MILD MANOEUVREING IN MAINSTREAM

It’s taken Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark six years to progress from playing to a club full of curious Anglophiles at the Whisky to packing the Universal Amphitheatre with hyperkinetic teen-age fans. But then it makes sense that a six-piece group led by two nice middle-class lads from Liverpool (bassist Andy McCluskey and keyboardist Paul Humphrey) would wind up playing to nice middle-class kids from Encino.

OMD once had a darker, more progressive, exploratory edge, which it demonstrated Saturday in the show’s opener, “Southern,” an instrumental incorporating taped bits of speeches by Martin Luther King--a good idea, possibly, if Keith LeBlanc hadn’t already done it twice as well with his “Malcolm X” record last year.

But ever since its Top 40 hit, “If You Leave,” OMD has veered toward mainstream pop manoeuvres in the charts, and the concert steered a course between quirkiness and patchwork pop like the group’s latest hit, “(Forever) Live and Die,” a bit of Beatlesque fluff. The personification of techno-yuppie, OMD combined ethereal keyboard washes, snappy little horn riffs and McCluskey’s yearning, strained singing (and relentlessly dorky dancing) into an evening that was danceable, pleasant and very, very tame.