Sunday Synthpop Brunch: A Flock Of Seagulls

It was all about timing: the post-punk New Romantic movement, with its legion of bitchin’-haired snappy dressers practicing their best cod-Bowie croon, was uniquely suited to take advantage of the infant form of music video. While it wasn’t quite “money for nothing and chicks for free,” as was widely assumed, the lure of being in a band and being on T.V. (and, by extension, an instant fashion-plate to an impressionable audience of millions) proved irresistible to hundreds of struggling musicians in the U.K. at the time.

While being good-looking and/or seeking to draw the maximum possible attention to ones self was hardly a revolutionary idea in the music industry (even during this time), there existed a handful of bands that ran a bit wild with the style-centric angle of New Romanticism. Among this select clique, none achieved the level of fame (or infamy) reached by A Flock Of Seagulls, one of those unfortunate acts whose utterly bonkers visual aesthetic (two of the four original members worked as hairdressers for day jobs, which undoubtedly gave them a leg up on the competition in that department) almost completely overshadowed their music, at least as far as 95% of the record-buying public was concerned.

As with countless other groups of English origin, A Flock Of Seagulls was centered around two brothers, in this case Mike and Ali Score. The band started off in 1979 in Liverpool as a trio with Mike on the keyboards and vocals (and the occasional guitar) along with Ali on the drums and Mike's friend Frank Maudsley on bass. Realizing quickly that their sound needed to be “filled out” a bit, the band brought aboard guitarist Paul Reynolds after a few months of looking around for a suitable addition and then went about the usual business of writing songs, playing clubs and trying to land themselves a record contract.

One of the most striking aspects to A Flock Of Seagulls is that their music is really quite simple in construction, and executed with hardly any flashiness on behalf of the band. While the resulting clean, basic sound may well have been due to their limited abilities as players (I think it’s safe to say that there were no virtuosos in this lineup), it nevertheless made them stand out even more so from the rest of the emerging field, who tended to fill up the spaces in their music with sequenced arpeggios or extraneous electronic percussion effects. Rather than follow this lead, A Flock Of Seagulls chose to leave those spaces wide open, resulting in a sound that soared and conjured up visions of limitless night-time starscapes rather than fancy clothes and swanky night clubs.

Balancing their vast sonics with a pop songwriting standpoint, A Flock Of Seagulls came off as more of a synthrock band than many of their peers ever dared to be, and it was in this area of that Reynolds became the band’s secret weapon: some of his solos recalling the direct, yet celestial sound of David Gilmour (he also seems to share a bit of the latter’s love for delay and reverb effects). With such a stinging, distinctive tone layered onto atmospheric synth chords and a propulsive rhythm section topped off by the band’s “futuristic” stage appearance, the Flock soon became one of the first signings to the newly-created indie label Cocteau Records.

Not long after the (uneventful) release of their kinetic debut single “(It’s Not Me) Talking” in 1981, the Flock released a debut EP with production handled by ex-Be Bop Deluxe leader and Cocteau Records co-founder Bill Nelson. While this EP made no discernible impact on a commercial level, enough attention was garnered at dance clubs by the pogo-friendly single “Telecommunication” to start turning heads a bit higher up the music industry food chain, and within a few months, the boys found themselves signed to Jive Records and recording their debut album with ex-Gong bassist (and budding New Wave guru) Mike Howlett producing.

Most of the debut EP (including “Telecommunication”) made its way in re-recorded form to the combo’s full-length debut album, which was released in the spring of 1982. From the outset, A Flock Of Seagulls initially went nowhere as the band could not find any purchase at radio for the first single, the grandiose alien abduction epic “I Ran.” This problem was quickly solved by the content-starved MTV cable network, which at the time was voraciously adding just about anything thrown at it in order to fill up airtime. With “I Ran” now in the channel’s rotation, the band then set out on tour as the opening act for fellow U.K. pop lineup Squeeze.

Boiling forth from a doomy, ominous instrumental intro, “I Ran” was for most of America a real blast of fresh air in the increasingly soft/corporate rock-dominated climate of 1982. An imaginative use of aluminum foil and floor mirrors, the promotional videoclip for the song was certainly not a big budget piece in the mold of Duran Duran's “Hungry Like The Wolf,” but it contained enough direct iconic imagery to make it memorable (and of course we cannot go without another nod to Mike Score’s hair, the shape of which was now beginning to resemble that of a seagull in flight) and it soon became one of the most popular videos on the network. Between MTV exposure, resultant airplay from rock radio stations being bombed by listener requests to hear the song, and the band’s ongoing road work, “I Ran” began to build a good sized head of steam that finally got it into the Billboard Hot 100 by midsummer, with A Flock Of Seagulls nearly outpacing its performance on the albums chart.

Winning markets over one by one, “I Ran” took a long time to reach the national Top 10: initially charting in July of 1982, the song finally crested at No. 9 for a couple of weeks right at Halloween with A Flock Of Seagulls reaching the Top 10, selling 500,000 copies as well and staying listed on the album survey for a year.

