose that one because the name below orchestral manoeuvres in the dark was Margaret Thatcher's Afterbirth. It could have been worse. It's hard to believe, but it could have been worse. MTA beats. That's really good. That is a true story. Oh my gosh. Another question. There's a gentleman right there. Up here. Oh, I guess that one. You're on. Hi. Just a couple of things. Can you tell us a bit about Gravity Never Failed and when it failed to be on the album? Because I think it was meant to be or it was going to be wasn't early on. And secondly, hearing you speak early on and you mentioned one of my favourite lyrics of all yours is the more we know, the more we know, the less we learn. And I heard you mention that actually when you were talking earlier about Joan of Arc. Yeah. So are the two related? With She's Leaving, did the lyrics come after you had been talking about or learning about Joan of Arc? Is there any link there? I don't know. She's Leaving is not related to the Joan of Arc or the songwriting process. But yeah, I think very much, you know, my sense of creativity is a celebration of the fact that it's like I quite like not knowing where I'm going.   You want certainty. But when you're being creative, it's quite nice to just swim in this pool and see what happens. But, yeah. Gravity never fails. I mean, that was, we went into the manner to record because of the success of In Old Again, we didn't have a second single off the album, we were looking for another single and we actually had a song that was originally called Georgia. That was the original song called Georgia and it was the drums. And it was, when we recorded it, we just went, it's okay, but it's not a hit single, so we wouldn't release. So we held it back and then it did eventually get released and we changed the title. Is that related to She's Leaving? Yeah, yeah. Different why She's Leaving has only been released as a single in the Benelux and not elsewhere. Yeah, well, it's his fault. I don't mind, I'm from the Netherlands. There was a conversation with the record company who said, wow, you know, we've had three singles. Three hit singles. We think there's another one on the album, She's Leaving is a great song, that could be a single, that could be a hit. And I distinctly remember saying, you're not prostituting our art by releasing four singles off one album. I'm pretty sure that's what you said. I could slap my two-year-old self sometimes. So because Joan of Arc wasn't released as a single on the rest of the world, because the rest of the world worked more slowly, so they were still working souvenir and then inter-made, we thought well, alright, we'll let the Benelux have it.  But no, I was a pretentious, precious little bugger. There have been times when he wanted to slap me too. I think we'll take a question from one of our viewers at home. Yeah, we've got a lot of questions coming in from the online audience, which is great, from all over the place. I was going to ask, have you guys thought about doing a pin-up calendar? Maybe 40 years ago, but not now. That one's from Stefanie Titio and Guernsey. One of the OMG Women's Guild, of course. Yeah, the bra throwers. The bra throwers, yes. So you've answered that one. Thanks, Stef. And here's one from Matthew T. So it's about, would you, if you had the technology you have today back then, how would the textures of the album or the figure? We'll be a completely different band, probably. I mean, this is what I was alluding to before, because as kids we wanted to be craft work, but technically we couldn't be craft work. And that's why we had the sound that we had, because we were kind of limited by our technology. So I'm not sure. We probably would have sounded an awful lot more like craft work, because as kids we idolized them. We wanted to be craft work as a 15-year-old I did. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing because we started out with a fan-based guitar, his auntie's cannibalized radios, then little plinky pianos and things, and synths from my mother's catalogue. And now, you know, it's in the box. It's all in a Mac computer. And you've got all of these soft synths that come up. And there's a lot of purists who are like, well, you're not using analog synths. It's like, because they go out of tune, I don't want to plug them in, I don't want to midi them. And every time I want to recall the song when it's in the computer I just go, it comes straight back up. I don't have to wire up. Spend three hours looking at my notes going, okay, VCF. No, I'm sure it doesn't sound the same. So, yeah, I mean I love the modern technology, and for the most part, for me, the greatest thing is the live technology is more reliable. We still have screw ups, but it's more reliable than the old tapes and the analogs. I mean, it's, we never could have imagined never could have imagined what we'd have access to. It's fantastic what we can do now. The gentleman up there in the red. Over here for this one then you. You talked about your creative process and it's really interesting to hear you talk about being able to use VSTs and having everything inside a Mac.  How do you create sort of limits to help you not have to spend all day trying to find one sound? He's up there poor, if you can't see. Over here. Absolutely blind. Where are you? He is going to have to, he's going to have to give up his vanity and wear glasses on stage. I can only just see him as well. Is anybody out there? Yeah. The tyranny of choice is a phrase that we use. We had to learn, didn't we? You get to this point where you've got all of these possibilities and it's too much. One of the things that we really made into an ethos a few years ago was more is not always better and when we were younger we were working with a 24 or 16 track tape. We had to make editorial decisions. You couldn't just go, well we'll have these four-blade shrubs and we've got six high-hat patterns and different chords. The chords could be on this organ or that organ. We'll decide later. We'll decide later. So we have consciously now decided to say, right delete, commit, stop, use that, get rid of that. And it's hard like, I'm deleting something I can't go back. But actually it forces you to go forward and limit your options because electricity if you look at the multi-track of electricity it's 11 tracks and five of them are drums three of them are white noise. It's so simple. We had no options then. It was just whatever we had. One of my other favourite phrases is it's like a lot of times when you've got too many options, you just pour it all