A FLOCK OF SEAGULLS: HAIR APPARENT

A FLOCK OF SEAGULLS:

FEATURES

HAIR APPARENT

John Mendelssohn

Since moving into it in the autumn of 1982, A Flock Of Seagulls lead singer Mike Score has scarcely seen his new flat in Liverpool 15, “where the riots were, halfway between the richest and poorest parts of the city.”

Behold the travails of the touring musician.

id in,” Our Mike ruefully confides, spj^^ctbout a week wandering around thiHng how I’d like to decorate it, and then on tour again. For all I know it’s not even isre anymore.”

Except for the time it took to record their second album late last year, the ’Gulls have scarcely left America since “I Ran” went into heavy rotation early last summer. But when a conversational foil from Americaj only rock ’n’ roll magazine that bills itself^ such asked him recently if he yearnedi a time when he’ll be able to enjoy thej^ps of all his band’s labors, he replied. “^Kg

on the road is one of the fruits of the labor.

“For instanc^Bis is about the sixth time we’ve been to^H. I’d never have been here otherwise, ej^mpt maybe on holiday, and then I’d hav^K)ent all my time lying on the beach or hflTde the pool thinking, ’cause that’s the^Brt of thing you do on holiday. It’s nice ^me taken to all the hip spots, and to be n^mng money.”

(A nHs from the author: I can’t begin to pictui^mnyone being all that excited about thes^Kur boys from Liverpool who show norths whatever of altering the course of pc^mar music in our time. While they’re adidly less excruciating than at least 175 \ent acts in heavy rotation, they’re also bontestably feeble —feeble singers, feeble flayers, feeble songwriters. Mark my jords — in 18 months, no one will admit to remembering anything about them. If not to the death, though, I will defend your right to be a Flock Of Seagulls fan to the very slight injury.

But to be forewarned—while Our Mike isn’t remotely monstrous, or even particularly obnoxious, neither is he notably witty,

gorgeous, or outrageous, and if you're d^thing but a rabid Flock Of Seagulls fan, recHig what follows is unlikely either to amuH enlighten, or even divert you. While I've used all my standard tricks to try to malHwhat follows entertaining—the thinly-i^Med contempt for the subject, the torturo^Ksyntax, the relentless New Journalistic ^md-person self-references—I cannot, inHaod faith, urge even the most perferv^mproponents of my prose to read /urther.Ham very sorry.)

Not Hat Our Mike always enjoys everythH about his life on the road. “If you enjoy yHurt,” he muses, “it doesn’t mean you’re folng to enjoy it all the time. It just means ^Bnerally you like yogurt. Well, I generalHlike touring.”

His cHversational foil wonders if Liverpool, wHh has been home to Our Mike and drummHbrother Ali since their soldier dad brough^Bem back from Cyprus many years ago, stomas people around every corner seemin^fc smile and say that they wouldn’t turn hii^feway regardless of his name?

At fiiH Our Mike pretends to be no better equipped to answer^^i the next fellow. “Liverpool is just anotheWjien place to me now,” he says sadly. But tl^^he laughs (for reasons that will become clea^Bter), “In fact, it’s full of atrocious nitwits. Tl^^^ople are sort of like those in New York-^^iqh, but friendly if you can get them to ^^k.what they’re doing for a minute.

“What I miss most is all my tc ome—all my little synths and my ste! the fact that I can’t walk around all st my underpants if I want to, eat wher^ it to and put the phone in the bath if t to. I miss small things like going into and knowing all the people. I miss a lot as well, actually.”

• concedes that “being on the road isn’t ally, but emotionally frustrating, Somei? you need a relationship to keep you ut it’s impossible to keep anythin’ together' ile you’re touring. You may meet a _ nd take her on the road with you for a k and then two weeks later she’ll come ,t for a gig. This may go on for three or fi ^months, but it always breaks down, at my experience. Each time you just start to scratch the surface, but gradually that scratch heals, and a month later you’ve got to make the scratch again. You never get any deeper. That’s mindboggling experience.”

As too is waking up on the bus in which the ’Gulls do most of their traveling to the sound of “horrendous metallic chewing noises and all this swearing from Terry, our official driver. Then you look out the back and the engine’s lying about a hundred yards behind you. You’re stuck for four hours without any air conditioning.

“We’ve already been through nine buses on this tour. When our 21st one breaks down, we’re going to have a 21-bus salute.”

In all of rock ’n’ roll, there is no stupider hairdo than Our Mike’s. The poor fellow j:an’t even enjoy a sip of Coca-Cola without, he himself puts it, “lifting the bridge”—that is, the sort of undone qumJ^t hides all but the southernmost regionl®ynis face. What could possess a man to ciWwrnself thus?

“1 saw alln^kefilms like Mad Max II and Escape From n&Bktprk and tried to imagine what would be a g^^knage for me if I were going to be in one oWfcwri,” he explains. “One day on the bus I^^kmy hair in this really weird way and said tiB|^ik, i think I’ll go on stage this way.’ He^^^id. ‘Go for it.’ ” His conversational foil cri^^^The rest of the band thought that I was ao^kgly cracked, but all these 14-year-olds steS screaming when I came on stage, thought I’d keep it.

“If there isn’t a gig or a photo session that day, I won’t even brush it out when I wake ip and it’ll look totally horrendous all day. kthe times we generally pull over for a waitresses tend to be a bit bleary-eyed anj^fcy, and they often think we’re from out^^Kace.

