OMD: ‘My generation felt that there was a very good chance that somebody would press the red buttons and we were all going to hell’

Yet for OMD frontman Andy McCluskey, this week’s celebrations to mark 40 years since the release of the band’s landmark single Enola Gay are tinged by the tragic loss of a close friend and his own brush with Covid-19 which left him having to temporarily shelve a benefit show for the group’s road crew.

Several weeks after falling ill with coronavirus, the 61-year-old singer and bass player reports that he still feels “tired and not back to myself again, but compared to others, I’m quite fortunate”, and he rues the fact that in October OMD had to call off a socially distanced show at the O2 Indigo, for which they had also sold livestream tickets. Proceeds were intended to help the stagehands, technicians, caterers, transport crew and merchandise sellers they employ during tours who have “fallen through the cracks” of the Government’s various support schemes.

Having backed the #WeMakeEvents Red Alert campaign to help freelancers, McCluskey says the band “decided to put our money where our mouth is – because to do this concert we had to stump up the guarantee to rent the premises and the equipment and all of the people” – but a combination of his own Covid diagnosis, and Merseyside (where he lives) being plunged into Tier 3 restrictions limiting travel, plus safety concerns for “our crew, who we were trying to do this for”, meant they were forced to postpone the gig until March. Even that, he accepts, may be optimistic. “The problem our business has is that a concert is a mass gathering and I don’t think until we’ve managed to get herd immunity, which is far off, or we have vaccines I’m not sure what we’re going to do about it.”

In mid-October his friend, the musician Hambi Haralambous, died of Covid aged 69. “Hambi was in and around the music scene in Liverpool for over 40 years,” McCluskey says. “He was one of those characters that everybody knew, just about everybody seemed to have been in his band or worked with him.” Latterly he’d run the Motor Museum Studio, that McCluskey owns and where OMD, Oasis, The 1975 and Arctic Monkeys recorded, and worked on visuals for OMD’s tours. “The man was a remarkable creative catalyst and then reinvented himself in his fifties as a genius filmmaker. Most of my work with him in the last 15 years has been with films. He’s sorely missed.”

Amid all of this comes a coloured vinyl extended mix of Enola Gay, pressed for the first time in 12in format – something, McCluskey says, that the band had intended to do in 1979 but were so busy they didn’t have the time. “This was the beginning of us becoming hugely successful and literally your feet did not touch the ground,” he remembers.

McCluskey and bandmate Paul Humphreys’ own remixes of the song, which were created from the original mastertapes, and one by Hot Chip – “a band that we like” – is, the singer says, “not intended to mess with memories” of the 7in single, which reached No8 in the UK 40 years ago and sold 5m copies worldwide. “It’s just been fun to mark the anniversary.”

Poignantly this year is also the 75th anniversary of the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima – an event described in the song. McCluskey says: “I realised that we are now 40 years away from the release of the single, but when the single was released we were only 35 years away from the actual dropping of the bomb – and that for me was an eye-opener, that puts things in perspective.”

The song was written against the backdrop of then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher controversially allowing US nuclear missiles to be stationed in Britain. “I think in the broader context there were several relevant issues,” McCluskey says. “We were still living in the Cold War. My generation felt that there was a very good chance that something was going to kick off and that somebody would press the red buttons and we were all going to hell. I think the reality is it was reflecting on the first use of a nuclear weapon in an age when there were thousands of them all pointed at each other around the world and there was quite a frightening deadlock.

“Obviously then there was the deployment of American bombers in the UK. They were tense times and I think we all felt the euphoria at the very end of the 80s when the (Berlin) Wall came down and the countries in Eastern Europe who had been under the influence of the USSR started to re-emerge from that Iron Curtain.

“The strange thing now is that my son is in a band called MiG15 and people are asking him why are they named after a Cold War aeroplane. The Cold War hasn’t gone away, it’s just gone digital. Mr Putin has had more effect on Western democracy over rigging votes than the Russians have ever done in the last 40 or 50 years trying to use bombs and guns.”

Like many of OMD’s song from the time, Enola Gay did not have an obvious pop chorus, yet it was an international success. McCluskey admits it was a surprise to him that it resonated so widely. “We were still kids and actually there were some issues within the band about the release of the record,” he says. “Paul Humphreys didn’t like it much because it was the first single that had been written by just one of us, so it wasn’t his baby, it had to be adopted and he had to learn to love it. I had the same thing the next year with his song Souvenir, so it balanced out. But our manager, who you’d think would be looking to maximise our commercial potential, thought it was cheesy crap and shouldn’t even be on the album. The record company, however, recognised that it was very catchy and were very excited.

“But again, we were so busy it was released and we were preparing to tour. The attitude of the record company in those days was ‘if it goes into the top 40 we will make a video, we’re not going to waste money unless it does’, but it went straight into the top 40 in the first week. We only had enough time to go into the ITN news studios in London for one hour and play against the blue screen and somebody dropped in some clouds behind us. It is the cheapest video you’ll ever see for a 5m-selling song and that of course remains the video forever more, we can’t change it, but it was amazing. It was No1 in Italy and France for over three months, it sold over a million in each of those countries. It was a phenomenon and I don’t think we expected it.”

OMD have just announced a tour of the UK in November 2021 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of their album Architecture & Morality.

Although reviews at the time were mixed it went on to sell over 4m copies. “The amazing thing is we did what the hell we wanted and people bought more and more of it,” Andy McCluskey says. “Yes, a few journalists weren’t terribly sure about it. A lot of people thought ‘Why are you going off down this road when you’ve just been part of inventing a new genre of synth-pop and salvaging synths from prog-rock hippies? Why are you getting all deep and proggy and intense yourselves now?’ But it worked and people turned round with hindsight and said, ‘It confounded our expectations at the time’, which it was intended to do, but once they’d adapted they went, ‘Oh, it’s still good music’.”

Enola Gay is out today. OMD play at Hull Bonus Arena on November 5, 2021 and First Direct Arena, Leeds on November 6. www.omd.uk.com