OMD, Enola Gay and a new album

"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..." says Paul Humphreys, of the OMD hit, Enola Gay.

"The subject matter caused consternation within the band," according to Andy McCluskey, "Our manager even threatened to resign if we released it as a single. I researched the subject in the library; it's not the way most people write songs – but couched the lyric in metaphor and emotive language. I thought the line "Is mother proud of little boy today?" was so terribly clever, because it had several meanings. It referenced the fact that the plane was named after the pilot's mother, and the bomb was codenamed "little boy" – while also asking whether a mother would be proud of what her son was doing. I was ambivalent about this: would you fly a plane to kill all those people because you thought you were going to save even more?"

For more, see The Guardian newspaper. OMD's new album, English Electric, is due for release on the 8th of April and their tour starts later the same month.

Meanwhile, here's that song...