![]() Their signature song, “I Ran,” which Score played using a Korg MS-10 keyboard setup, makes that fabled “final frontier” sound like the wild west, a ray gun shootout between man and Martian. The Seagulls, which also included drummer Ali Score and bass player Frank Maudsley, hailed from the famed seaport city of Liverpool. One can hear a bit of its maritime influence in the band’s patterns, that is if sea ships were spaceships and the ocean were the whole of the night sky. Reynolds’ riffs shoot up like rescue flares. They are urgent and pleading like SOS calls. On the gorgeous “Space Age Love Song,” for example, Score gamely affords them vast planes of sound against which Reynolds can orient the listener, punctuating the backdrop like a blinking radio tower. Using a Roland RE-501 jazz chorus amp and a RAT distortion pedal, he created echo effects and delays that would help define the band’s sound and set it apart from other synth bands of the era. In Score’s atmospheres, Reynolds’ offerings peak then bloom, billow and change color, like jet streams in the gloaming. ![]() The band’s crowning achievement, the triumphant sum of all of its parts, is “Wishing (If I Had a Photograph of You).” Propelled by Score’s beautiful chords, it sounds, at once, like a shuttle lifting off and the wonder felt by those who stop to watch it pass overhead. Score finally achieves human fluency singing, “If I had a photograph of you/or something to remind me/ I wouldn’t spend my life just wishing.” Reynolds, taking an E-bow to his guitar, coaxes the craft farther and farther beyond the horizon, and the wonder of approaching a new world gives way to wistfulness at leaving the old one behind. Earnestness and longing echoing from a great distance. It’s a sound that would help to define the decade. Not that they’re given much credit for it. As it is for so many acts from the 80s, pop culture is happy to profit from the Seagulls’ innovation, while dismissing them without thanks. ![]() Recently, in the film LaLaLand, frustrated musician Sebastian played by Ryan Gosling, in order to make ends meet, lowers himself to play keytar in an 80s cover band. Smarting over a previous rebuff from Sebastian, Emma Stone’s character, Mia, requests a song with the explicit purpose of embarrassing him while she dances mockingly. ![]()
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