There's a shadow of a man at Hiroshima where he'd pass the noon. In a wonderland at Hiroshima, 'Neath the August moon. And the world remembers his face,
Remembers the place was here. Fly the metal bird to Hiroshima, and away your load! Speak the magic word to Hiroshima, Let the sky explode! And the world remembers his name, Remembers the flame was Hiroshima. (Dave Scott-Morgan, 1971)
The words are pretty oblique in English too! They try to project an image of the story, bounded as always by the meter of the music. Here is verse one as I wrote it: ...The second line is my way of saying: where he would pass the time of day ('noon' being a time of day) ie. the shadow is where he would normally have been going about his business. The third line uses an old-time english word 'neath' (I may have made it up but I think it's from Shakespeare. Anyway, it is [bad word] of the word 'beneath') to explain that the man lived in Japan (the land of the august moon) and that it was indeed August when all this happened (August 6, 1945). The picture I want to paint is of someone in Hiroshima passing the time of day beneath (and in) the moon of august.. The lyric is always in pursuit of the core [bad word] that the shadow is all that remained ... The song came out of the shadow! I read the bizarre report about the stone steps of a downtown building bleached perfectly white by the blast of the a-bomb everywhere EXCEPT where someone had been at that moment... shadow etched into stone was the only evidence ... That's where the song came from.... But I understand the problem my lyric has created in the land where my song was so successful. Maybe if you guys had known what it meant you wouldn't have bought it? .... Dave
from an e-mail by Dave Morgan [bad word]  2005):
I don't know exactly what, whether a book or a magazine, but I just chanced upon an article about the first Atom bomb blast on Hiroshima. August the sixth, Nineteen Forty Five it said. It sounded a long while ago then, now it's history book stuff. But the article mentioned the fact that in the remains of downtown Hiroshima, impregnated on a wall, you could see the perfect outline of a man etched as a shadow against the stone. It was the evidence of someone who had stood there - for a millisecond while the stone behind him was bleached white by the intense flash - before being blown to smithereens. Well that was it really:
'There's a shadow of a man at Hiroshima, where he'd pass the noon; In a wonderland at Hiroshima, 'neath the August moon..'. The article wrote the song for me. I was in a group called 'The Ugly's' and Willy Hammond, the lead guitarist, came around one day and we recorded 'Hiroshima' along with some other songs in the front room of my moms house. That was in the year 1969. year later, Lou Reizner recorded it with the group 'Wishful Thinking' using almost the exact same arrangement that Willy and I had put together at my moms house. Apart from recording it at studio quality, the big difference was that Lou had dubbed his own voice onto the record - reciting a facsimile of the original news report announcing the atom bomb attack (he got hold of the transcript of the broadcast).
Well that song was a real 'sleeper'. In fact the 'Wishful Thinking' version immediately sank into a [bad word]  not to be awakened for eight years. Not until 1978 when somebody in East Berlin asked for it to be played on a West Berlin radio station (!!). One thing led to another and by 1979 it had been in the German charts for over 40 consequtive weeks, a massive seller although never higher than about number 30 in the hit parade. Again the song went back to rest.. for another ten years until 1990 when the German artiste Sandra resurrected it in a totally new version with a new arrangement and beat. In this guise it finally became a top ten seller, reaching number four in Germany, and later selling big throughout Europe.