Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark are the most important and influential group of the late 1970s/early 1980s birth of electropop. OMD’s classic, clever, arty synthpop single “Enola Gay” is 40 years old, and Andy McCluskey takes us through their history.
“Enola Gay”, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s (OMD’s) wonderfully indulgent synthpop classic named after the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, has just turned 40. While the last 40 years have seen OMD produce multiple charting records, break into America with Pretty in Pink‘s “If You Leave”, and more recently, record the critically acclaimed The Punishment of Luxury, it’s “Enola Gay” that most honestly captures the band’s triumphant legacy.
Synthesizing intellectual lyrics with popular sensibilities, “Enola Gay” reflects bandmates Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys’ efforts to bring the cerebral and often, commonplace, into the mainstream. Taking a detour from the typical source of lyrical inspiration, love, and human experience, OMD lifted their songs from engineering handbooks, historical stories, and wartime politics.
The popular music of the 1970s as OMD saw it had become senseless and overblown with uninventive guitar-work, mythological narratives (looking at you, prog-rock), and financial barriers to entry. Listening out for a counter-narrative to everything they heard blaring from UK radios, they found what they were after in experimental German music.
German bands like Kraftwerk, Neu!, and Faust made heavy use of synthesizers, followed unconventional song structures, and seemed committed to unfashionable but relevant subject matter like urban development, technology, and the role of the individual in a mechanized society. The reliance upon synthesizers, instruments that were becoming increasingly affordable and required little knowledge to play, also meant that an artist’s traditional characteristics were being challenged. Anyone with an idea could produce it musically.
OMD adopted the conventions of German electronic music and applied them to catchy melodies, tying the two together in an act that went on to define the new pop of the 1980s. More than any of their other songs, “Enola Gay” is evidence of how OMD masterfully captured the concerns of the modern world and packaged them up in such a way that they won over the mainstream.
To celebrate the anniversary of a single that remains at the center of the band’s live set and recorded catalogue, PopMatters’ Max Shand met with Andy McCluskey to discuss a lifetime of making intelligent pop music, remaining innovative over a 40-year career, and how popular culture is eating its history.
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