A Flock of Seagulls did not pride themselves on their ownership and use of a drum machine. There were two other Seagulls, being Frank Seagull, who was also a hairdresser, and Ali Seagull, who respectively played the bass guitar and the drums and was the brother of Paul Seagull. Mike Seagull sang, and played the electronic synthesiser keyboard - and because this was the early 1980s, he almost certainly played a Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 - whilst his brother Paul Seagull played the electric guitars, and ironically although Mike was a hairdresser, he was genetically predisposed to baldness, and indeed his brother Frank was losing his hair even at the height of the group's success, and both have lost their hair now. Apartness.įour people manned the tank that was A Flock of Seagulls. The band was neither A Speck of Seagulls or A Mass of Seagull, it was most definitely a flock, a distant assembly of identical individuals. It only exists when it is far away, but not so far that it is a speck. No, a flock can only be discerned from a distance. I have not been with the birds, but I am sure that the situation would be no different. There is no flock, there is simply a mass. In their midst, the sheep are a mass of white and bleating, an explosion of white, an overpowering cloud of bleating. I know this from experience, for I have been with the sheep. The one thing that a flock of sheep and birds has in common is distance, for a flock cannot be discerned from close-up, or from within the flock.
In the animal kingdom, two kinds of animals can be grouped in flocks - birds, and sheep, although only certain kinds of birds (a group of crows is, of course, a ' murder', whereas a group of Starlings is a ' catchment'). It was a flock, a purposeful collection of individuals, for there can be no accidental flocks. No, A Flock of Seagulls was not a thing or a person. In contrast, the top New Romantic bands all had names which at least suggested the glamour and style to which their members aspired Duran Duran took their name from the high-camp science fiction film Barbarella, Visage was surely a reference to the striking make-up of lead singer Steve Strange, and Spandau Ballet were of course in thrall to the matchless sartorial style of Rudolf Hess, the barmy ex-top Nazi, then imprisoned in Spandau prison in ultra-fashionable Berlin. Granted, the band's name made reference to the process of making music, and can be construed as a description of the band's oeuvre - although it cannot be in a literal sense, for OMD's music was precisely-sequenced synthesiser pop - but the name nonetheless remains today as the most prominent and extreme example of a bygone fashion. The most extreme example of this trend must, of course, have been Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, a band whose name was not a person or a thing or a philosophy, but an entirely abstract concept.
It was a ship within which its crew sailed - from their native land of Liverpool to the land of America, but that is a story for later. The band existed as an entity separate of the people who manned its guitars, keyboards and drums. They were instead, on those few occasions when the media referred to them as individuals, they were instead 'members of A Flock of Seagulls'. No-one referred to Mike and Ali Score, Frank Maudsley or Paul Reynolds as 'Seagulls', or ' Flockers' or 'The Flock' or 'The Seagulls'. They were not "The Flock of Seagulls", and there was no attempt to equate the imaginary flock with the individual members of the band whether in the extreme fashion of The Ramones, by adopted the band's name as a collective surname, or in the more insidious way members of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones are often referred to as ' Beatles' or ' Rolling Stones'. Like so many bands of the early 1980s, A Flock of Seagulls was named in such a way as to project an aloof image of detachment.
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