It was meant to be a lark – hence their relatively inelegant name, cobbled together in haste from song ideas scribbled on McCluskey’s bedroom wall (OMD won out over “Margaret Thatcher’s Afterbirth”).īut OMD had taken off immediately. Emerging from the ashes of their previous group Hitlerz Underpantz, McCluskey and Humphreys formed the duo with the intention of playing just one gig. The band had started as a bit of a pretentious jape. Then you make boring music to carry a lyric, instead of writing interesting music and putting the lyric in later.” “I don’t ever want to write lyrics completely before I’ve got my music. “I got out my book of words and look at my research,” he reflects. I thought - 'oh maybe I could sing about that Enola Gay plane'." It was just me at the back of his mum’s house. He had to go on some work employment scheme. “He finally couldn’t turn one down any more. He kept turning down jobs so he could sit in his mum’s room and write songs with me,” McCluskey remembers. “Paul had been on the dole for a year when the band got started.
It was just McCluskey, a binder stuffed with jottings about Hiroshima and four-engine heavy bombers, and a rudimentary keyboard. Humphreys was out helping to repair a public swimming pool at nearby Hoylake as part of a back to worth scheme (he was living on benefits trying to get OMD up and running).
It was like I was writing a dissertation or something.” As you may know, I don’t always write 'I love you baby'. When it comes to a particular subject I want to know everything about it. “It was quite a slog collecting the lyrics. McCluskey, then a gawky 20 year-old peeking out through spirals of curly hair, was at Humphrey’s house, where the duo, who had met in primary school in Meols, wrote much of their early material. The song itself had come together relatively quickly. It’s about what happened – and how it happened.” “The song is not in any way, shape or form a celebration,” McCluskey continues. But one thing you cannot deny is that it was an absolute atrocious thing to do. There are so many questions that hang over the dropping of the bomb. So many contradictions and different points of view as to whether the Japanese would have surrendered because the Russians were about to come into the war… the dropping of the bomb was actually to demonstrate to the Russians what the Americans could do. He carried with him a folder of lyrics ideas and had spent time reading up on the subject in Liverpool’s grand old Central Library on William Brown Street. McCluskey had long intended writing about the dawn of the atomic age. The pilot, Paul Tibbets, always felt that he had done the right thing." “And of course, there is no more greater moral dilemma than whether you should drop an atomic bomb that kills 140,000 people in the hope that it might save five million. “I’m not a black and white person: it’s always fascinated me…you are actively encouraged to do things in a time of war that would get you locked up for. “I’ve been fascinated – but not in a celebratory way – about the moral dilemmas that occur in warfare. “I’ve always had an ambivalence regarding the dropping of the bomb,” says McCluskey a history nerd and World War 2 buff going back to his adolescence on the Wirral. As the world marks the 75th anniversary of Hiroshima this week, his feelings remain nuanced. McCluskey himself has gone back and forth over the years about Enola Gay, named for the Boeing B-29 Superfortress that dropped the bomb in August 1945. However, he had a dramatic change of heart as in the autumn of 1980 Enola Gay rocketed up the charts, reaching number eight in the UK and number one in Spain and Italy. Our manager at the time thought it was cheesy pop crap.” For Paul it was a little strange – like trying to adopt a stepchild. It was our first song that wasn’t written by us both. “The record company instantly thought, 'oh we’ve got a potential hit',” recalls McCluskey. "The contention was within the band and within our own management. But it was also a lament for the destruction of Hiroshima by a nuclear bomb in 1945. Yes it was catchy, that heavenly synth line spiralling toward the troposphere. OMD were, by contrast, hugely ambivalent about Enola Gay. When Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark ’s Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys played their weird new song for their record label, the suits immediately heard the chiming of cash tills.