When British pop band OMD (short for Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark) released Dazzle Ships in 1983, it was such a flop it almost sank the band. Their previous LP, 1981’s Architecture & Mortality had been a huge commercial hit whilst being arty and experimental. But Dazzle Ships took things too far, with themes of cold war tensions and computers taking over, containing a mix of B-sides and leftovers, ‘found sound experiments’ and the influence of Kraftwork and Stockhausen; 1983 just wasn’t ready for it. However, time has been good to the album and it now sounds great.

In the inner gatefold of the LP it says ‘<Dazzle Ships> title suggested* by Peter Saville after a painting by Edward Wadsworth’, then goes on to list the Designers: M. Garrett, K Kennedy, P Pennington, P Saville, B Wickens for Peter Saville Associates.

The painting in question – to give it its full title – is Dazzle-ships in Drydock at Liverpool, painted in 1919.

Edward Wadsworth’s background as a member of the modernist artistic and literary movement Vorticism would prove to be instrumental to the work he would do during the First World War. Vorticism, founded in London by Wyndham Lewis in 1914, was launched just a month before the start of the war with the publication of their manifesto in the short-lived magazine BLAST. Partly inspired by Cubism, Vorticism sought to do away with tradition and sentimentality by violently expressing the industrial modern world in bold, sharp geometric shapes.

With the advent of the war, many of the paintings were lost, and the movement all but dispersed and disintegrated. Wadsworth joined the Royal Navy in 1915. Another artist caught up in the war was Norman Wilkinson, a naval officer.

By 1917, German U-boats were swarming the English Channel, destroying many British merchant ships transporting supplies to Britain. A radical solution was needed. Though there had been much research on camouflage conducted – and indeed the animal kingdom, from birds and fish to insects, had been successfully using it for millions of years – it was Norman Wilkinson, a former marine painter, who devised the idea of using strong geometric shapes.

And whilst at first it might seem ridiculous to paint ships as visible as possible with striking colours and shapes in order to camouflage, the dazzle ships were designed to disrupt, not conceal. Previous attempts at concealment had included covering boats in mirrors and disguising them as whales, islands and skies (by covering them with cloud-painted canvas). None of these were practical enough to work.

By using high contrast colours (unfortunately black and white photos don’t do the boats justice), shapes and diagonal lines going in varying directions, the dazzle ships were able to confuse the U-Boat gunner as to what direction the boat was going and where its intention was. Because torpedoes were fairly slow back then, taking perhaps up to two minutes to hit its target, the gunner had to guess in advance where the enemy boat would be, up to 1,900 metres away in order to hit it. Essentially the dazzle ships created an optical illusion, which worked best when viewed from a low angle thorough a periscope, where the submarine gunner would be.

A test dazzle boat was a success, and Wilkinson and his team, which included female students from the Royal Academy of Art, created drawings and models which were tested before being handed over to boat painters at the dry docks to produce, by the end of the war, some 4,000 dazzle ships.

Edward Wadsworth would also get involved, supervising the painting of over 2,000 dazzle ships, as well as producing a series of wonderful prints and paintings of dazzle ships in the style of Vorticism after the war, such as the one that inspired Peter Saville and OMD. The dazzle ships not only helped win the war** but to embody the modernist, jazz spirit of the age***.

When the war ended, dazzle balls were held in London to celebrate victory; revellers wore harlequin outfits (Picasso believed he invented camouflague with Cubism and the disruptive costume of harlequins was a favourite subject for the artist) and dazzle dresses and danced the night away to jazz music.

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*I’m always confused as to what Peter Saville actually does, except look cool and suggest appropriate artwork, then get half a dozen assistants to do the work.

**Or not. A panel set-up after the war concluded that there was no evidence the enemy were confused by dazzle. Like with sound mirrors, the advent of radar made dazzle ships obsolete.

***Though we’d have to wait until the 1960s for the spirit of dazzle ships and the wearing of camouflage to go mainstream with op art and the ‘counterculture appropriation of military surplus clothing for street wear’.