Maureen says the title. Paul sings the rest.
Paul Humphreys sings Secret. Andy McCluskey does not. That is the first thing the record does differently from the OMD singles people already knew. The song is the second single from Crush, the album Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark released on Virgin in June 1985, and it came out in Britain on 8 July 1985.
McCluskey and Humphreys wrote it. Stephen Hague produced it with the band. Crush was built on a Fairlight, using the machine’s Page R sequencer, with live drums added later. The sessions ran at Amazon Studios in Liverpool and at The Manor in Oxfordshire, and the mixes were done at Advision in London. Hague played parts himself. Humphreys would later say that after Hague the pair stopped using an outside producer, because both sides wanted control of the session. On Secret the control is still Hague’s, and the lead voice is still Paul’s.
The title word is not sung only by him. Maureen Humphreys, Paul’s wife, is sampled saying “secret”, and that whisper sits in the track as a hook. The UK B-side was Drift. The American single, on A&M, used Firegun instead. Andy Morahan directed the video at Walton-on-the-Naze in Essex: black and white clips, including shots of the Beatles, cut against Humphreys singing and a small story in which McCluskey watches the couple and walks off along the shore.
First they were wimps, then they turned doggedly serious and obscure, now, hey presto, they are unashamed wimps again. Nothing wrong with that, really, and these jolly pipings and girly swot melodies are a fine substitute for cottage cheese. Surprisingly pleasant.
(Tom Hibbert, Smash Hits, July 1985)
The single reached number 34 in Britain and number 24 in Ireland. In the United States it was the band’s second entry on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at 63, and it also made the adult contemporary chart. West Germany put it at 25. None of those numbers matched If You Leave, which was still a year away, but Secret was the record that showed Hague’s OMD on the radio: programmed, sung by Humphreys, and aimed past the clubs.
The compilation that later bundled the song is not the point. Secret belongs to Crush, to Amazon and The Manor in 1984 and 1985, and to a duo that had handed the vocal to the keyboard player while a producer programmed the Fairlight. Smash Hits heard the piped melody and called the band unashamed wimps again. The chart did not argue very hard. It just let the single sit in the thirties and move on. So in Love had been the first single from the album and had reached number 27 in Britain. Secret followed it onto the Crush tour through 1985 and 1986. In 1988 the song turned up in Arthur 2: On the Rocks and got another push at US radio, without returning to the Hot 100. The original remains the Hague mix: Humphreys in front, Maureen in the sample, and a Fairlight underneath.
