MIKE SCORE: In the late seventies, early eighties, I owned a shop in Liverpool called Oz the Magic Hairdresser. We were the punk hairdresser in town—crazy perms, crazy colors. I witnessed the music scene from the outside: I wasn’t really a clubgoer. I was 25 and married with a child. But I was involved with people in local bands who would come in and get their hair done: Teardrop Explodes, the Icicle Works. That got me interested. In ’78 or ’79, Hambi from Hambi and the Dance came into the shop and said they needed a bass player. I was just learning to play, but I told them I was the best bass player in Liverpool, and, probably in their desperation, they believed it. I ended up joining them.
One thing I didn’t really like about the after-punk Liverpool scene was that everything was dark. We called it the Raincoat Brigade, because they all wore long coats and hangdog expressions. But they were stylish in their own way. Almost like the hipsters are now. But Hambi were more Talking Heads than Echo and the Bunnymen: not as dark, a bit more fun, and tinged with sixties psychedelia. Then Hambi got a deal with Virgin Records, and they said there were two of us who didn’t fit the style of the band, and I was one of them. But they said, “Maybe start your own band and come back to us.” I told my brother, Ali, and he goes, “Great, I’ll be the drummer!” Frank Maudsley, who worked for me, was like, “Well, let me join too.” Synths had just come out, so I said to Frank: “Here, play my bass. I’m going to get a synth.” Frank’s friend Paul Reynolds slotted in on guitar, and, basically, that became A Flock of Seagulls.
I wanted to call the band Level 7 because I was reading a sci-fi book with that title. It felt really techno and electronic. Then another band came out called Level 42. We were like, “Shit! People will think, You’re just copying Level 42.” I’d also read Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and it said a lot of things that I was thinking. In the book, the seagulls squabble over food, and one of them realizes he has wings and can fly. He looks at all the other birds flying and says, “They have wings, I have wings. Look how high they’re flying. Why aren’t I flying that high?” That was the inspiration. I went, “OK, now I want to be a seagull, and my band will be A Flock of Seagulls. We all want to fly that high.”
We were never really a part of the Liverpool scene. As I said, Liverpool was into darker bands like Teardrop Explodes and Joy Division. We were more into Devo and the Cars. We’d seen Duran Duran on TV, and they were more in the path that we were going down, except they weren’t as electronic as we wanted to be. It sounds big-headed now, but we didn’t think Liverpool was ready for what we were doing, though we thought the rest of the world might be. So we made a mutual decision: We’re going to London. What we want is to be world-big, not Liverpool-big.
The four of us went and lived in London for two weeks in a van. We went to every gig we could and gave tapes out. One of the guys that got the tape was Tommy Crossan, a soundman for a band called the Yachts. They did a gig in Liverpool, and we opened for them: A Nautical Extravaganza with the Yachts and A Flock of Seagulls. We found Tommy’s address and parked outside his door. One morning I said, “Have you listened to the tape?” He said, “No, I haven’t.” I said, “Well, we’re not moving until you listen to it.” Tommy ended up co-managing us.
STYLE COUNCIL
“I didn’t wash it for a couple weeks at a time because it was just so locked into place—a can of Aquanet every night,” Score says. “Once it was up and we had gigs, it never came down. One show, a girl jumped onstage, ran over to me, touched my hair, and fainted. I came offstage that night, and my manager said, ‘I think you’ve got something there!’”
Ninety-nine percent of the record companies rejected us. I don’t think it was that we weren’t good; it was that they didn’t understand what we were doing. One of the labels we were trying to get a deal with was Zoo Records in Liverpool, which had Teardrop and Echo. One day we went up to their offices, and they had a picture on the wall of two people running away from a flying saucer. It was probably from a fifties movie. They said it was going to be the cover of Teardrop Explodes’ new album. I mentally put myself in the position of the people running from the flying saucer. Then we went to see the band Fischer-Z, and they had a song called “I Ran.” [Editor’s note: It was actually called “Wristcutter’s Lullaby.”] When things are right, they line up. I went, “I ran from the alien girl in the flying saucer who was chasing me,” and within a few minutes the whole song came together. “I Ran” wrote itself, as all good songs do.
