I Ran Telecommunication It's Not Me Talking A Flock Of Seagulls

I Ran Album: A Flock Of Seagulls (1982)
Telecommunication Album: A Flock Of Seagulls (1982)
(It's Not Me) Talking Album: Listen (1981)
by A Flock Of Seagulls

80s vibe.

I Ran is the opening song of the album, which is a concept piece about an alien invasion of Earth. The song itself describes a person seeing an attractive female - he becomes anxious and wants to run away from his feelings but he can't forget her. Then they are both abducted by the aliens.

The imaginative (for the time) video broke the band in the US during the early days of MTV. The video was directed by Anthony Van Den Ende, who later did Killing Joke's "Eighties" and Melissa Etheridge's "Like the Way I Do" and "Bring Me Some Water."

The video shows lead singer Mike Score in a room covered from floor to ceiling with aluminum foil and also floor mirrors in which you can see the reflection of the cameras.

Along with Duran Duran, Thompson Twins, and ABC, A Flock of Seagulls was a British pop band who owed their American success almost entirely to MTV. Mike Score, along with the band's bass player Frank Maudsley, were hairdressers, and they put their skills to use in creating that distinctive hairstyle that not only defined the group, but entered the pop culture landscape - witness Samuel L. Jackson's character Jules get a cleverly coiffed young man's attention by yelling "Hey, Flock of Seagulls!" in the movie Pulp Fiction.

The I Ran video cost just £5,000 to make, but it gave a huge return. For Score, the novelty wore off quickly, as his hair was much more famous than he was. He rarely got to talk about his music because interviewers were always asking about the hair.

Lead singer Mike Score recalled the day he wrote the song to Billboard:

"We'd just been to the Cavern in Liverpool and saw a band play a song called 'I Ran' and thought, 'What a great name,' although we didn't particularly like the song. And then the next day saw a picture from the 1950s of a flying saucer and two people running away from it. And because we had this sci-fi thing going on, it was like 'look at that! First 'I Ran' and now that!' So even though we had the basics of the music already, we went to rehearsal that night and the picture was in my head and we started to try to formulate words about that.

And when I'm playing live, that picture comes back into my mind. And of course movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the flying saucer coming out of the clouds, that contributed to lyrics, and all that comes through your mind and it makes you smile."

Flock leader Mike Score said in a VH1 interview: "Every time I perform live, everyone just wants to hear 'I Ran'... I'm sick of it!"

He softened his stance in 2018. "I don't think it's the best song we've got, although it was the biggest hit. I have moments where I think 'Space Age' is a lot better, or 'Wishing' is a lot better. It depends on the mood I'm in, or the emotional state I'm in at the time. But I like to play it live, because the crowd loves it. Especially at nostalgia gigs like this tour, you want to give people what they remembered, and they remember 'I Ran,' and they all get into it and have a great time. It puts a big smile on your face."

I Ran was A Flock Of Seagulls biggest hit in the US, but in the UK they enjoyed a bigger hit with "Wishing (If I Had A Photograph Of You)," which reached #10.

The band was not named after their hairstyles, but after a combination of a book title and a lyric. Mike Score was a big fan of the book Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach, and of The Stranglers, whose song "Toiler On The Sea" has the refrain: "A flock of seagulls."

When I Ran does appear in movies, it's often in jokey reference to the time period. It shows up in the 1998 film Edge of Seventeen, which is set in 1984, and in the 1999 film The Suburbans, about an '80s cover band. In the 2016 film La La Land, Ryan Gosling's jazz-snob character ends up playing keyboards in an '80s cover band, and Emma Stone's character torments him by requesting this song and dancing along to it as he's forced to play it.

The band Bowling For Soup covered I Ran on the 2003 re-release of their album Drunk Enough To Dance. Other acts to cover it include Cranial Screwtop and Assemblage 23.

I Ran is the theme song of the video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and was used in the TV advertisements for that game.
A portion of the song was used as the opening for the cartoon Knights of the Zodiac.

Telecommunication was released in 1981 as the band's second single. Although it did not chart on either the traditional United Kingdom or United States charts, it received considerable time on the dance charts. It peaked at number 19 on the Hot Dance Club Play chart in 1981, along with "Modern Love Is Automatic". The uptempo beat featuring power chords and heavy synth, along with the futuristic lyrics, has enabled the song to reach cult status. The song is noteworthy because the band eschewed the guitar-laden choruses many songs of this period had (e.g. power ballad), and instead relied on percussion arpeggios and multi-layered sounds.

Telecommunication details types of energy transmitted across time and space. The first line mentions "ultraviolet..radio light..to your solar system..." indicating someone or something is attempting to communicate across the galaxy. In astronomy, UV light is emitted by very hot objects. A motif in the band's lyrics is alien life forms (with their debut album being essentially a rock opera about alien abduction) and futuristic technology. The song also includes references to nuclear energy and wireless communication.

"(It's Not Me) Talking" is the debut single, originally recorded in 1981. It was re-recorded in 1983 and is featured on their second album Listen. The song is about a man who hears voices in his head, who believes that he is being contacted by aliens from outer space, and who cannot run away from his emotions; wherever he goes, the voice is there.

"(It's Not Me) Talking" was originally released in May 1981 as the third release on producer Bill Nelson's independent label Cocteau Records and it peaked at number 45 on the UK Independent Singles Chart. Following this, A Flock of Seagulls signed to major label Jive and by the end of 1982 they had a top-ten hit in the US with "I Ran (So Far Away)" and in the UK with "Wishing (If I Had a Photograph of You)". In the wake of the latter's success in the UK, "(It's Not Me) Talking" was remixed and released as a 12-inch single in March 1983 on the Cocteau label. It fared better than its original release, peaking at number 22 on the Independent Singles Chart, though it failed to make the UK Singles Chart Top 100, peaking at number 128. The song was re-recorded for the band's second album Listen and this version, released on Jive in August 1983, made the Top 100, peaking at number 78.

(It's Not Me) Talking music video was based on a 1951 science fiction classic film called The Day the Earth Stood Still. The producers wanted to use special effects that would be current, yet recall the look of 1950's cinema. The music video was filmed at Dawn's Animal Farm in New Jersey. With hundreds of acres of land and many exotic animals used in television commercials and film, it made for an interesting shoot. They hired Talking Dog Productions to build the spaceship. Talking Dog built the props used by Pink Floyd.[citation needed] For the lasers, they retained the services of holographic pioneer, Jason Sapan, of Holographic Studios in New York City. At that time, Sapan was also doing laser light effects. As they negotiated the laser effects, they realized that Sapan himself had the right look to act in the music video and hired him right there. Sapan built the red laser ray gun that Mike Score used.

The music video was the first shown on MTV to use on screen credits for the actors. The credits were shown next to the images of the actors at the end of the video. The credits listed were:

Jason Sapan as "Sparks" Hopkins
Peter Reynolds as Joey
David York as Sergeant McGuire
Ali Score as Prof. "Scottie" Frost
Paul Reynolds as Duane
Larry Friel as Major Dick Docherty
Frank Maudsley as Rex Nolan
Mike Score as "The Alien"