A cheerful tune about the bomb
A toy-bright synthesiser states a melody you could whistle in a playground, and Andy McCluskey starts singing the name of an aeroplane as if the name were a girl’s, which, terribly, it was.
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark recorded Enola Gay at Ridge Farm Studio in Surrey for Organisation, their second album, with Mike Howlett producing, and released it in September 1980. McCluskey wrote it. He had been a boy who built Airfix planes and read about the war, not in celebration, he has said, but because the moral exemptions of wartime would not leave him alone. The Enola Gay was the B-29 that dropped the bomb code-named Little Boy on Hiroshima. Paul Tibbets, the pilot, had named the aircraft after his mother. McCluskey put all of that into one line he was proud of: is mother proud of little boy today. The manager threatened to resign if they put it out as a single. They did. It reached No. 8 in Britain and became enormous across Europe, a dance record about an atrocity.
Paul Humphreys, who shares the machines, has said he was always uneasy that it was a bright, perky pop song about a nuclear holocaust, and that it was insanely catchy anyway. The unease is the composition. The Korg states the hook with the innocence of a game, and the vocal will not smile with it. On stage the crowd dances, because the record told them to, and the words keep their indictment. McCluskey has refused the idea that the song celebrates anything. It is a discussion, he has said, of a dilemma with no clean side: a bomb that killed a city, a pilot who believed he had shortened a war. The single does not adjudicate. It puts the question in a tune you cannot sit still for, which is its own accusation.
I was always uneasy about the fact that Enola Gay was a bright, perky pop song about a nuclear holocaust, but it was insanely catchy.
(Paul Humphreys, The Guardian, 2013)
The track has been played at ceremonies and at discos, and both uses are uncomfortable, which means both are listening. OMD were two young men from the Wirral with cheap keyboards and a library card. They made a hit out of a history lesson that radio would never have commissioned. The arrangement is almost nothing: a bass pulse, a drum machine, that melody, a voice. The emptiness is respectful. There is no orchestral mushroom cloud, no guitar heroism. The horror is left in the words, and the body is invited to move, and the listener has to live with both instructions.
What remains is the line about the mother. It works three ways, as McCluskey intended: Tibbets’s mother, the bomb’s nickname, and the plain human question of whether anyone should be proud. A pop song that can hold that much without a lecture is rarer than a protest record with a pamphlet attached. Enola Gay is still whistled by people who later learn what they are whistling. The learning does not spoil the tune. It completes it. The playground melody was never innocent. It only sounded that way, which was the point, and the risk, and the reason it is still here.