People used to say to me, “What is the aurora borealis?” and I was like, “How could you not know?” Then, secondly, they would say, “How did you get those words to fit into a song?” You’ve seen Close Encounters. You know when the ship breaks through the clouds and the rainbow-effect thing happens? That’s like in the song: “A cloud appears above your head / A beam of light comes shining down on you.” When she’s coming down on her beam of light, it breaks through the clouds, and there’s the aurora borealis.
The concept for our debut album [1982’s A Flock of Seagulls] is sci-fi too. It’s a love album, but it’s not about loving the girl around the corner. When you watch Star Trek, Captain Kirk always got the green girl, the alien girl. So that was my concept, to be the guy that was in love with the alien, not the girl who works on the checkout at the Publix. Of course, being into sci-fi, we also loved stuff like Ziggy Stardust, “Starman” and “Space Oddity.” Bowie’s clothes and hairstyle made me realize that if I wanted to be in a band that was going somewhere, I had to have a look.
We were the first band Clive Calder signed to a new label called Jive Records. Clive said to us, “There’s a new thing they’re putting on in America called Music Television, and they want videos from new bands. Let’s make a clip for ‘I Ran’ and see what happens.” We were given a hundred pounds each to get some clothes to wear in the video. The first thing we did was we went to some girls’ shops in London. Guys’ clothes just weren’t up to looking very fashionable or new wave-y. The whole new wave thing was to look pretty. We were like, “Let’s grab a few things that make us look different. We don’t want to look like we’re not happy and not interested. And we don’t want to look dark; we want to look bright and sci-fi.”
MTV was a little gift from the gods. By the end of that year, “I Ran” had hit the U.S. Top 10, and we’d toured with the Go-Go’s and played Madison Square Garden twice. It was meteoric. It was nothing, then everything. By ’83, we were supporting the Police on their Synchronicity tour, playing to 100,000 people a night.
In the “I Ran” video, I wore my hair curly. After that, I decided to go for a Ziggy Stardust blond, punk look. We were getting ready to do a show, and I’d spiked my hair up. Frank put his hand on top of my head, basically to say, “Let me see in the mirror as well.” He collapsed the whole top of my hairdo by putting his hand on it, with the sides still sticking up—and it stayed like that. Mick Rossi, our manager, was trying to shoo us on stage, so I just went out with it like that. I noticed a few people looking and pointing. When we came off stage, I looked in the mirror, and I remember feeling a bit like, That looks awesome!
MIXTAPE: 5 More Songs from the Past About the Future 1. “Together in Electric Dreams,” Phil Oakey and Giorgio Moroder 2. “Major Tom,” Peter Schilling 3. “Einstein a Go-Go,” Landscape 4. “Living by Numbers,” New Musik 5. “Living on Video,” Trans-X
The next gig, I went for that look and made it even more so. Frank said “God, that’s so sci-fi!” So it became my image, to have the aerials at the sides, the wings, and the big thing hiding my face, which I thought was great, because that made me more mysterious. That’s how I wore it in the video for “Space Age Love Song.” “Space Age” wasn’t as big of a hit as “I Ran,” but it’s definitely one of our best songs—actually, it’s a rewrite of a song I wrote called “Nagasaki.” It was based on watching a show about the dropping of the atom bomb. My idea was to have beautiful music and horrendous lyrics. Maybe one day I’ll redo it with the original lyrics: “A bomber flies, a
baby dies, a mother cries. Nagasaki.” Now, if you go to “Wishing,” I remember when I played it to a friend of mine, she said, “This is going to put you in the top songwriters in the world.” It’s timeless. Even when I hear it on the radio now, that one stands up to anything. You can put a Beatles song in front of it, you can put a Tears for Fears song in front of it, and it still sounds as good as any of those.