in and you go, well it's not sounding right but I'll just add more of this and I'll polish this and I'll add more varnish to it. It's like, my mantra is you don't need a million quids worth of varnish if you don't start with a turd. Don't polish it. It ain't going to get any better. Bin it off and do something else. I use that expression all the time. It's a good expression. When we did the Punishment to Luxury we just finished doing Dazzleships live and we were trying to play all these songs and we had to go back to the multi-tracks and we were looking at the songs on Dazzleships and they were so incredibly simple that when we were doing Punishment to Luxury we were going well, you know we used to have hardly anything in it but this is definitely more and so with Punishment to Luxury we really stripped back, didn't we, and just deleted so much stuff to just left what was important and deleted everything else. You have to be ruthless. Absolutely ruthless. Not easy, but you have to. We'll get to you after. Hi. Is there any song you've heard that you really wish I'd written that? One Leatherette. Outer Barn. Most of the Beatles catalogue publishing is about that. You're just thinking financially now. Yeah and I still I mean dancing on my own, the album version not the single version by Robin I wish I'd written that. Talking about stripped down 12 tracks in it. Yeah very rarely do I hear something that, speaking personally now but very rarely do I hear something where I just go wow. One of the reasons I think why we started making music was because it was like certainly again, speaking personally, most music I didn't like when I was a kid. On one hand I could count David Bowie, Roxy Music, Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, Noy Velvet Underground, one hand and one finger. And I thought the rest was mostly crap and so it was like I didn't think we could do it better but it was a bit disincentive. But yeah, sometimes you just yeah, you do. Not often but when you hear it, you are green with envy. I wish I'd done that. I think we should do one more online one. Sure. Here's a forward looking question it's about the new album Bauhaus Staircase. This question comes from Helga Santamair in Bavaria. The new album Bauhaus Staircase will it be released later this year? It's looking like early next year. Looking like early next year. Well the dilemma we have because of COVID is everything is just out of sequence and we're trying to catch up with things we promise to do. Touring and stuff. This year we're busy doing a lot of gigs. We're finally going to go to America to do the tour that we did in the UK over two years ago. The souvenir celebration tour. It's just we it's coming out. It's mostly written. It's just down to Paul to stop moving house and having children. It's not wrong. Paul's in his court now. He's the mixer. Early next year. Early next year. Question over here. Do you have a question? Yes. I'm going to come over. Okay. Obviously I'm from the Pretty in Pink era. And I've only seen you guys once in Dallas which was amazing. And this is my favorite album. And I was supposed to have tickets here to see it. I went to Cambridge and frowl there but Ailesbury but Codeness that up. So the one that sticks out in my mind always is Georgia. And I wonder where you get your samples to do it. It just it boggles my mind. They were short way we had a short wave radio. And we used to architecture and we used to to kind of record our shortwave radio every night and we used to kind of just we had tons of tape didn't we we just used to kind of because it's random what you find and we just used to scan the channels in fact radio waves on dousal ships is is that radio scanning it's the digital it's trying to find a station you know but but the the chorus of the song georgia is basically it's a classic kind of like i'd written the verse and we had this chord change and we had this course it's like we didn't know what to do in the gunny ideas now i'm going to use the gunny and is right get the radio out let's sample the stuff off the radio cut up the tapes and throw it in and see what i'm amazingly it's like yeah that'll do that's the chorus um so but it works and it's actually in key which is and of course and of course it's about the cold war and it's about the soviet union and that seems to be sadly current at the moment but yeah but that's um that that yeah georgia was was was was is it it is it was intentionally a kind of geopolitical sorry dancing in the ruins of the western world it was a kind of a prequel to dousal ships thank you really thank you hi thank you um you both say you're quite different from each other yeah over the years was would you say there's something you've each learned from the other that's perhaps changed how you are sort of from back when you were younger to how you are now makes sense i mean i think we're always learning from each other i mean i think in songwriting terms i mean i mean i think because we both couldn't play you know just pure musical terms now because we could you never taught me to play keyboards and you haven't learned bass that hasn't changed that's not changed um yeah but you know we think we learned we're screwed here she's asked a question we've never had a bloody answer I'm hopeful yeah i think damn you woman i think we we kind of we learned to to write songs together and we kind of learned each as we as we both individually learned how to write songs i think we were teaching each other how how to go through that process because no one taught us so we both had to kind of learn it individually and and kind of guide each other through it really i have learned from paul how to be a slightly better engineer i've learned i've learned what i've learned what things i learned what a compressor does it took me about 40 years but i think i think in some respects we kind of we kind of leave the demarcation actually it's like that's a paul job you know it's like when it when it comes to mixing it's like i just get on with it you start making it sound sonically right i've done you know we you know we're called the butcher and the surgeon you know it's like i will chop it all up and then he'll stitch it back together going to make it sound but then i will go back in and say right it all sounds lovely but you've lost the field let me screw it up for you again and then i pull it back and then we yeah we were in his studio yesterday arguing about bass drums actually there was three bass drums that was the problem there were three bass drums yeah should have been one but