When it came to recording, the drum machine that you hear at the beginning was about the last thing to go on. I’m also proud of the fact that, although Paul and I were obsessed by technology and electronic sounds, we never wanted to do the silly we-are-robots thing that was fashionable in the early 80s. The emotional way I sang the song helped give it strength. 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? 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 thought the line “Is mother proud of little boy today?” was so terribly clever, because it had several meanings. 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. Our manager even threatened to resign if we released it as a single. But the subject matter caused consternation within the band. We were a pair of anoraks with a fascination for old trains and aeroplanes, which inevitably led me to write about Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Paul Humphreys and I had been at school together and formed Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark in 1978.