Everybody thought I’d developed this huge ego, because when we did interviews, people wanted to talk to me. Onstage I have a way of controlling the band—I will look at people as if to say, “Start the song now,” and sometimes that gets read wrongly. A lot depends on your opinion of the person who’s looking at you. I would look at my brother as if to say, “Let’s start the song now,” and he would never take it as just a look. He would always take it as me trying to control him. As the band gets bigger, you tend to lose that camaraderie. I think that led to the downfall.
THAT WAS THEN
BUT THIS IS NOW
By the end of ’85, Reynolds, Maudsley, and Ali Score departed the band, leaving Mike Score to employ various musicians so he could continue to tour under the name A Flock of Seagulls. In 2003, all four original members patched things up for VH1’s Bands Reunited series, but the re-formation was short-lived. “It wasn’t long before all the old problems resurfaced,” Score says, referring to the others’ desire for democracy and his need to exert control. Soon after, he was again a lone Seagull, but he also began writing and recording his own material, which he describes as “better than any Seagulls stuff.” In July 2013, all Score’s music equipment and tracks for an upcoming solo record were stolen. Though he now sports a shorn pate, his hairstyle lives on as a go-to joke for bad-eighties style. “I Ran” has been covered by artists including Nickelback and Bowling for Soup, and was featured in a commercial for Cape Cod potato chips, in which the song was performed by a flock of CGI seagulls.
SCORE: When the hairdo became more important than the band, I stopped doing it. People would say, “What happened to your hair?” and I would say, “It might be important to you, but it’s not important to me.” For a long time I had it waist-length, snatched back. Then, of course, you start to lose it. I woke up one day and said, “It’s all got to go today,” and I shaved it off. I looked in the mirror and said, “Now you look better than you did in 1982.”
Because of my hair, I’m like a legend of the eighties, right? So I was like, “Why not open a restaurant and have every table have a legend on it?” In 2007, I opened the Legends Cafe in Cocoa Beach, Florida. I had this idea to have a Muhammad Ali table, a Beatles table, a Rolling Stones table, an astronaut table. It had a Mexican bar, Italian dining room, a sushi bar—it was a fusion situation. People loved it, because the girlfriend could have sushi and the guy could have burgers. But I don’t think the world that I put it in was ready for it. We had it open for about a year, and because I knew nothing about running restaurants, I ran it into the ground.
Everybody who’s had a big hit resents it at some point. You go, “Hey, that song was 25 years ago. Why are you still hanging on to it?” As a listener, you go, “Oh, in ’82 I was going out with Billy, and ‘I Ran’ was on, and we had a great time.” I don’t play “I Ran” for me anymore; I play it for the people who like it. At least it keeps me being able to be a musician. I’m not digging ditches, and I’m hoping to retire with a small pension.
“I MELT WITH YOU”
ou know those young-adult novels that today’s kids love so much? The ones based in dystopic universes where doomed lovers try to snatch a fleeting moment of romance before dark forces snuff out their young hearts forever? We didn’t have those in the eighties, but we did have songs about nuclear paranoia, which served more or less the same purpose. As the arms race intensified, as Reagan and Gorbachev stared each other down, fears grew that these might be our last days. But at least we had a stellar soundtrack to keep up our spirits as we awaited the arrival of rockets from Russia. These were the days of “Atomic” by Blondie, “1999” and “Ronnie, Talk to Russia” by Prince, “Missiles” by the Sound, and “Breathing” by Kate Bush, to name a few. These were also the days of “I Melt with You,” which painted perhaps the most idyllic picture of romance in the apocalyptic age. Over the decades, many fresh fears emerged to turn us into twitching, hollow-eyed wrecks, but the jangly headlong rush of “I Melt with You” remains an uplifting reminder that a catchy tune can outlive presidents and their space-defense initiatives.
LM: Whenever I tell people I’m working on a book about the most beloved songs of new wave, they respond with a litany of tracks—“Is this one in it? Is that one in it?” Invariably, “I Melt with You” is one of the first mentioned. Idealist lyrics like “Making love to you was never second best” recall a more innocent time before twerking and choruses like “Tonight I’m fucking you” (thank you, Enrique). And “Never really knowing it was always mesh and lace” is a lyric that could have been written only during the eighties. (When else might someone have attempted to mix two such unlikely fabrics?) At the same time, the music could have been made last week by a U.K. band like White Lies. Ecstasy in the face of Armageddon set to a danceable beat: It’s the only way to go.