no i i i think i think we have learned stuff but i i think sometimes it's quite good to not actually think about it too much and just just you know let it know that the other person brings something that you don't have yeah andy the you secretly miffed that paul sang your biggest uk hit and paul provocative question there and paul can you remember the two songs that kept it off number one i mean the thing is andy wrote whole again so he got to number one so i remember going around to paul's house in the early 90s uh because actually you're not factually completely correct is it you i had to go to his house to ask him about some keyboard sample or something and sailing on seven seas had just got to number three but what was that andy said congratulations on getting to number three but i'm glad you haven't got any higher than souvenir so so um true story listen innalegated all the bloody groundwork he was just climbing he was he was standing on the back of a giant song i think we have time for one more question right here oh okay i think it's it's probably fair to say that architecture morality amongst the general public is kind of considered to be this sort of seminal album of yours but i wondered sort of how you think of it in the context of the rest of your output like do you think of it as this album that really sums up your sound or is it like just another album or is there one that gets overlooked in favour of architecture morality good question that was a good question um i mean i think it's probably one of our favourites because i think i think it does work in in in its entirety you know as it's a complete album every song works you know with each other it's it has a unity the album which perhaps some of the other albums don't have but uh but yeah i mean there are other works i mean people do concentrate on architecture morality but i'm very proud of the first album i'm proud of dazzleships i'm proud of the punishment of luxury you know what i would say about architecture morality i mean there's only nine songs on it if i listen to it and i don't listen to our stuff very often but if i listen to it i just go that's a good song that's a good song that would there's no there's no song on the album that i don't go yeah we could have done better there's bits not quite right about so in terms of it it's it's it's nine a star songs as far as i'm concerned we we we got it right i don't know how we got it right but i'm i'm very proud of all of those you some of you will know that there are other albums where we look back and go we just didn't have time and maybe we could have done better than that song and that song but yeah no we're proud of it i think it's a great place to to leave it tonight thank you sorry we can't do more questions we can talk forever but yeah thanks to all of you thank you thank you thank you are you all coming to the albert hall in a couple of weeks time we're still learning bunker soldiers and pretending to see and we won't mention pretending to see the future because we haven't played it for 40 years and i can't remember the words at the end but uh i will do by the time we get there so yeah seven seven songs from the first album that sounds amazing so thank you so we've got to go and rehearse thank you for watching thank you thank you so much


Okay. So we are going to go through the classroom rituals, but I want to just kind of talk a little more detail about what's in your classroom closet or cabinet. We lost a couple of you. Are you guys coming down on the door of your cabinets is where the attendance sheet lives? And, you know, chances are there's more than one class meeting in your room, so you'll have to find the attendance sheet that's yours. Karen was talking about the X method. That's what that looks like, but all of the classes that meet in this wing, you don't have to wait for a parent to check out their child. You can just, in the class, please keep them to the designated end time, which is 6 o'clock on Saturday, 10.30 to 12.30 on Sunday, because they may have a parent who's teaching and is not available to determine. But at that time, you can just have them leave and meet their parents out there. This is how she did it last year, and I think it will be similar. Karen had a list of, this is the no photo list, so that's how you can keep track of that. And it's for everyone in the program, so this is not just the list for people meeting in this class. We have to look to see your closet. And then there's also a list about the allergy and health concerns. So we have very much done away with snacks, because the allergy issue was just crazy. So we decided to just not do it. There are a couple of, I have full of lessons of holidays and holiday days that have food-related items because they're a part of that holiday. And Karen will take responsibility for getting all that food, and we'll make sure that we aren't getting anything that's going to cause an allergic reaction. So that's that. Are the parents, is their parents not taking action in that program? No, we do have a class list in your binder, and then there's all of them. Is it okay to leave it on the platform so that we have an easy radio program in Paris? Do you think your privacy matters? Maybe not, because it has their email and phone numbers and a lot of renters and people who use this space. And then these are what your name tag holders look like. They get tangled really easily. So, you know, the demo is always in the detail, right? And the details.  We could just put them all back in this little binder clip. And each class will have its own binder clip, so we can keep it separate. Yeah, that would be great. It just makes life a little easier for you and for Karen, because if she doesn't have time to untangle, then she gets untangled. You do. The closet will have a container with some scrap paper, construction paper. This is where you'll find your curriculum box that has a lot of lessons. You have cleaning materials in here. You have towels, cleaning materials, stuff. For those of you who are teaching holidays and holy days, your second semester is moral tales, and you each have a basket with props in it, and each week you share a story that has props associated with it. So that's your basket with props. There's a CD player that's kept in here. There are vinyl table cloths that we really would appreciate you using, because as you can see, our tables get really scoffed up and a lot of protective as much as we can, because they're ridiculously expensive. So please use the hoops. And these are good response. They