So that’s who it was all along: Mike Score of A Flock of Seagulls

I owe one to the portal Lovin’ Malta. For the last three or four years, since Joseph Muscat’s head changed shape (it used to be very different not so long ago), I’ve wondered who he reminds me of. It was quite a disquieting sensation because I’d look at him and picture a bleach-blond quiff without knowing why. The mind is funny in those sorts of ways.

But then the 20-somethings at Lovin’ Malta stumbled on some photographs of the lead singer of what they clearly think was some obscure 1980s band with the strange name A Flock of Seagulls, and my besetting mystery was solved at last.

A Flock of Seagulls wasn’t an obscure band at all, but a major part of the New Wave movement that shaped music completely in the first three years of the 1980s. You couldn’t be 17 in 1982, as I was, without having A Flock of Seagulls coming at you off the pages of every magazine along with Adam Ant, Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, The Human League, Tears for Fears and the rest of them. I wasn’t crazy about A Flock of Seagulls or their music, but Mike Score’s face, with his terrible hair, was everywhere. You can’t escape that kind of memory imprinting.

The unnerving thing is that the unbelievably strong resemblance is still there, giving Muscat a pretty good idea of what he will look like at 58.