JB: “I Melt with You” for me falls into the same category as “Under the Milky Way” by the Church: I like it, I sing along to it, it never feels dated, and I’m sufficiently satisfied by it that I never feel the need to listen to another song from their catalog.
ROBBIE GREY: Punk was kind of dying off; it had become very commercialized. A lot of bands who used to play better music started playing three chords just to jump on the band wagon. We just decided to do something a bit more experimental. Other bands, like Joy Division, Wire, they started to do the same thing just to get away from punk’s straightforward chord structures.
What we were doing, it felt very modern and very English. It felt special to be British because of the record labels like Factory and 4AD. And I remember when we first went to America, they called it the Second British Invasion. But England was a very bleak place back then. We came from Colchester, in Essex, a small town about an hour from London. They talk about a recession, but there is nothing like England in the late seventies and early eighties. There were times when people were only working three days [a week] because there was no money. There’d be no power—you’d be at home with candles. I used to go watch bands just to steal a microphone if I could get close to one.
So that’s what the feel of England was, and I write about things I know. On the first album, [1981’s] Mesh and Lace, “Black Houses” is all about the nuclear threat and all the nuclear pamphlets that were around at the time. You know, “In case of nuclear attack, paint your windows black and get under the table.” [When “I Melt with You” was first released as a single in 1982] I don’t think many people realized it was about a couple making love as the bomb dropped. As they make love, they become one and melt together. I remember writing the lyrics in my room in Shepherd’s Bush in London in about two minutes. I was stoned. I remember kneeling down on the floor and writing on a scrap of paper these first lines: “Moving forward using all my breath”—so easy to say but so much content—and then: “Making love to you was never second best.” They coupled together really nicely. And then, the bridge: “The future’s open wide,” [because] you’ve got a lot of negative stuff with the idea of the nuclear bomb.
“I Melt with You” was a love song, but it was also about the good and bad in people. “Mesh and lace” was the hard and soft. I liked the idea of having these different images in a pop song. The last thing we wanted was to write a song where boy meets girl, they go to the cinema and make love, and that’s the end of it.
The music was put together in a rehearsal room in London. We just put pieces of music together, almost like classical music. We’d say, “Let’s try that piece and that piece together.” That’s why [1982’s After the Snow] is such an imaginative and special album. We really do have to doff our cap to Hugh Jones,
the producer. He stopped me shouting. I used to just get on the microphone and just shout my words ’cause I wanted to tell people what I felt. He was the one who said, “Hold on a minute, Robbie. You can still tell people how you’re feeling, but you can just say it.” And “Melt” is the first song I did it on. That’s why it’s got that very close, not-very-well-sung feel to it on the verses. Let me be straight about this: When we were in the studio, the band had never written a pop song. We were looking at this creation that was coming out of the speakers and thinking, Oh my god, this is different! You know, the whole song just glides. If you took my vocals off, I think it sounds a bit like the Byrds.
MIXTAPE: 5 More Songs About Nuclear Bombs 1. “99 Luftballoons,” Nena 2. “Two Tribes,” Frankie Goes to Hollywood 3. “Dancing with Tears in My Eyes,” Ultravox 4. “The Last Film I Ever Saw,” Kissing the Pink 5. “Red Skies,” The Fixx
Someone picked up an import from England and started playing it on mainstream radio in America, and it just went like wildfire. We used to play to 200 people in art college; the next thing we knew, we were in Daytona Beach playing to 5,000 people who know all the words to “I Melt with You.” When we showed up at spring break, we had never played outside before, and we were so scared of losing all our atmosphere without a roof and walls. The promoter said, “You can play to 10,000 people out here or you can go inside and play to 5,000.” We said we would go inside instead. That night, all the water was running off the walls, it was so hot. We were wearing coats coming off the plane in Florida—we didn’t even know it was going to be hot, that’s how clued up we were. And I’ll never forget coming off the stage and saying to my manager: “That’s it!
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