say, be kind, be gentle, be patient, respect others. So, what's over wristbands? I'm going to wear one. They're cute. So, any questions about your closets? So what I'm talking about when I say classroom rituals is listed right there. Bringing the chime is lighting the chalice, sharing your opening words together. It's doing the wristband ritual. It's doing the check-in question that Barry referenced earlier. And you have the option of doing the check-in question or sharing joys and sorrows from the previous week. And then it's the closing wristband ritual and the closing words. So, you know, it's not like it's really long, but it's a substantive part of time with your class. So, as I mentioned, the rituals, they provide consistency from week to week, but I think it's really valuable. I think that they help to create a culture of respect in the classroom. It's a really nice transition into this space. You know, they've been sitting in there. They've been trying for a while, and this is a way for them to kind of get me quite different group. With the new wristband ritual, they have kind of setting expectations each week for how we're going to be community together. And I think an important piece of it also is that it helps to develop a UU identity.  This is distinctly UU. So, it gives them sort of this shared UU language and experience that I think is really important. And in our little ways, we are really trying to create sacred space for them. And we don't have a lot of opportunities to do that, but the rituals are one way that we can kind of create a sacred space for them. And I think what you bring to that equation is really important. Like, if you take that seriously and you really present this as a sacred experience and those relics of our faith as being sacred objects, that they will embrace that as well. But it's putting those expectations forward and expecting them to rise to that I think is really important. And I think it's powerful. I think it can be really powerful. And I think that it can go a long way. And the hope is that if we take that really seriously and with a respect ritual, that it will help kind of cut off some of the behavioral things that would be so frustrating. So, I hope that you can become comfortable with the idea of creating sacred space in whatever ways that you do. I don't know if you want to talk about this now, but I just wonder, sometimes when I get a parent help or I've seen that the joys and sorrows or a lot of these rituals or a lot of children decide, oh, I'm not going to participate. And if one child does it, then it's three or four in a row. And this is like four-year-olds, five-year-olds, six-year-olds, seven-year-olds that I've seen. And I wonder if you have any opinion about how much of a requirement it should be. And maybe that's just the way of phrasing it. Now we're all going to put on a wristband. Versus, if you want to put on a wristband, you can put a wristband on. If you would like to share a joy or sorrow, feel free, but if you don't want to, you don't have to. Have you had conversations with a teacher in the past about how much pressure, but setting an expectation, how has that actually done? For the wristband, I would say everyone needs to put the wristband on. And there are some kids who, for whatever reasons, they need to kind of just sit off to the side. But I think the expectation still has to be that the wristband is our covenant with each other and they have to put the wristband on. I'm a parent of one of the kids who, she was, you know, from, I think, very far on.  And it really helped. I think I came to you and said, can you please ask the teachers to ask everyone to contribute something? So she's not singled out, but everyone does it. And it really helped her to get to know people in her class when she started talking and doing things. So it is helpful to bring them out a little bit. I think it's a good comment too to say, well, I'm not going to do it. It kind of goes against you and the whole purpose of being in the class. You're not going to be respectful. Those are real fundamentals. I think it's a good expectation to have because they participate. It's not like we're going to kick them out of class if they don't. But if you have someone that seems kind of continually reluctant, maybe the next time they're in class say, do you have any ideas, but we'll look at you as a new check-in question. What's something that you could like to know about the other kids in the class? Or maybe give them a little more ownership? Well, you continue to have the aids for us that have those words written out that we can hold up. That will be in the closet. They're up here. Oh, there it is. And then the wrist band control. Excellent. Other questions? I was just going to say, from my experience teaching the other kids, I really liked your idea of directing at each kid and inviting them. Because I think you're right, when they start to pass the chalice without not being able to look up but just sort of take it and pass it. So it's almost the teacher, each time, good morning Naomi. What's your joy and sorrow? Good morning. What's your joy? So they're being invited to the conversation when the chalice has passed for them. I think that's a really good idea. Work as well. Okay, so I'm with the classroom ritual room and then we'll actually do that, okay? So you usually get here like 15 to 20 minutes before class, not before class begins, before service begins, to set up, get everything together. What you'll do is, you'll take out your chalice and chai box. Some places it might say, I don't think they also take chalice and chai, but yeah, it's a topping stick. Every box has a little fabric for creating their altar and every box has a chai. So you'll get everything set up on the floor. All of these classrooms are prepared for you with a clear floor. That's the default. It'll be a table or two that's set up like this off to the side. But the default is that you have a clear floor to sit on. So if you have any knee issues or anything like that, feel free to take a chair. But basically, the rest of the people will be sitting on the floor. So you'll get that set up and then the kids will get released from the worship service. They'll come in here. I think it's kind of nice to have a teacher that's sitting on the floor that even can kind of welcome them in and start talking to them. It's up to you if you want to take attendance as they arrive and kind of just wait until things are underway and then somebody takes care of marking out the attendancy. It might make more