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I’ve got distance, but I’m still really pissed off at what my friend did. There was a long time when I couldn’t sing those songs live, the memories were too fresh. “I’d go to our rehearsal room two hours before everybody else to write. “I really needed to let everything out,” Mike sighs. Read our review of A Flock Of Seagulls: Inflight – The Extended Essentials Mike’s best friend, who he’d known since his school days, died by suicide. Tragically, 1984’s third album The Story Of A Young Heart proved all too easy to write. I’d already got the riff, and once I started thinking, ‘I wish I had that photograph’, the song wrote itself.” “She said, ‘No, you’ll forget all this when you go off and become a star.’ I can still picture what she looked like, she was absolutely gorgeous. “She had a Polaroid of herself and I asked if I could have the picture,” Mike recalls. It was written about a short-lived romance when the band were between US tours on the first album. Their biggest UK hit, reaching No.10, Mike considers the ballad the band’s best song. But at the end of that year, the attitude from the record company was, ‘You guys must be so exhausted… By the way, you need to make another album.’”Īt least Mike was able to write songs quickly for second album Listen, including Wishing (If I Had A Photograph Of You). “The first year we toured the States was ridiculous. So we just did our best and had fun with it. “It was ‘Next week, you’re opening for The Psychedelic Furs to 3,000 people.’ That was as big as the Empire in Liverpool, so it was amazing, but then it was, ‘And now, you’re opening up for The Police.’ ‘What?!’ ‘Yeah, it’s in Chicago, and it’s 60,000 people.’ It was going up so fast, you’re scared to look down because that drop was suddenly massive.

“Every day, it was going up and up,” Mike recalls. Check out our Top 20 reunion albums here Read more: Top 20 80s house hits Initially going to the States to play the usual 300-capacity clubs, the success of I Ran and the album’s other single Space Age Love Song quickly saw the band headline 1,500-capacity theatres in the US. Without us knowing it at the time, I Ran was a big step forward.” “Guitarists and drummers could join in and realise ‘Even though there’s synths, we’ve got a place’ and it helped people getting into synths with the next step. “ I Ran was a great bridge between what was already going on in music and what was about to happen,” he ponders. Mike has long been ambivalent about I Ran, feeling it’s far from the band’s best song.īut he recognises why it became such a smash. The reason Paul joined is he understood about restraint, where so many guitarists want to blast everything at you.”Ī Flock Of Seagulls’ self-titled 1982 debut album featured their biggest worldwide hit, I Ran (So Far Away), as well as DNA, which won the Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental. Paul understood that meant there wasn’t enough going on in the song, and he was brilliant at fitting in his echoey guitar parts that didn’t disturb the vocal. “When I sang, I’d hold one note on a synth. Trying to combine singing with playing keyboards led to Mike’s distinctive minimal style. “Frank was saying, ‘It sounds good when you sing it,’ but I thought, ‘We’re still looking for a singer.’”

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“Because I wrote the songs, in rehearsals I’d say, ‘The vocal should go something like this’ and start singing, but only so we could understand how to play it,” laughs Mike. They got through “six or seven” guitarists before Paul Reynolds auditioned, and they were initially looking for a singer, too. Within three hours of first rehearsing, we had a song.”

“As soon as we started messing around, good things started to happen. “Ali had never played drums, Frank had never played bass, but within an hour they both could,” enthuses Mike. Ali casually said he’d love to be a drummer. On the rebound, Mike bought his first synth, a mono MS-10, so his workmate Frank suggested taking over on bass. Mike was the bassist in his previous band, sacked when they got a record contract only to be told Mike’s playing didn’t fit in. The crackling atmosphere of A Flock Of Seagulls’ music initially came about by accident. Making Ascension brought back a lot of memories, to when we were in our rehearsal room 35 years ago.” Read more: Top 40 synth-pop songs Read more: New Order – Album By Album It didn’t work out, but there was certainly some of the old magic there.

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“Doing that TV show, the same problems that had taken five or six years to arise first time round, they came up in two weeks,” says Mike. The abortive reunion tour in 2003 came on the back of appearing in VH1 show Bands Reunited, where A Flock Of Seagulls joined the likes of The Alarm, Haircut One Hundred and Kajagoogoo in reforming, 19 years after third album The Story Of A Young Heart in 1984.

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