I Ran (So Far Away)

The hook of this song isn’t just that guitar riff that sounds like a futuristic echo, but the mix of urgency and space that wraps around every note. The lyrics speak of fleeing, but not just any way: they describe someone moving away from a female figure illuminated by the northern lights, as if love or desire were dragging them toward a place they can’t name. The title itself —I Ran (So Far Away)— sounds like a contained scream, that tension between running and not being able to escape. What’s curious is that, although the story seems straight out of a science fiction film, the sound is pure new wave: cold synthesizers, a drumbeat that pulses like an accelerated heart, and guitars that fade into the air. The detail that stands out the most is that instrumental bridge where the guitar repeats with a delay effect, as if time itself were stretching in an attempt to understand what’s happening.

They recorded it at Battery Studios in London with Mike Howlett at the helm of production, and the result was a five-minute, seven-second track that didn’t sound like anything else in 1982. The original A Flock of Seagulls —the Liverpool quartet made up of brothers Mike Score and Ali Score, plus Frank Maudsley and Paul Reynolds— didn’t aim to sound like anyone else: they wanted their music to have that otherworldly air, and they achieved it without even trying. The video, for example, came from the need to do something “weird” for MTV: a room lined with aluminum foil and mirrors, where the band moved like aliens on a television set. That clip became the magnet that pushed the song to number 9 in the United States and, later, number 1 in Australia. However, in their own country, the United Kingdom, it never even entered the top 40. Today, more than forty years later, it remains their most recognized track, though the band’s frontman has confessed in interviews that, deep down, it bothers him that it’s the only thing people remember about them.