sense to just let everyone filter in and start your circle. So they'll come in and then you'll bring your chai for the centering moment. You'll welcome any visitors or parent helpers. And this is in your binder, so you don't have to remember on this. This is in your parent helper. Select the child to light the chalice for the day. Then you'll read your opening words which are hanging on the board here and light the chalice. And then you'll do the wrist bend ritual. And every class will have a basket of wrist bands like this. And it'll be a process of passing this around. So I'm the teacher. I start. We have the words that we say as part of the wrist bend ritual. And for the little kids, for the K1 kids it makes more sense to just have them repeat after you. So in this sacred space and then they can stay in this sacred space through our actions and our orders and they can stay through our actions. For the older kids, you probably they can just read what's on there and it shouldn't take too long for them to memorize it. So what I would do is I would hold this out to Harry. Harry would take a wrist band or two put it on. They have small hands and then take the basket and then he would hold it up to Kilda.  And this may seem like a small thing but I'm going to believe that it's a big thing. That just that sort of that to say that these the values that are expressed on the word to the wrist band are important to us but it's also just a way of connecting with each other, however briefly to look someone in the eye and offer them something and then for them to offer something to someone else. It's a small token but it's a more token and I think it creates a stronger sense of community in a classroom to be able to share with that and kind of do the reverse process at the end. So that's sort of where that whole idea of the wrist band ritual was born of this desire to have the kids connecting in a more beautiful way together. So when I first came up with that I had people putting the wrist bands on each other and then it became complicated. It was a little too ambitious but still being able to just like present the basket I think is a nice way of just connecting. Okay.  I think that visual is really important for kids. It's really important for a lot of adults and so I don't want to put that on their dry erase board. So go over what the agenda is for the day and then before you move into your activity so this all you'll see is going to be on the floor and for the first couple weeks I really encourage you to emphasize that these are sacred objects I think we've said that and I'll say it again that we in a very sacred and respectful way we then move those items off of the floor and each room will have a triangle table and then you'll set up your little alter triangle table. Sound good? And you can enlist the kids to help you with that as long as they're going to do it respectfully. Then you go into your lesson plan and then at the end of the lesson so you have to keep it because you get swept up in what you're doing and it's fun and it's exciting but really try to be intentional about saving time for the closing rituals because it's a nice way to cut closure on that day. So you gather again in a circle you say you ask that or you say we had fun talking about the thing about what we did today and just give them a chance to sort of reflect on what they really enjoy and maybe ask them like so what do you think you'll most remember when you leave here to think about what was most important to them and then you do the wristband return ritual. Now it's time to return the wristbands to the basket and you know I think it would be great if you can comment on any ways that you saw them living out these ideas during the class session to reinforce that and then you say the return words which is thank you for sharing this space and time with me. I return this wristband now but I carry your kindness, gentleness, patience to respect whatever I go and then I would hold out the basket to carry and he would give me the wristband back and then he would hold it out for Kelda and so on and so forth and then you say any of your same words together which are behind me while we are apart maybe we could give friends to all we meet maybe remember the things we learned in the day together and maybe we'll peace go down our way and that's any questions about that? Keep the chime close to you and we'll keep this close to you okay so you welcome everyone thank you so much for being here today and looking forward to our time together to start out by bringing your chime so that we can all become present in this room together and if you'd like you to close your eyes and then when you can't hear the sound anymore raise your hand thank you welcome our parents help our Beth today we're really happy to have your help here and our visitor Sandy who's here for the second time we're glad that you came back today we're happy to have you here we're going to start with our opening words so Ferry would you mind lighting the chalice for us? yes and together we'll read our words it doesn't play that's the flexibility that's right well just so you know it doesn't work alright thanks for nothing Barry this chalice to celebrate unitarian universalism this is the church of the open mind this is the church of the loving heart this is the church of the helping hands together we care for our earth and work for peace and friendship I'm teaching a lot I'm looking at you, Karen, Sandy Kathy, do you usually hold hands for them? no these are different words than we have yes, you've advanced you're in the new wing they're very similar except at the very end we keep them shorter you don't have to hold hands we actually probably make torces to do it at the end we usually just do peace so you could that's true work for peace and then during cold season just don't help with our wristband ritual and and I just want to remind you all that our wristbands are sacred objects they're an important part of what our community believes together and so this is our way this is our promise to each other our wristband ritual we're promising to treat each other with respect, to be kind to be gentle, to be patient and part of that is keeping the wristband on your wrist during class so that we're respecting its importance to who we are while we're here so let's start with that and I'm going to offer a wristband to Harry and we're going to start saying words together and then Harry after you put on your wristband if you could offer one to Kelda and Kelda after you put on your wristband if