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A Flock of Seagulls return

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It’s the original line-up apparently. I’ll be honest I had to read that twice before I’d believe it after watching the video. The iconic hairstyle is gone, the waistline is gone, the ability to remove sunglasses upon entering a room is gone. The passing years have not been kind. They look older than the Stones and in worse shape. The good news is that the bass player seems happy with the reunion. Lead singer Mike Score has a ‘Brando as Colonel Kurtz’ vibe going on from a good angle; from a bad angle it’s ‘Brando as Dr. Moreau’. If you watch the video on mute and randomly freeze-frame you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re watching a Bad Manners or Black Grape comeback promo. Hey, it could even be a reformed Right Said Fred!

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  1. Seriously predisposed to hate ‘em back then (the haircut? Being “big in America” first? Couldn’t be the sh*t name – everyone had one of those) but one of their tunes was dropped into an episode of Halt And Catch Fire a while back and I was already thinking “this is reet good” before I realized it was Barnet Fail and chums.
    They may be more Mitchell Brothers than Martin Kemp now, but how many of us would want to live in a house full of floor length mirrors? Apart from me and Gary.

  2. I saw him at a pub in Liverpool one afternoon about 2-3 years ago. This guy gets up and sings AFOS`s `I Ran` on a karaoke , I thought he sang that well. The the DJ says `thanks Mike` and then announces `a big hand for Mike Score from AFOS`. Like you say Bisto his appearance through me completely, the hair had taken off but he was neck to toe in black leather.

  3. I recently had my tape deck repaired. One of the first tapes in was Jesus Jones on Radio 1 In Concert from 1989. It hasn’t aged well.

    The reformed Jesus Jones played my local pub the other week. I didn’t go. I’ve played on that stage, that’s how far they’ve fallen.

  4. Liked ‘Info Freako’ and parts of Jesus Jones’s first album. Thought ‘Right Here Right Now’ was a decent zeitgeisty kind of pop song.

    Saw them perform at Reading ’90 and they were pants. They’d obviously decided to ditch the guitar sound and replace it with…nothing. So the music sounded like a session drummer struggling with delay while competing with samples on a backing tape; not a great sound for a festival gig. Nor does it make for a good look if you’re the guitar player and the bass player throwing yourselves around the stage as if you’re riffing like Sabbath on speed and all you can here is the echo of a bass drum and a sampled screeching noise with occasional bursts of Italian House piano (also sampled).

    I remember the week in July 1991 when ‘Unbelievable’ by EMF was at No.1 in the US with ‘Right Here Right Now’ at No.2. I think NME made that one-two the cover for that week’s edition. That is a long way to fall.

  5. Sandwiched between “Barbed Wire Kisses” and “The Martyr Mantras” are two Jesus Jones elpees – ‘liquidizer’ and ‘doubt’ – on the vinly shelves at Foxy Towers. I don’t think either disc has been spun since about 1991. I’d forgotten I had them until you lot started reminiscing!

  6. Has there been a demand for a FoS reunion? Honest question. I would have assumed they’d be a 5 minute spot on an 80s revival bill. But I don’t know that era well.

    • I would usually agree with you, but ver ‘gulls were genuinely big in the US at the time (kind of Herman’s Hermits to Duran Duran’s Beatles), so there may well be a lucrative payday in prospect for the sake of a few months on the road, and good luck to them… “I Ran” and “Wishing” are still choons, though I don’t think I’d be in the queue to listen to a whole album’s worth of them…

    • I was going to mention that. Namechecked in Austin Powers as well, plus a nod in La La Land.

      There’s certainly something in the air. They seem to be a key part of the eighties mythos. I genuinely think it’s the name more than the music – ‘a flock of seagulls ‘ – it sounds comical, but bizarre and intriguing. I actually don’t know any of their songs but their name has stuck out as long as I can remember.

  11. I saw them a few years ago at the Electric Picnic festival here in Ireland. The EP always throws in a few “legacy” acts. I’ve also seen OMD (not the Ozark Mountain Daredevils, the other ones), ABC, BAD (spotting a pattern here!) and they were all good value in a large tent on a sunny, beery afternoon. None took themselves too seriously and all were content to just play the hits. I never liked A Flock of Seagulls back in the day but stayed for the set. I think I had more of an issue with the guitarist’s glasses than yer man’s stupid hairdo when they were in thir pomp.

    I just had a flashback to one of our resident school psychos trying to bite my ear off. He had the AFOS haircut…

    • Talking of three letter acronyms (IS it an acronym or just an abbreviation? I don’t know. Anyway, if you feel the need to correct me please don’t bother)…. talking of three letter acronyms, in my work I deal a lot with the Financial Ombudsman Service, or FOS for short… in my head I always think Flock Of Seagulls when I see it written down. Which I find funny, but which is a joke I will never tell to anyone in my work ever for fear of the pitying silence that would come in its wake.

      • I used to see lorries with CTI written on them. My Dad convinced me, an impressionable boy, that they belonged to the jazz record label and were delivering LPs. Fascinated, I subsequently expected to see trucks adorned with the logos of ZTT, Chrysalis, A&M….

  12. Queerly enough, I was in a charity shop last week and ‘I Ran’ was being played. It sounded great, and I’m saying there are three other excellent songs, bang in the middle of the OMD/Classix Nouveaux pasture: ‘Wishing’, ”Space Age Love Song’ and this:

  13. Is it about this time in the proceedings when we need to talk about The Thompson Twins?

    Another band that seemed to become much bigger in the US than in the UK and another band that, to look at, just didn’t seem to make sense. I bought their first album Set when it came out. I can’t remember why. Not listened to it for years but I do have fond memories of their singles like ‘Lies’, ‘Hold Me Now’ and ‘Love on Your Side’ which are for me the quintessential sound of the end of term school disco.

    https://youtu.be/N66cGvR5yvU

      • Yep – it happened. Forgot Simon Le Bon fluffing a high note, the Led Zep debacle and Ronnie, Keef and Dylan – all of those pale next to this. Essentially a warning to all musicians about the dangers of Cocaine abuse. I adore a lot of 80s pop but when people dismiss it outright or say they hate 80s production values – this is probably what it sounds like in their heads:

    • The Thompson Twins are my trigger band, rendering me really quite homicidal. Maybe it was the purloining of their name from the mighty Tintin books; maybe their dour earlier incarnation as a 7 piece had already prejudiced me; maybe it’s the unsmiling, charmless reference to one of their earlier songs (In The Name Of Love) that they make in Love On Your Side. They didn’t help themselves by, if I remember correctly, being ill-tempered in interviews, even with Ver Hits.
      Student teachers trying to be cool. Unlike Andy McCluskey who resembled a fully qualified teacher.

      • They made me think of the Rock School programme – where competent musicians talked with glassy-eyed evenness sharing techniques about achieving a good rock beat – and thereby sucking all the life out the music. In a conversation about music they are like Alan Partridge talking about a Fond Mondeo.

        Undoubtedly talented songwriter in Tom Bailey but I get the impression he is of this ilk. Stylists said – “your band needs crazy haircuts”. He said “very well”.

        Very functional, literal, competent Northern European band. If you have a TT record you probably have a Roxette record too.

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