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.