you could offer one to Hillary we'll just go around the circle as we say our words through our actions and our words I promise to be kind be gentle be patient and respect others we're getting the ones right and the best that will actually that's not just your feelings it's your liberals I can make you maybe it has a little more of a staker feel, tell me what you think if you hand it to that person they put it on and then they take the basket and then they present it to the next person does that make sense does that make sense does that make sense it's a subtle it's a subtle tea so instead of just passing it around you hold it out to the person they put the wristband on then they take the basket so that it has a little more ritual feeling than passing things you could do naming at least for the older classes you could do what Harry Kelda you only have to say one person's name so so you're saying the name of the person that you're giving it to I like that that's good because then you're ruining each other's name I remember my son telling me at the end of the year like I didn't know what his name was what that's good okay so let's see now we're going to do our checking question so that we can learn a little more about each other and today's checking question is what is something about yourself that you're looking forward to sharing with your class what's something about yourself that you're looking forward to sharing with your class so this is our talking stick and does anyone know the rule about the talking stick we can all talk about it I mean the person holding it can talk so there's no sign of conversations we want to take time to learn what each one of us thinks so the attention to the learner is the stick something about about the play I'm hoping to bring some of our work I love to sing and so I hope that we'll make music together I am hoping to have something exciting happening this year so if that happens I will be sure I have my last thing stay tuned I love Bible stories so I'm excited to be teaching by the way I'm looking forward to sharing some whimsy with the children we have a session on bats to share my excitement about bats good to know about that I'm looking forward to the puppets at last I'm looking forward to the choir starting back in September I love to read stories so I'm looking forward to reading stories in the class I'm looking forward to helping all the kids feel like they're really included in the class I love learning about different cultures and in holidays we get to talk about a lot of cultures I am looking forward to bringing my patients to the kids I'm looking forward to a lot of different cultures the three kids go through it and holidays was their favorite I've done a lot of cultural exchanges over the last few years so I'm looking forward to bringing some of that let's say I like to play with kids this age especially I get really silly and musical and all that so looking forward to being inspired by our own energy I enjoy traditions and I'm going to be in the holidays and how the kids build their own and I'm looking forward to working with all of you over the course of the next eight months so okay, let's talk a little bit about what we're going to do today this is our agenda okay our activity ritual wasn't that fast so we had fun today talking about what we're all going to bring to class this year what was your favorite thing that you heard because we had a lot of bats in our building there was busy surface I recall yes and I visited training on Monday night one of them came visited us I don't like that anyone else have something they really enjoyed doing or hearing maybe that's the question do you generally move the altar back down when everybody sits down to play yes, thank you can I ask a question about the talking do you mainly only use that for the check-in yes okay, we will return our wristbands to the basket now and in order to do that we're going to pass the basket one at a time I'm going to offer the basket to Harry and he's going to put his wristband in and then he'll offer it to Kelda and then together we'll say the wristband return ritual work so let's pass it around and say thank you for sharing this space and time with me I've returned this wristband now but I carry your kindness, gentleness patience, and respect wherever I you can try saying names yeah Naomi Joe Apple okay and finally we're going to say our closing words together so why don't we stand up in full hands for this may we be good friends for all we meet may we remember the things we learned together and may we know peace and go now with peace in our hearts I'm sorry do you ever find that the younger kids have too many words to say we did a lot of reciting of things commission of us five yeah I think the repeating bat makes it a little easier for them it's probably pushing it a bit with the five year old but right definitely we do at that age they were telling me that I was doing it wrong so they modified something what was that something was modified too short then yeah that was the preschool they modified the wristband ritual but now we're going to do it again is there a poster made of the list in order of the rituals or if not could there be one sure, yeah we can make one so then we could have more space for the rest of our agenda and also students yeah yeah she's right okay


What's up everybody, I'm the Mangoos, you are awesome and with all of these new games coming out, I'm sure many of you are looking to jumpstart your creative career. It's a good idea too, the best time to start up is at the ground level of a game before it becomes saturated with established creators.  This is one of my first Paragon videos, it has five views, three of which are probably me, zero likes and one dislike. Yep. I want to try and give you guys some pointers how you can go from that to this. That's the extreme though, my video is really only average about 4k views after a month but you get the idea. The first thing you need to do is think about why you want to create content. If the answer is money, then go ahead and bail out now. You are not going to make any money off of YouTube for a very long time. And I don't mean like you'll only make five or ten dollars, I mean zero dollars. YouTube is connected to Google AdSense and Google is who will be paying you, however in order for YouTube to send money to Google, you have to have made at least fifty dollars. It doesn't end there though, in order for Google to actually pay you, you have to have made at least a hundred dollars. It does carry over so if you make fifty dollars this month and fifty dollars the next then you'll get some money from Google. Just to give you a frame of reference for how much you can expect to make during a month, I've made fifty four dollars in the last twenty eight days, so no soup for me. I'm happy if I can cover the cost of my Adobe subscription. I use Adobe Creative Cloud for editing and I will not make that money this month. I rarely get out of my channel what I put into it monetarily. I do however get much more out of it than I put into it emotionally. I do this because I love creating content, keeping people informed and making people laugh. If you set something like that as your goal, you'll be much happier as a content creator. Next up is the advice I give almost everyone who asks how to grow their channel. Thumbnails.   