Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark – Enola Gay
#quotefromthe80s
These games you play
They're gonna end in more than tears some day
Ah-ha, Enola Gay
It shouldn't ever have to end this way
#EnolaGay #OMD #OrchestralManoeuvresInTheDark
On September 26, 1980, a song came out that most likely we all still remember today. Surely because it is a beautiful song, very catchy, but also for a number of additional reasons. The group that created it, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, abbreviated to O.M.D., were quite well known on the English electronic music scene. They had formed two years earlier in the Merseyside area, the area around Liverpool that throughout the 1980s will churn out creative talents always faithful to their originality and genuineness, as opposed to the more glamorous and glossy images that will instead come from London and international record companies. This area will give us Mighty Wah and Pete Wylie, authors of Come back and later Sinful!, China Crisis with Black Man Ray or It’s Immaterial with Driving Away from Home.
O.M.D. were about to release their second album Organisation (the first had only been out eight months earlier), and of course they chose a song that would drive sales. The song had a title that in authors’ intentions was a very clear reference, but it was also misunderstood, and all in all this gave further visibility to a hit that was already memorable in itself.
We are talking about Enola Gay, a song on which honestly the record company and also some O.M.D. members placed hopes but also many doubts. The song is a very clear reference to the atomic bomb launch on Hiroshima, which took place on August 6, 1945. Of course it is an anti-war song, and the intent of the frontman Andy McCluskey and his teammates was to make us think if really that action was necessary, as well as warfare in general. O.M.D. were passionate about aviation, and put a series of references to that mission in the lyrics.
Enola Gay was the name of the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb. Commander Paul Tibbets named his plane after his mother’s name, which was precisely Enola Gay Tibbets. So the verse saying that Enola Gay should have stayed at home that morning begins to make sense. There is a reference to a time in a cryptic verse which says “it is 8.15 / And that’s the time that it’s always been”, but the reference becomes clear and powerful when we remember that the bomb exploded in the sky over Hiroshima at that very hour. Due to the effects of the explosion the clocks that were not completely destroyed stopped, marking 8.15 forever.
The anti-militarist position of O.M.D. it is summed up in the doubt that is placed in the text, whether the mother is really proud of little boy today. A very clear play on words, if we think that “Little Boy” was the code name of the bomb device. So McCluskey is wondering if Enola Gay would have been really proud that a plane with her name had dropped the deadliest weapon in history, but also, more directly, that her son was the author of that action. Moreover, the lady was still alive when the song came out, although she was of course in the United States.
Net of the considerations in the text, however, the song was irresistible. The riff of electronic keyboards that we all know made it famous throughout Europe and very exportable, without political or militaristic considerations. This will also happen in 1984 to another antimilitaristic song, Industry’s State of the Nation. Furthermore, the presence of the word Gay in the title generated a series of misunderstandings that contributed to making it a kind of anthem of the first homosexual communities (in 1980 the concept of LGBTQ ++ was still immature), which naturally contributed to the spread of this song. It was certainly a very pleasant song musically.
The video is rather simple, but impressive. With the first graphic effects allowed by the technology of the time, images of planes and skies are overlapped with and images of Andy and teammates playing the song (dressed in a very british way, I must say). In some scenes,where the profiles of the musicians are cut out and overlapped transparently on the images of the skies, director used a very primordial version of rotoscoping, the same technique that, after five years of progress, will allow director Steve Barron to shoot the most iconic video of the 80s, Take on me by a-ha.
Finally: this song that no one wanted to bet on even reached eighth place in the British charts, and first place in many European countries, including Italy and Spain. It is fair to remember that we were in 1980, MTV did not exist yet and Prince Charles had not even married Lady Diana yet: in short, the 80s had practically not even begun, and this song had already entered the imagination and the memories of us dinosaurs forever!
Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark on Wikipedia
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