https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/jan/07/orchestral-manoeuvres-dark-enola-gay
Paul Humphreys, keyboards
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. We’d intended the song to go on our eponymously titled first album, but hadn’t quite got it right. When we signed to Virgin, they put us with producer Mike Howlett, ex-bass player with space rockers Gong, and he helped us improve it. He took us to this lovely studio, at Ridge Farm in Dorking, our first venture into proper recording. In those days, you didn’t have sequencers, where you can just chuck something in and edit it; it all had to be done manually. So, as I was a much better keyboardist than Andy at the time, I programmed the synths and played everything on the keyboards.
Our great inspiration was Kraftwerk, though we didn’t have the technology to emulate them. This helped us define our own sound. We were never purist and robotic, and there was a certain romance in our melodies. Today, making our new album, I’ve got about a billion synths and the possibilities are endless; but back then, proper synths cost thousands. Ours were really quite cheesy. Most of the melodic parts of Enola Gay were recorded on a Korg Micro-Preset bought from a mail order catalogue – the cheapest one you could buy.
Andy found the master tape recently . The single might sound big and grand, but when you listen to the solo parts on the master, everything is so small; 60 per cent of that sound must have come from the reverb effects we used in the studio. When we reformed the band a few years ago, we bought up a load of old synths on eBay; we didn’t want to come over like a band using modern instruments to try to sound like OMD. Songs are like capsules that catch a moment. When you perform them correctly, audiences are transported back to when they first heard them.