YouTube has a metric called CTR. That stands for click-through rate. That's the percentage of people who are shown your video and actually click on it and give it the time of day. If you've already established yourself as a content creator and have a loyal fan base, then your thumbnails don't matter as much. However if you want to attract a wider audience and grow your channel, you need to incentivize people to click on your video without clickbaiting. I'll discuss clickbaiting later. Your thumbnails don't have to be as pretty as mine. In fact, my style of thumbnail really isn't the best. It's better to use bright colors and big distinctive font for your lettering. There is an online program called Adobe Spark that is free and simple to use and will give you some decent thumbnails if you don't have or know how to use photo editing software. Now onto your actual content. You need to be able to carve out your own niche and set yourself apart from the other creators out there. The best way to do that is just to be really good at the game you create content for.  Briddick and I had a conversation about this a while back. Briddick really is very good at Paragon and he's also very good at these Paragon-like games. He's able to hook people in with his skill. I, however, am only decent at Paragon. I will never be good enough to sustain a YouTube channel through my gaming skills. So I have to go a different route. For me it ended up being humor. First I established myself a bit with Casting Call and then really broke through when I started doing the Honest Hero Overviews. I substituted gaming skill with good editing and my natural wit. If you can't grind your way to the upper ranks or when you do, you find that other creators are already feeling that really good at the game niche, then you'll have to find another way to grow. I can't tell you what your niche can be. That's something you'll have to figure out on your own. A good example is Shark. I'll link his channel in the video description below but he does these fantastic cinematic edits that are unlike anything I've seen anyone else doing. You'll also need to somehow advertise your channel. Try to get friends and family to at least click on your videos and leave a like even if they have zero interest in gaming. I know this sounds pathetic but you gotta do what you gotta do to get YouTube to actually show your videos to people. If a game has a Discord Creator tab that they allow people to post their videos in, take advantage of that. You can also use things like Reddit and Facebook but don't go all out with it. Those sites aren't there to advertise your YouTube channel and folks will not appreciate you doing so. However, like I said, you gotta do what you gotta do. I'm certainly guilty of using the Paragon Subreddit to try and promote my videos. You just need to be conscious of how much you're doing it.  Maybe just post a video here and there if you're like really proud of it. The other thing is click baiting the dark side of the force. Here's the thing, it works. If you put a blurry picture of Bellica on your thumbnail and give it a title like Did Fault make a nude skin for Bellica? People will click on it and you will get a ton of views. However, they will be empty views and you will feel empty inside. I've seen people actually succeed by using click bait titles and topics but they'll never really be respected. You're going to need a thick skin. People will leave negative comments on your content. You can use that though. Instead of just getting pissed off, really read what they're saying and see if it's something you can actually improve upon. If they don't like your sound quality, try to fix it. If you're saying, um, uh, too much, work on that. Of course, there will be some things you can't fix. I get comments from people who don't want me to cover ethereal but that's not something I'm going to compromise on. Same with my language. Sometimes people will complain about my foul mouth. I get that. I'm not mad at them for disliking how I talk but I can't simply change the way I am.  I was just kind of lucky that my honesty or overview for Moragash was so well received. However, it was my hard work at seizing upon that opportunity that has put me in the position that I am now.  This is the man goose wishing all of you success. You guys, have a good one. Man goose!


I mean, I don't get it. Can someone explain this to me because I can't seem to wrap my head around this. If Ratboy was so passionate about helping people, how does he have the time to sue me? As stated in this lawsuit. Dr. Saladino is passionate about understanding and correcting the ruins of chronic disease and using this information to help patients enjoy better lives. Yeah, he's so passionate about helping people enjoy better lives that instead of doing nutritional research, making free educational videos, he's suing me for more money. Hmm, isn't that a little bit contradictory? How does he have the time to take out of his selfless, human serving schedule to sue me? Shouldn't his efforts be going towards something more positive? Even when he was plagiarizing over 100 of my ideas, statements, business ventures, I didn't sue him because I'm putting 100% of my efforts truthfully towards helping people. And now I have to spend my efforts towards this lawsuit. So not only is he lying about wanting to help people, he's also impeding my ability to help people.  And before we go into this, if you guys can sign up on frank-final.com for the email list, just to stay in touch. As I've spent the last four years on YouTube building up my businesses to give back, just to scrape by enough money to keep more businesses afloat, things I deem are necessary to help people, Wi-Fi shielding clothing, high quality animal foods, nutritional supplements to fix modern lifestyle imbalances. And this guy has made millions of dollars last year ass-show-turfing my ideas.  