Not that they’re given much credit for it. It’s a sound that would help to define the decade. Earnestness and longing echoing from a great distance. Score finally achieves human fluency singing, “If I had a photograph of you/or something to remind me/ I wouldn’t spend my life just wishing.” Reynolds, taking an E-bow to his guitar, coaxes the craft farther and farther beyond the horizon, and the wonder of approaching a new world gives way to wistfulness at leaving the old one behind.
The band’s crowning achievement, the triumphant sum of all of its parts, is “Wishing (If I Had a Photograph of You).” Propelled by Score’s beautiful chords, it sounds, at once, like a shuttle lifting off and the wonder felt by those who stop to watch it pass overhead. In Score’s atmospheres, Reynolds’ offerings peak then bloom, billow and change color, like jet streams in the gloaming. Using a Roland RE-501 jazz chorus amp and a RAT distortion pedal, he created echo effects and delays that would help define the band’s sound and set it apart from other synth bands of the era. On the gorgeous “Space Age Love Song,” for example, Score gamely affords them vast planes of sound against which Reynolds can orient the listener, punctuating the backdrop like a blinking radio tower. They are urgent and pleading like SOS calls. Reynolds’ riffs shoot up like rescue flares. One can hear a bit of its maritime influence in the band’s patterns, that is if sea ships were spaceships and the ocean were the whole of the night sky. The Seagulls, which also included drummer Ali Score and bass player Frank Maudsley, hailed from the famed seaport city of Liverpool. Their signature song, “I Ran,” which Score played using a Korg MS-10 keyboard setup, makes that fabled “final frontier” sound like the wild west, a ray gun shootout between man and Martian.
“Nightmares,” one of many songs that fall under the band’s theme of alien abduction, is haunting and sparse and features an echoing wail that sounds like it’s coming from light years away. “Transfer Affection” a sweet and gentle ballad, sounds like another being mimicking human emotions and the speech patterns with which to express them. Their bouncy first hit single was the aptly titled “Telecommunication,” the verses of which sound, between jubilant choruses, like an intrepid astronaut transmitting observations from a new dimension back to a space hub. His earthly counterpart, wunderkind Paul Reynolds, did, in fact, strum his Kramer XL-5 with an old penny, and though he remained less visible behind his oversized sunglasses, was the band’s beating heart. Lead singer Mike Score, sporting a “waterfall” hairdo, playing his Roland Jupiter 8 synth, singing staccato lines in a robotic monotone, was truly an alien presence. They’d listened as Bowie asked, “Is there life on Mars?” A Flock of Seagulls’ answer was, “Yes. And in Britain, a new wave of bands armed with synthesizers were beckoning the future in their own way. NASA began launching its fleet of shuttles to explore the infinite. Armageddon felt imminent with the threat of nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union hanging in the air. In the early 1980s, the future had never seemed so near. This is the sound of A Flock of Seagulls.
An alien intercepts them and signals back. A young boy sends signals out into space using an old penny and some string.
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