![]() Mike was backcombing his hair and we all wanted to get to the mirror to do our hair, get our make-up on,” he remembers. “We were getting ready for a gig in Trinidad, it was in a miserable, dirty old dressing room. ![]() It’s a story Maudsley has told many times before, but doesn’t seem to tire of sharing. Key to that look was Score’s outrageous hairstyle, which was created by accident shortly before a gig in the West Indies. “MTV had a lot do with it ,” he explains.”Video Killed The Radio Star – know what I mean?” The band’s stand out look made them perfectly suited to the emerging art of the pop video and Maudsley attributes their US success to the rise of MTV. “We were influenced by David Bowie, The Cars– all the stuff going on in the late ‘70s.” “We were always described as a New Romantic band, but I don’t think we ever really were,” Maudsley remembers. ![]() Their self-titled debut LP further enhanced their reputation, before ‘ Wishing…’from second album Listen gave then a first Top Ten hit in the UK. They scored a club hit with second single Telecommunication, before exploding into the public consciousness with ‘ I Ran (So Far Away)‘, which went top 10 in the US and No 1 in Australia. The band released Space Age Love Songfrom the new album in June, with Ascensionthe only track written solely for the album due to follow soon.įormed in 1980, the band took their name, according to Mike Score, from The Stranglers‘ song ‘ Toiler On The Seaand the novella Jonathan Livingston Seagullby Richard Bach. “It’s a massive dream, it’s incredibly humbling,” he says before pausing to pick out the melody to Wishing (I Had A Photograph Of You)on his baby grand. The orchestral arrangements on the album were performed by the Prague Philharmonic and Maudsley is hugely enthusiastic about the recordings. “We would be playing festivals to 200 or 300 thousand people a night and it would be a big stage to cover. I may have to ask for a stool on this tour, but I might be a better musician for that.” “You had to be very athletic,” he explains. He concedes his condition is likely to make for more sedate performances than in the band’s early years when he’d “be running all over the stage”. With a tour in support of the album set for the Autumn, Frank admits his excitement about being on the road again is tinged with some trepidation. A photograph of you – Maudsley in his ’80s heyday “And now we’ve got this fucking album coming out!,” he laughs. “And this thing in my chest wall shocks me back to life. “I just die suddenly all the time,” he explains matter-of-factly. Maudsley has been fitted with a defibrillator, which restarts his heart when it stops pumping. This results in the heart being less able to pump blood effectively. Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is an incurable condition, in which a portion of the heart becomes thickened without an obvious cause. “I’m finding everything very emotional,” he admits, “It’s a crazy time.” News that Flock of Seagulls were getting back together came as something of a surprise to Maudsley who had thought he was “done with being in a group”.Īlthough delighted to be back with his old mates again, it was something of a double whammy following the diagnosis of his heart problem. A Flock of Seagulls clockwise: Mike Score, Ali Score, Paul Reynolds and Frank Maudsley ![]() Pausing every now and again to play a flourish of chords on his baby grand piano, he outlines the band’s rollercoaster rise and fall, his fondness for “the dark side of the Seagulls” and the happy accident that led to the creation of that legendary bonkers barnet. Very much the joker in the pack, Maudsley, is in typically mischievous mood in his chat with EP, challenging our writer Matt Catchpole “to ask us something really daft”. Happily settled back in his beloved Liverpool, he’s determined not to let a little thing like hypertrophic cardiomyopathy get in the way of the band’s comeback tour. They achieved rapid fame – perhaps too rapid in retrospect, burning brightly but briefly – the original quartet releasing just two albums before imploding in a whirl of breakdowns and inter-band rivalries.īut now, having first been brought back together by VH1‘s Bands Reunited in 2003, A Flock of Seagulls have returned with Ascension a series of orchestral re-workings of some of their most famous songs, along with a brand new title track.įor bassist Frank Maudsley, however, the band’s revival has been bittersweet, coming not long after he was diagnosed with a potentially life-threatening heart condition. With their futuristic sound and frontman Mike Score’s outlandish haircut, A Flock of Seagulls were as synonymous with the eighties as yuppies, ET and DeLorean cars. ![]()
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