Gary Numan & Tubeway Army - Replicas Redux: Expanded 2008 Tour Edition

Watershed synth pop/post punk album gets reissue treatment

In 1979 Gary Numan was just preparing himself to step, somewhat nervously, out from behind the protective mask of being a band member and into the centre-stage spotlight. Tubeway Army’s first self-titled album still showed traces of Bowie adoration and a hangover from the punky demos that got him his Beggars Banquet deal, but Replicas was to be the first of three consecutive and peerless records. Taking his queues musically from Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, David Bowie and the then unknown Ultravox!, and lyrically from the paranoid and hallucinatory writings of Philip K Dick and William Burroughs, Numan’s was a horrific world view perhaps only matched by Joy Division. The over-arching theme of the album is that of a totalitarian near future roamed by robot prostitutes called “friends”, population control through enforced homosexuality and thought policing by trench coat wearing “agents”.

Of course, all of this alienation and “lonely android” schtick takes on a more melancholy tone when you take into account Numan’s recently diagnosed status as an Asperger’s Syndrome sufferer. For example, you don’t have to look too closely at the lyrics to Are “Friends” Electric? to see that it contains as many references to an unhappy love affair as it does to more fantastical concerns. Whatever it’s about, it is arguably the best synth-pop track ever recorded and certainly one of the weirdest No 1 singles. The harshness of the angular guitar sound, married to the oddly moving electronics, make the perfect backing for Numan’s strangely soulful croon. Elsewhere, John Peel favourite Down In The Park is probably the most gothic cut Numan ever recorded, with mordant, string-like keyboards and echoing drums. There are the last vestiges of the earlier, punkier Numan on tracks such as You Are In My Vision, but there are also the seeds of the direction that he would take later in the year with his first solo album The Pleasure Principle. This is most evident on the instrumental, guitarless tunes When The Machines Rock and I Nearly Married A Human. Deceptively simple, icicle-fragile high-end synth lines sit neatly on top of opiated and shimmering keyboards. It was a formula that would serve him well on singles such as Cars and We Are Glass.

The self-deprecating line that Numan has taken in the past is that he just happened to find a Moog set up in the practise room and it was already set to the booming imperial synth tones that we associate with him. The second disc of demos and outtakes here tells a different story, however, and show someone who, even at the beginning, was an obsessive engineer. Best of all is the inclusion of relatively rare outtake We Have A Technical, one of the great “lost” Numan tracks, sounding like a (relatively) upbeat sister to Are “Friends” Electric? (curious parties should seek out the cover released by Damon Albarn and Weezer’s Matt Sharp). Let’s hope that The Pleasure Principle gets the same lavish treatment soon.

Beggars Banquet | BBQCD 2057 (2-CD)

Reviewed by John Doran
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