A second lawsuit and I'm about to declare bankruptcy. The first time he sued me in San Diego, knowing I lived in New York, so I had to waste $13,000 on a San Diego lawyer just to get the case dismissed. I was never refunded my attorney fees. Even so, I didn't file counterclaims. If I did that, I would have been out another $15,000. What are the options? I spend all the money I have left defending this case. That would mean that the farm, the future of providing high quality animal products, wanting to expand to things like raw dairy, soy-free corn-free eggs, high quality bacon, charcuterie, jerky. Delay that for years. Possibly it never happens. I don't know what's going on with that. And I still haven't decided if I want to ask for donations or not.  So I'll keep you guys updated on the case as much as possible. So far I've just been writing up stuff to file my own claims because I've spoken to over half a dozen lawyers and not one of them gave me the same answer, let alone a straight one. Basically, the more you pay a lawyer, the better the law firm. The more claims and motions you can file, which increases your chances of winning something, but tens of thousands of dollars quickly becomes hundreds. And I'm imagining this lawsuit is going to cost a lot of money again. Not really a lot for a lawsuit, but for an individual like myself, yeah. I mean, most likely we'll reach a settlement. The only question is how much I'm going to have to spend on a lawyer to reach that settlement. But I'd like to be in a position where I don't have to worry about saving money on every single thing. As I've said, I'm still with my parents. I drive a 20-year-old car. This has put me in a position that I was slowly trying to get myself out of. But in brighter news, though, some Westchester magazine published my article, homophobic slur charged in lawsuit of bicoastal carnivores fight for diet dominance. A California carnivore is fighting a Westchester carnivore to restore his reputation in the dog eat dog world of eating nutrition services. Paul Saladino of San Diego claims that Frank Tafano of New York posted defamatory videos, depicting him in sexually graphic and homophobic images, for instance, and hijacked his name for an internet domain in a lawsuit filed November 7th in U.S. District Court. Why is a 43-year-old doctor suing a 27-year-old former bartender? Tafano asked in a brief telephone interview. It doesn't make any sense at all. Why does he care about what some guy in New York thinks? Saladino had already sued him in San Diego, he said, and the case was recently dismissed for lack of jurisdiction. The carnivore diet is based on the belief rejected by mainstream nutritionists that eating only meat and meat products and avoiding fruits and vegetables is the path to well-being. Tafano is a former bodybuilder and personal trainer who wrote, the ancestral indigenous diet, a whole foods meat-based carnivore diet, copyrighted in 2019. Saladino, a medical doctor, wrote, the carnivore code, unlocking the secrets to optimal health by returning to our ancestral diet. Copyrighted in 2020, he claims he has helped hundreds of patients reverse auto-immunity, chronic inflammation, and mental health issues using a carnivore diet. Both meat-eaters promote their services on social media, sell merchandise such as nutritional supplements and free-range meats, and offer personal consultations. Yeah, I wonder why he didn't mention I was doing all that stuff a year or two before Rat Boy showed up on the scene? Tafano sees Saladino's reputation and presence on social media that complaint alleges as a threat to his own enterprise, which is similar in vision. If that was the case, wouldn't I care about the other dozen carnivore influencers that are on the scene that also have a sizable audience? Why would I just pick out one person? There's other carnivore doctors, there's plenty of other people I could have picked on. Tafano said it is Saladino who is threatened and he claims that the doctor has plagiarized his materials at least 50 times. Yeah, I made about three videos calling him out for his plagiarism. All I did was pointed out and make a few jokes along the way. In October, Tafano registered the internet domain PaulSaladino.com, according to the complaint, to divert customers from Saladino's similarly named PaulSaladinoMD.com. Then Tafano allegedly posted sexually graphic homophobic images of Saladino. He linked to videos in which he describes himself as the source of Saladino's information on the carnivore diet and depicts Saladino as a plagiarizer, a thief, and a drug abuser.  The images are not homophobic, Tafano said.  The joke is that he's sucking the information out of me. Saladino accuses Tafano of cyber piracy, unlawful registration of a domain name, deceptive trade practices, and defamation. Though he is not demanding a pound of flesh, Saladino is seeking $600,000 in damages. He is asking the court to stop Tafano from publishing defamatory statements, make him remove defamatory videos and take down his website, transfer ownership of paulsaladino.com to Saladino, and order him to make efforts to restore Saladino's reputation. Brooklyn attorneys David DeLynn and Michael DeClanto represent Saladino. Oh man, this guy, Mr. Raddy, must have had some really pampered delusional upbringing because he's in this illusion of what is reality and what is not. You know, if no one likes you because someone else is telling the truth about you, I don't know what to say. So thank you guys for joining me today. I figured this was kind of like the next update for this lawsuit. And listen, I really don't want to talk about this on my channel. The only reason I made that plagiarism video recently was because, you know, he was on the largest platform and there is Joe Rogan, and I felt like I had one last opportunity to defend myself. You know, I would not say another word about this guy, but now there's a lot on the line, you know, especially everything I've worked towards seemingly. So yeah, if you guys do want to support that vision, definitely let me know what you think down in the comments below. Please drop a like on the video. And if you can share it on social media. As I mentioned earlier, you know, please sign up for the newsletter on frankdestrafano.com. I'm going to try to start sending out stuff to you guys. Thank you guys for joining me today. And I'll see you guys for tomorrow's video.