The song was a sleeper hit in the UK: it entered the UK Singles Chart at number 35, but proved popular with audiences and climbed 27 places over the next 3 weeks to reach a peak of number 8, thus becoming the group's first Top 10 hit in their home country. It topped the charts in France, Italy and Portugal. Recognisable by its distinctive lead synthesizer hook and ambiguous lyrics, 'Enola Gay' has come to be regarded as one of the greatest pop songs of the 1980s. Critic Ned Raggett in Allmusic retrospectively described the track as 'astounding.a flat-out pop classic – clever, heartfelt, thrilling, and confident, not to mention catchy and arranged brilliantly.' It featured in MusicRadar's 'The 40 Greatest Synth Tracks Ever' in 2009, who noted that the song 'includes some of the biggest synth hooks of all time.' In 2012, NME listed the track among the '100 Best Songs of the 1980s' and wrote that it 'married Andy McClusky's brilliantly quizzical vocal and placed OMD's unstoppable mesh of synths and programmed beats front and centre to create a pop classic.' The song was selected by the BBC for use during the opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. The song's title is frequently misprinted on the internet as 'Enola Gay e'. In a 2012 interview, the band mentioned that most of the melodic parts were recorded on a Korg Micro-Preset, and that the drum machine sound was 'about the last thing to go on' the recording.
