‘Maid of Orleans’ by OMD: Meaning and Analysis

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Two of the nine tracks to feature on Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s third album, Architecture and Morality (1981), were about the medieval French saint Joan of Arc. These two tracks, ‘Joan of Arc’ and ‘Joan of Arc (Maid of Orleans)’, open the second side of the original LP release of the album, and come between the industrial mood-piece ‘Sealand’ (which concludes side one) and the instrumental title track.

What drew Andy McCluskey, founder-member of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD), to a fifteenth-century peasant girl and martyr?

McCluskey wrote ‘Maid of Orleans’, which he described as OMD’s ‘Mull of Kintyre’, on 30 May 1981, the 550^th anniversary of Joan of Arc’s death (she was burned at the stake in Rouen on 30 May 1431).

Who was the Maid of Orleans?

Joan of Arc, born in 1412 in Domrémy (a region which, at the time, was not part of France; so from one perspective, France’s most famous military heroine wasn’t technically ‘French’ at all), was a devout peasant girl who believed that God had chosen her to lead France to victory against England, with whom France had been at war for almost a century (the so-called Hundred Years’ War – which, in fact, would end up lasting for 116 years).

Joan somehow convinced the crown prince Charles of Valois to allow her to lead a French army to Orléans, which was besieged by the English. Joan and her army won the ensuing battle, but Joan’s triumph was short-lived. She was captured and tried for witchcraft; she was subsequently burned at the stake (by the French, or at least French collaborators with the English, oddly enough) at Rouen in May 1431. She was canonised as a saint in 1920.

‘Maid of Orleans’: song meaning

The track is listed as ‘Joan of Arc (Maid of Orleans)’ on Architecture and Morality, but was renamed ‘Maid of Orleans (The Waltz Joan of Arc)’ when the track was released as a single in January 1982, the ‘waltz’ being a reference to the song’s time signature, as it’s written in 6/8 time. So, technically, Architecture and Morality has two songs actually titled ‘Joan of Arc’.

The song has few lyrics, and the lyrics it does have don’t kick in for some time, thanks to the industrial noises that open the song, and then the slow arrival of the memorable drums, before the distinctive mellotron – perhaps the best use of this wonderful instrument in a pop song since The Moody Blues’ ‘Nights in White Satin’ fifteen years earlier – kicks in, reinforcing the plaintive yearning of the song’s lyrics.

The song is essentially, like OMD’s previous homage to Joan of Arc, a love song: if Joan of Arc was, despite her battle-hardened exterior, capable of love, would the speaker of the song be in with a chance? Would she gift her heart to him, of all people? To him, she is not just an ‘angel’ but the epitome of angelhood: the paragon of angelic virtue.

The second verse builds on the first: now the speaker acknowledges that Joan of Arc does have a heart, and that her dream is to give it away, like a young girl giving away an orphan or waif (presumably, an unwanted child she has had out of wedlock). Joan of Arc had a caring heart, and cared about France.

She was fighting against the English who were attempting to claim French land during the Hundred Years’ War (which had already been raging for nearly a century when Joan took her stand; the ‘Hundred Years’ war would actually end up lasting 116 years).

Joan, known as the Maid of Orleans, was prepared to give up not just her heart but her life to this cause. And this is what she did, while she was still a teenager, in 1431.

So in many ways, ‘Maid of Orleans’ has a meaning which is familiar to fans of love songs: it’s about a boy liking a girl, putting her on a pedestal, and then realising her heart belongs to another. But the innovative twist McCluskey gave to this familiar theme is by making the girl not just any girl, but one who had been dead for five-and-a-half centuries. And the ‘another’ is not some other boy, but a whole kingdom.

But what about that distinctive opening to the song? McCluskey wrote that the intro came about because the original version of the sound began ‘oddly’, and the band agreed they needed some other way to open the track. At the time that they were making Architecture and Morality, the band was interested in what McCluskey calls ‘ambient soundscapes’ (‘Sealand’ is a good example of this).

Most of the noises heard at the beginning of ‘Maid of Orleans’ were mellotron vocal sounds which the band slowed down (or sped up) and distorted.