I Ran (So Far Away)

This 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 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."