“Enola Gay” is perfect pop, the ultimate party-uplift banger. It’s that rare song which only seems to grow better as the years, then decades pass. This is tricky to reconcile with the fact it’s about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (albeit opaquely). But, when Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark play it as the last song before their encore, the subject matter fragments amid its subversively joyous synth riff, as has been the case ever since it was a Top 10 hit, back in 1980. It’s greeted ecstatically, like the old friend it is.
OMD’s set-up initially looks Kraftwerk-ian, with two synths at the stage-back, right and left, manned by Paul Humphreys and Martin Cooper, all four members sternly dressed in matching black. But this ideal is spiked by the fact they have a rock drummer (Stuart Kershaw) and by the bloke-next-door antics of frontman Andy McCluskey. The opening number, nonetheless, the (relatively) recent “Isotype”, is very much in the vein of Kraftwerk, the band’s original inspiration. “I know this isn’t a hit but it’s not summer yet,” says McCluskey, somewhat cryptically.
The reference to the song not being a hit makes sense, though, because tonight is the first date of OMD’s Greatest Hits Tour. It’s a magnificent setting, Lincoln’s Norman castle, four decades away from its millennium, with the two-century old Crown Court building to the right of the stage, glowing pink in the lights. The predicted heavy rain even holds off, aside from occasional spitting.
The problem this writer has with OMD is a deeply felt contention that they made some wonderful music between 1979 and 1983, and have been doing so again since 2010, but that the music they made between 1984 and 1996, when they first folded, lacks heft and is sometimes cringe-tastic. Unfortunately, it’s from this period that a good number of the hits derive. Happily for the band, I’m very much a minority. Cheery faces all about sing along, word for word, to the terrace anthem chorus of “Tesla Girls”.
McCluskey is an unedited presence. This is, by turns, refreshing and clunky. He chats as though he were playing a pub with his mates, which sometimes lands weirdly, as with his repeated suggestion that, for OMD virgins, he’s not sure how gentle the band are going to be, but he’s mostly endearing. He riffs on Lennon, telling the VIP section to “put your glasses down and rattle your jewellery”. He introduces the Eighties-in-excelsis “If You Leave”, from the film Pretty in Pink, “for all the girls who wanted to be Molly Ringwald… and all the boys who wanted to be Molly Ringwald too.”
Paul Humphries comes up front to sing a few numbers, such as “Forever Live and Die” and “Souvenir”, with its gorgeous and influential synth intro (its construction later heavily flavouring Ryan Paris’s Euro-gorgonzola hit “Dolce Vita”), but its McCluskey who amps the energy, getting the crowd clapping along to “Joan of Arc” and jumping up’n’down to “Secret”.
Martin Cooper showcases his sax skills for “So in Love” and, by the time they reach “Sailing on the Seven Seas”, Lincoln Castle is having a proper sing-along. For this writer, the nadir is the dreadful “Locomotion”, which sums up how OMD’s back catalogue really does represent both the best and worst of the Eighties.
At the start of the encore, McCluskey comes in with a classic McCluskey-ism, introducing 2023’s “Look at You Now” as “a song released in 1981”, a bizarre deadpan gag that apparently confuses even Humphries. It’s pleasing though, that all four onstage have been longterm members of OMD, rather than it just being McCluskey, Humphreys and a couple of session guys.
After playing 1991’s “Pandora’s Box”, they end the night, as they usually do, with their debut single, “Electricity”. Just as Madness always end with “Night Boat to Cairo”, it’s a touchstone, grounding the band and their audience in what made OMD great in the first place. It works. It’s a shiny nugget that, when it appeared in 1979, sounded beamed in from the future. It still bristles with contagious electro-pop zing and much dancing takes over the castle grounds. Then, visibly pleased with how the evening has gone, the foursome exit, but not before McCluskey, in his inimitable fashion, has compared us favourably to the audience he will be playing to in 24 hours time.
Below: Watch OMD play "Enola Gay" live at the Virgin Radio Halloween Party 2023