“Pe^^E expect to see the hair now and not the p^fcon. So in a shop, they may think they kno^^dio I am, but won’t be sure enough to ^^rn'iythin’. It’s quite nice to be a bit anonyma^^At the end of this tour I’ll shave it down^^^uniform quarter of an inch until I think OT^fcoaething else to do with it.”

Difficult as it may imagine, looking at him now, people used to pay Our Mike (and ’Gulls bassist Frank Maudsley) to make their hair look fab. “We weren’t into being Vidal Sassoon or anythin’,” he notes, pronouncing “anything” just as Elvis Costello did in that song on Trust that should have been entitled “Watch Your Step,” but may not have been. “We were ground level hairdressers, with this grotty little shop that we wouldn’t even open if we didn’t want to.

“I’d started off as an electrician, but I thought there must be some easier way of making a living. I can use my hands quite well to do anythin’, and I used to do me mum’s hair sometimes, so one day when I was 17 I decided that I’d be a hairdresser. I opened a shop that immediately went completely bankrupt. As soon as I’d learned a bit about it by working for someone else, though, I opened another shop with Frank and a guy called Kevin.

“As soon as we’d painted everything red and tossed up an Open sign, all these little punks stated marching in saying, ‘Can you do me ’air for a quid?’ A quid’s about $1.50! We’d say yeah, and go zap zap, clink clink, spray it a lot, twist it, do all sorts of weird stuff with it. They’d leave the shop going, ‘Dunno about that.’ but the next thing you’d know, they’d be bringing a mate in.”

Our Mike’s conversational foil relates that, after seeing Shampoo, he’d briefly considered becoming a hairdresser himself, since the film has suggested that heterosexual hairdressers get all they want.

Our Mike affirms that hairdressing milady’s hair does tend to make her susceptible to one’s masculine charms, but denies that he and the hunky Frank ever needed such an advantage. “Everyone has their sort of private space around them. With hairdressing, you’re immediately through that barrier because you’ve got to touch someone to do her hair. It’s very relaxing having someone running his fingers through your hair and yeah, girls do go a bit glassy-eyed,

“Being on the road isn't sexually frustrating —Mike Score

“But we always did well for girls anyway.

I can’t understand why anyone can’t. If you can’t do well for girls you must be something ^pretty irregular, pretty alien maybe.” Oh, ^ut up, his conversational foil thinks, cual barriers, though, weren’t the only^^bt that Our Mike and his buddies deligm^^m busting in their shop. “You’d be doin^^^inkette’s hair all spikey,” he remembers^^^bdthe 80-year-old in the next chair would ^^^^ust as a joke, “Oh, lovely—do mine^^fcyaat,’ and they’d both laugh and maybe s^^diatting. It was a spaghetti junction of c^^^ctions.”

Back in the days whe^^^^onsidered hairdressing as a career, Our I^^kconversational foil worried about having^^kk. foulsmelling chemicals in old ladies’ heS he wasn’t getting models and actress? glassy-eyed. Our Mike, though, denies tF this sort of thing was a problem. “Sometimes, when you’d be working on the good-looking girl you’d be wishing you were doing the 80-year-old instead, because she’d probably be more interesting.

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“Anyway, over a year we developed sort of our own style of hairdressing. If you go to a place where the guy’s been trained by Vidal Sassoon, you think, ‘This guy must be good.’ But if someone’s trained by Burt round the corner, you might not know what to think, except. ‘Who the hell’s Burt?’

“That’s Similar to how our music developed. Maybe that’s why a lot of people are unsure about A Flock Of Seagulls, because they don’t see it coming from anythin’ they know. We weren’t influenced by David Bowie and Chic, like everyone else was. We were influenced by the fact that we all woke up and felt like practicing at the same time.”

It hadn’t been his conversational foil’s intention to get into the delicate subject of the Flock’s music. But once Our Mike himself had broached it, there could be no avoiding discussion of Martin Fry’s celebrated description of the Flock as “atrocious nitwits.”

“Let him call us what he likes,” Our Mike sniffs. “He’s into one kind of music and we’re into another. This band hasn’t got anythin’ to do with him. He can’t have much intelligence himself, saying things like that. It’s just like my calling some guy playing a bit of log somewhere in the jungle an atrocious nit wit. And to tell you the truth, I’m not even sure what band he’s in—is it ABC or Heaven 17?

“I think David Bowie said some bad things about us as well. I used to like David Bowie, but anybody who’s been in the business that long without having worked out that music is for each individual to either like or not like for himself.. .well, it’s a bit sad when people get so narrow-minded.”

“If my manager ever rips me off,” Our Mike vows after his conversational foil wonders how much fruit the ‘Gulls!’ labors are likely to earn them in 1983, “I’ll take what I have, buy a gun, and blow his credentials apart.” This strikes his conversational foil as a quote well worth including.

“Lots of young girls throw soft toys and things on stage,” Our Mike explains as his conversational foil runs out of provocative queries and frowns at the teddy bear seated just north of the Casio keyboard on which Our Mike composes ‘Gulls hits-to-be in his hotel room. “I think that’s really good fun. 1 must have 150 of them by now, and I don’t know wherq I’ll put them all.” His conversational foil minks they might make the inmates of an orphanage very happy. “That’s a good idea,” Our Mike muses. “I should tell girls to toss them up so we can give them to young children. And I think that I’ll tell them that if they toss their bras up, we’ll give

them to charity as well.”