While “I Ran” remains to this day the song they are best known for, A Flock Of Seagulls have some real gems buried away in their catalog, some of which, like their follow-up single “Space Age Love Song” and the Grammy-winning (!) surf-tinged instrumental "D.N.A." were in a similar melodious, epic vein as “I Ran.” A decent-sized follow-up hit, reaching the lower end of the Top 30 in February of 1983 (following a similarly lengthy climb as its predecessor), “Space Age Love Song” was a more outwardly emotional, even romantic piece that featured Reynolds’ guitar work effectively making the five-word choruses work in spectacular fashion.

By the spring of 1983, the band's follow-up album Listen was ready for release, and was presaged at radio and MTV by the single "Wishing," which is quite possibly the most affecting song in the band's canon. While it didn't glide quite as gracefully as their preceding singles (the drum sound here was far more robotic and mechanical in nature than what had come before), "Wishing" was a more hypnotic kind of work that was all about scale and austerity. It also featured a gorgeous, 2 1/2 minute instrumental coda with Reynolds' oddly-muted guitar presence emerging from the background like a pitched-down whalesong. While "Wishing" stalled disappointingly at the bottom of the U.S. Top 30 (a little below the peak of "Space Age Love Song"), it became the first and only of the band's singles to be embraced by their home country: reaching the Top 10 of the U.K. singles survey.

Those awaiting more of the same on the second Flock album were in for a bit of a surprise as Listen offered up a rather different listening experience than the debut. It wasn’t hard to identify that this was the same band or anything: that intoxicating sweep and sense of space was still there, but the feel of the music was colder, darker, and more overtly synth-driven than what had come before, which was fully the band's intent. A lot of this is likely due to the record being recorded in Germany in the studio owned by legendary Krautrock producer Conrad Planck (though Howlett was manning the boards again). Listening to other tracks like the failed second single "Nightmares," the bracing techno-rocker "Over The Border," or the chilling instrumental "The Last Flight Of Yuri Gagarin," it's easy to hear echoes of Neu! and Kraftwerk in the final mix.

That said, Listen remains to this day my favorite of the band’s records (and apparently the same goes for Mike and Ali Score, judging by the liner notes in the CD), possessing some pretty forlorn, spatial landscapes that admittedly lack obvious pop hooks, but not without a few hidden gems, one of the shiniest of which was the absolutely sublime electro-ballad “Transfer Affection.”

Listen was viewed as a commercial letdown in comparison to A Flock Of Seagulls, even though it reached to #16 on the album charts and was listed for five months, but it was on the 1984 album The Story Of A Young Heart that the wheels really started to come off. Listen may have been a alienating to those who wanted more of "I Ran," but The Story Of A Young Heart offered up more of the "classic" Flock sound, but a complete drag regardless. While the group appeared to be trying to reclaim lost ground in already-changing times, their charming shortcomings had started to become a bit glaring, particularly in the areas of songwriting and artistic growth. By switching back to their "classic" sound, A Flock Of Seagulls weren't at all rejuvenated, but instead sounded like they were running out of gas. Apparently the public agreed, as the The Story Of A Young Heart flamed out at #66 on the album chart, ten notches below the peak position on the Hot 100 of its one and only single “The More You Live, The More You Love.” Both album and single represented the last appearance of the Flock on the U.S. hit parade.

The next couple of years for the band weren’t pleasant for anyone involved as some pretty massive changes fundamentally altered the direction and sound of the band, the most damaging being the departure of Paul Reynolds. A bit of a fragile soul during the best of times, Reynolds apparently descended into serious drug and alcohol abuse as a result of stress and constant rigorous touring. By all accounts, Reynolds was a physical and mental wreck and leaving the band probably saved his life. At the time, however, the loss of his highly distinctive guitar work (a crucial part of Flock’s signature sound) really took the wind out of the band’s sails.

The magnitude of this loss became glaringly apparent (as did a few other things) when the band’s fourth album appeared in the spring of 1986. At the time, I never would have thought that a new Flock Of Seagulls album would make The Story Of A Young Heart sound like a Herculean achievement, but unfortunately no one was prepared for Dream Come True. Recorded in Philadelphia, co-produced by Mike Score and a guy named Wayne Braithwaite (who has also worked with the likes of, uh, Billy Ocean and Kenny G) and with a far different sound and approach than any of the albums preceding it, Dream Come True was a clunky, misguided disaster on just about every imaginable level, from the embarrassing, over-shellacked techno-funk production to the frankly hideous cover art. It was pretty obviously the endgame for A Flock Of Seagulls and they knew it, but what a shame that they had to release this album to figure it out.

Following the complete dissolution of the band in the wake of that fiasco, Mike Score laid low for a while and then, surprisingly, resurfaced in 1989 as A Flock Of Seagulls with an entirely new band installed around him. This new lineup would change regularly around Score over the years, with the odd single (“Magic”) or album (The Light At The End Of The World) to flog for a small group of remaining die-hard fans. Otherwise, one could convincingly argue that A Flock Of Seagulls got a jump on the competition one last time as they became, whether they like it or not, the first traveling 80s nostalgia show.


Buy The Best Of A Flock Of Seagulls from Amazon.com.