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Leaving the 1970s and entering the 1980s, how did you feel about pop music, and what music trends were you rebelling against? The lyrics and title of “Enola Gay” expose your love of history and efforts to make intelligent pop music.
#LYRICS ENOLA GAY OMD MOVIE#
It’s the one that most people remember us by, except for the countries where “If You Leave” from the movie Pretty in Pink was big. And over the last 40 years, it’s become the most iconic track that we have. And it’s incredible really, I mean, everywhere it was a hit, it was massive. I mean, it was number one in both of those countries for over three months. It slowly crept up the chart, but particularly in places like Italy and France, once it got to the top of the chart, it didn’t go away. It was very rare that something would go flying in and then fall down, which is what tended to happen if you had a big following. We didn’t have a massive hardcore following, and so songs in the old days used to come into the chart slowly and climb up. We’d only had one hit before, so we were still a fairly new band. In terms of its release and climbing the charts, it wasn’t unusual. How has the track’s reception changed over time? From my knowledge, it didn’t even scrape the top 10 in the UK upon release, but over time it went on to sell five million copies and become a core staple of your live sets and the broader synthpop canon.
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Amazingly, I was 20 years old when I wrote that song. So that was a rather strange and sanguine realization this year, that actually the song was released 40 years ago, and at the time of release, the bomb had been dropped 35 years before. And it’s also the 75th anniversary of the airplane dropping the atom bomb. It’s a double anniversary this year, which is quite strange because it’s the 40th anniversary of the release of the single. I’m here to talk to you about the 40th anniversary of “Enola Gay”, the lead single from your second album, Organisation. 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. 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. 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. Anyone with an idea could produce it musically.Īndroid Face Image by bluebudgie from Pixabay 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. 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.
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Listening out for a counter-narrative to everything they heard blaring from UK radios, they found what they were after in experimental German music. 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. 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. 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. 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. “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.