and it ended up with arguments." This did little to help band morale, as Holmes explained, "Both myself and Martin seriously began to doubt Paul and Andy's judgement... More and more, it was becoming Andy's album." The sample-based approach to compiling the tracks further alienated Cooper and Holmes; the latter would ultimately play on only three songs, which had been recorded during the earlier Gramophone Suite sessions. Holmes spent his time at the White House "playing video games and trying to convince [him]self that Paul and Andy knew what they were doing." Part of the album was also recorded at Mayfair Studios in London. To maintain the band's image of being signed to an indie label, the Dazzle Ships record sleeve purported that the album was issued by the fictitious "Telegraph" label. It was released on LP, compact cassette and compact disc. The cover art was created by longtime OMD collaborator Peter Saville; Dazzle-ships in Drydock at Liverpool, the painting which inspired the record's title and artwork, is in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Commercial performance Dazzle Ships peaked at number five on the UK Albums Chart (remaining in the top 20 for six weeks), and also reached the top-10 in New Zealand and Spain. The record achieved global sales of 300,000 copies; this figure represented a fraction of the sales of multi-million selling predecessor Architecture & Morality (1981), and prompted OMD to move in a more conservative musical direction on subsequent releases. NMEs Gary Ryan noted that the album "was considered a flop", while McCluskey recalled, "The painful joke at Virgin was that it shipped gold and returned platinum." Critical reception Dazzle Ships received mostly negative reviews, with NME and other outlets making unfavourable comparisons to the work of OMD heroes Kraftwerk. A scathing Mark Moses in The Boston Phoenix rechristened the album "Guzzle Shit by Offensive Manure in the Park". Record Mirrors Jim Reid observed a "nightmarish" album "replete with the worst kind of futuristic nonsense", while John Gill of Time Out labelled it "redundant avant-garde trickery". Sun Times critic Michael Lawson dismissed the record's experimental content as filler, adding that "too much attention [is] given to soundtrack-like effects that only clutter what decent electropop baubles there are here." There were sporadic appeals for listener perseverance: Paul Colbert of Melody Maker portrayed the album as "a challenge and a reward", while Smash Hits