And I Ran… I Ran To The Video You Deserve
If you want to run, run so far away, from the dreariness of Mondays, then The Video You Deserve is for you.
Every Monday, we give you a fun, cheesy video to begin your week, and this week’s video and song is one of the most iconic of the ’80s and features one of the most iconic haircuts and lead singers of the decade.
Although A Flock of Seagulls’ reign on the charts was relatively short — they had their biggest hits in just a two year span between 1982 and 1984 — the band’s futuristic image and spacey, trippy videos, made a huge impact on the visuals of early MTV and in defining the decade. But undeniably, the most lasting image of them is the strange, over-the-top haircut of lead singer Mike Score. In the video we’ll look at today, “I Ran,” it’s only at its infant form, but later on in videos like “If I Had A Photograph Of You,” Score’s unique, swooping, angular, spiking wave of a hairstyle was an indelible image. So much so that in decades removed, the image of someone
“Ok! Ok! I’m sorry I used the last of the hairspray!”
with that hairstyle was enough to not only goose instant laughs (as it did in “The Wedding Singer”) but transport people back instantly to that time.
“I Ran” was actually the third single from the English new wave band A Flock of Seagulls and the second single from their self-titled debut album. It topped the chart in Australia, and reached numbers seven and nine in New Zealand and the United States respectively. However, oddly enough, even though the band was thought of as the very definition of British bands at the
“Does this poofy haircut make my butt look big? Be honest!”
time, the song wasn’t a big hit in their native UK, and A Flock Of Seagulls actually had more success in America and Australia than they did in their home country.
Imagine their disappointment when they noticed E.T. was behind them giving them the finger.
According to the song’s Wikipedia, lead vocalist Mike Score says that there were two main sources of inspiration for “I Ran (So Far Away)” — one was that a band at a club they frequented, Eric’s Club in Liverpool, had a song called “I Ran,” and another idea came from a poster at a Zoo Records office. The band had gone there with the intent of securing a recording contract, and they wanted to use the poster, which featured a man and a woman running away from a flying saucer, as the cover for their first album, A Flock of Seagulls (1982). This depiction also helped spark the song’s unusual space-like lyrics.
Lyrically, “I Ran (So Far Away)” is about a man who sees an attractive woman and attempts to run away from his feelings. Before this happens, the man sees an aurora in the sky, and he and the woman are abducted by aliens.
The music video directed by Tony van den Ende features the band in a room covered in aluminium foil and mirrors, in homage to Brian Eno and Robert Fripp‘s (No Pussyfooting) album cover, which was also portrayed by the Strokes in the video for their single, “The End Has No End,” two decades later. The video received heavy rotation on MTV in the summer of 1982, and helped the single to become a hit.
To this day, it remains one of the singularly iconic songs and sounds of the era. And here it is, “I Ran,” by A Flock of Seagulls, The Video You Deserve…
