By Christina Fuoco-Karasinski
Singer Mike Score is grateful any time his band, A Flock of Seagulls, can play music live.
After all, gigging is just as much fun now as it was during the early 1980s heyday of the Liverpool-bred new wave band.
“I like playing,” Score says. “It doesn’t matter where it is — Phoenix, Los Angeles or Canada. It’s always a good time. We’re a bunch of friends, and when we get up there and play, it’s more about having a good time than playing music.
“We play the same songs a lot. It just comes automatically. But it’s so much better having your friends up there with you. We have just as much fun onstage and off stage. We go out for meals. We’re all too old to be drinking. We just have our favorite inside jokes.”
A Flock of Seagulls is coming to the Celebrity Theatre on Thursday, September 1, as part of “Lost ’80s Live” with Wang Chung, Missing Persons, Naked Eyes, Stacey Q, Dramarama and Musical Youth.
“The Phoenix show is a show of the hits,” he says. “We don’t do any new songs. We do songs that everybody knows. They know them, and they can sing along and feel like they’ve been involved in a way.”
That inclusion stretches to the performers as well.
“Once you’ve been out on tour with people a few times, you get to know them,” Score says. “It’s not like we’re best friends. But I respect the fact that they’re in another band, and we treat each other like brothers and sisters.”
Score is hoping A Flock of Seagulls will put out a new album this year; a solo album will follow, too. The band’s music fits snugly in the catalog.
“It’s definitely been a bit of an evolution,” Score says.
“I like to mess around and experiment with songs and music. I’m not looking to write ‘I Ran’ again. It’s a good song, but I don’t want to write it again.”
“Lost ’80s Live” w/Wang Chung, Missing Persons, Naked Eyes, Stacey Q, Dramarama and Musical Youth
WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, September 1
WHERE: Celebrity Theatre, 440 N. 32nd Street, Phoenix
COST: Tickets start at $45
INFO: celebritytheatre.com
