How I wrote Enola Gay by OMD’s Andy McCluskey in Songwriting Magazine The thought of Paul Humphreys having to carry hod around is still hilarious! But I wrote this song on my own because Paul, in order to continue to receive his dole money, was forced into doing some labouring work in the rebuilding of the local baths in Hoylake. “So, Paul was out and I was at his house and I just started writing the chords on the organ and the melody. Once I got those primary ingredients I then had the blueprint to write the song. It’s a typical linear OMD song, it is the same four chords all the way through and it never varies. The verse, the melody, the middle eight, it’s all the same. “We worked it up as a band and played it in February/March 1980 when we were touring with our first album, before it was even released. There’s a recorded version of it that is on a compilation album before it was officially released.
The famous drum machine sound wasn’t on the original version. We purchased a Roland CR-78 CompuRhythm, which was one of the first programmable drum machines. As well as having the presets like bossa nova and tango, you could actually programme your own drum sounds. So we programmed up that drum pattern and that became the bed for the whole track that we put on to it and is one of the most distinctive parts of the song.
