The girl I had a crush on as a teen turned me on to the music that would define my adolescence. Whether I wanted to or not, I was, because of Toby, about to become a Gary Numan fan.
Over the years I pretty much forgot that she was the one who made me listen to Replicas (& The Dickies and Human Sexual Response). But that didn’t stop my affection for the disaffected robotic alienation that was Gary Numan.
I lost interest after 4 records, bought the 5th but never listened much. And I had the first one, Tubeway Army and Living Ornaments, the live album, both on vinyl but gave cursory listens to the first and never listened to the latter. Well, that’s not true. I liked Jo the Waiter and stole that bassline, sped it up and wrote the song Joey Enough for my band 20 years later.
Imagine my surprise when I learned that Numan was prepping a new album. That makes him somewhat relevant. And that makes him the perfect candidate for a Listening Post.
Without further adieu.
Gary Numan.
Gary Numan – Tubeway Army – 1978
The pulsing throb of the opening track “Listen to the Sirens” suggest not just the coming coldly dystopian future of New Wave but also the mod-pop of The Jam and the lo-tech, high concept of Adam Ant. The whole album is probably more melodic than you would expect, considering Numan is famous for “Cars” and being the godfather of industrial electronic music. In many ways Tubeway Army is the album I would have expected from Ziggy Stardust if his band didn’t kill him. Instead of veering into pop and taking over the world, Ziggy would have embraced his alien quality and disappeared into a votex of his own selfness.
“The Life Machine” always creeped me out, being a song sung from the perspective of a coma person on life support. It’s cold. It’s sad. It’s monotonous. And in all of those ways, it’s brilliant.
Right around this time Adam Ant would be writing a song called “Friends” as well. I’m not sure what was so important about dealing with something so simple as friendship in the early New Wave UK, but as an effective piece of post-punk Numan’s is infinitely better and more bleak. And where Adam’s is, it seems, from the perspective of an obnoxious clubhopper whose name dropping does not succeed in getting him in to the clubs he wants (or maybe it does), Numan’s is about male prostitutes. Different drummers indeed.
Tubeway Army sounds, believe it or not, current or fresh even though it’s 32 years old and I imagine this has something to do with a) the minimalism employed in it’s production and b) Numan’s intense dedication to the future. There’s a reason Blade Runner doesn’t feel dated today and yet, ET, does. The “future” was forward thinking. The creators of lasting forward thinking science fiction were creating what they thought the world would look like in the future, like the art directors and sci-fi writers on the original Star Trek. They weren’t trying to graft quasi-futuristic sounds on to contemporary, and thereby dated, sounds. Like, say, Duran Duran or the Star Trek movies.
A track like “Are You Real” sounds scarily like “Machmen” off his next album, but the crunch of the guitars separate them so vividly. And we wouldn’t get to hear that instrument played like this very often for a while from Gary. Like “Jo the Waiter” which employs a predominantly acoustic guitar. Something I never heard again from him, then again I’m not familiar with his entire catalog. Yet.
Only toward the end of the album with “The Dream Police” do I begin to get bored. But that is immediately rectified by the aforementioned “Jo”. A great ditty. One I was happy to steal from.
A nice little debut.
Grade: B+
ASide: Listen to the Sirens, Jo The Waiter
BlindSide: Friends, Everyday I Day, Are you real, Zero Bars
DownSide: The Dream Police
