TUBEWAY ARMY – "Are 'Friends' Electric?"

The 80’s start here!

Thatcher, with her strange mix of brutalist futurism and sexless Calvinism derived from the pages of Good Housekeeping as edited by Hayek, won the 1979 election almost in spite of her party, just as she’d gained the Conservative leadership. There has always been a touch of the aggressively defensive misfit about her; privately spat upon by the alleged Great and Good, the lower-middle-class Grantham Methodist never swung by Presley or flowers in hair or pounds in pocket, the austere and – yes – cold rationalist unable to relate to anybody else in a meaningful way, so locks herself in the back room to get on with “it.” It isn’t surprising that her declared favourite pop record is “Telstar,” a record bearing no apparent involvement by a human being (yet, paradoxically, the most human of number ones; Meek locking himself in his front room watching the news and inspiring himself to vacate the planet); and nor should it be shocking that Gary Numan – at that time the biggest-selling artist to emerge from what would eventually be termed post-punk – turned out to be such an enthusiastic cheerleader for Thatcherism (although he has subsequently, and inevitably, made the minimal journey from Thatcherite to Blairite).

Nor is it any wonder that “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” – those internal inverted commas are as crucial as those in Bowie’s “’Heroes’” – should sound so much like a record Joe Meek could have made had he survived until 1979; the single was credited to the group Tubeway Army – hitherto a fairly run-of-the-mill electro-thrash outfit in the mode of John Foxx’s Ultravox! – but the group is as irrelevant to Numan as the Tornados were to Meek; his querulous but hurting right eye dominating the 12″ picture disc sold the record, and, together with his anxious blankness, was responsible for making “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” the first indie crossover number one single in the post-Pistols age.

Much scorn was poured on Numan – that name! A total reinvention of the Gary Webb with which he had been christened! And how close to the Harry Webb, that other anxious Conservative pop individualist who reinvented himself as Cliff Richard (and, as this tale is about to demonstrate and fuck the bunny, closer than anyone could have imagined)! – mainly for being perceived as an electro ambulance chaser.

With Numan, however, I do not believe that he has ever knowingly raised an eyebrow, and myinescapable, rapidly-reached conclusion has to be that he believes every single word and gesture; he means it all. The key critical problem was whether there was any clear precedent for Numan. Kraftwerk were the Man-Machine, but they celebrated the post-human world, luxuriated in its elegant textures. There was of course Bowie’s Low, where on side two language, and eventually the singer, melts into the alien totality; scraps, bulletins of desperation on side one (“Be My Wife,” “Always Crashing In The Same Car”) leading to a landscape (“Art Decade,” “Subterraneans”) which could fairly be described as post-life. Meanwhile, Macclesfield punk scruffs Warsaw were realigning themselves as Joy Division and, in tandem with Martin Hannett, were about to take “rock” music somewhere nobody had been before.

So Unknown Pleasures, which came out later that summer, invented a genuinely new music (though bear the ghosts of Peter Hammill and Northern Soul one-offs in mind) which flipped everyone’s judgement, and Bowie himself re-emerged with one of the most virulently animal of all pop records, “Boys Keep Swinging.” But Numan wasn’t really like either. His great innovation was to accentuate the position of the human being lost inside the world of machines who isn’t happy there, is not celebrating streams of technology; whereas the Bowie of Low buries his voice in the mix, or simply makes it sing incomprehensible things, Numan’s pained Home Counties vowels – Hammersmith via Banbury – are always clearly discernible in terms of comprehensibility and emotion. In other words, he steps back from total Low-ist annihilation, refuses to relinquish the human being as he lives, breathes and cries.

In addition, where Ralf and Florian’s synthesisers, and Eno’s sundry devices (even when producing Foxx’s jumpy, rabid Ultravox!), are sleek, up-to-the-technological-minute affairs, Numan (again, like Meek) seems to have had a preference for using imperfect technology; the just out-of-date drum machine, the deliberately primitive synthesisers which (as they are on “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”) sound as though they are being powered by steam. So this is an individual’s approximation of technology, of The Future, imaginable only for a loner – and note the inevitable evolutionary straight line from Numan to Aphex.

“Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” is another single which takes its time to unfold, lasting nearly five-and-a-half minutes, largely because it began life as two separate songs which Numan felt worked better if welded together. If anything, Numan’s voice here sounds, as it unsettlingly does on several of his other noted pieces of the time, like Robert Wyatt – those same plaintive South-East syllables, almost the same degree of poignancy. He sits in his squalid room (“the paint’s peeling off of my walls”) disconnected, remembering details of someone who has now passed (“things I just don’t understand/Like a white lie that night/Or a sly touch at times/I don’t think it meant anything to you”). Then someone knocks at the door (“And just for a second I thought I remembered you”). “It’s the ‘friend’ that I’d left in the hallway/Please sit down” – and they engage in ways of which no speaking is required; Numan has said that the song is about a man being visited by a prostitute, and that one of them, or possibly both, may be androids, thus the inverted commas around “friends”:

“You know, I hate to ask/But are ‘friends’ electric?/Only mine’s broke down/And now I’ve no one to love.”

If it sounds as though we’re verging on the territory, not just the obvious one of Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? (which became Blade Runner), but also that of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, here, it’s because we are – are these depersonalised humans, humanity bled out of them by grief, or androids who only know how to “love” because they’ve been instructed, or is this song about a fucked-up man who has only been left capable of loving machines because humanity has let him down so badly?

“And I should never have tried,” he concludes. “And I missed you tonight/Still it’s time to leave/You see it meant everything to me.” The machines of synths and synthesised drums progress relentlessly, while the man, a failure at the only thing he could do well, prepares to do it the BS Johnson way or maybe even the Joe Meek way. The only previous number one even vaguely akin to this which comes to my mind is “Johnny Remember Me,” but even there the attachment is emotional rather than strictly musical, though Hughes’ Crow flies through the rain of both. Think, perhaps, of Tricky’s “Aftermath” as the lullaby leaking through his dying soul – but in truth there had never been a number one record like “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” before, and I doubt there will ever be a number one record like it again. Not even that one. 10

“I don’t think it mean anything to you.”

This song’s four-week stay at Number One coincided with the first (and second, third, fourth, fifth…) occasions where my passions were – at least in the strictly physical sense – requited. He was fair, athletic, pretty-boy handsome, and frankly well out of my league in the normal scheme of things – but in the cloistered all-male confines of the English public school, one took one’s pleasures where one found them, and I took considerable pains to signal my availability.

Darkened hallways, knocks on doors, cigarettes, shadows on bedside walls, sly touches, white lies – these were the symbols of our encounters, which eventually and inevitably brought far more suffering than pleasure.

Running simultaneously with all of this nocturnal furtiveness, my daytime existence had never been happier. Once our A-levels were over, our school in Cambridge became transformed from prison to boarding camp. Seemingly endless days were spent lounging by the river, or drinking in The Anchor, The Mill, The Fountain and The Granta, where we pumped our pennies into the jukeboxes, soundtracking our first tastes of freedom and independence with selections from the best singles chart since… well, since the last time I was in the senior year, five summers earlier.

For all of these reasons, the singles charts of June and July 1979 remain my absolute favourites. Dance Away, Boogie Wonderland, Pop Muzik, Shine A Little Love, Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now, Boys Keep Swinging, Hot Stuff, Number One Song In Heaven, We Are Family, HAPPY Radio, Masquerade, Roxanne, Up The Junction, The Lone Ranger, Say When, I Want You To Want Me, I Fought The Law, Love Song, Accidents Will Happen, Light My Fire/137 Disco Heaven, Silly Games, Babylon Burning, Space Bass, C’mon Everybody, Good Times, Girls Talk, Born To Be Alive, Breakfast In America, Bad Girls, My Sharona, Chuck E’s In Love, Death Disco, Playground Twist, Can’t Stand Losing You, If I Had You, Voulez-Vous, Beat The Clock, The Diary of Horace Wimp, Kid, Morning Dance, Harmony In My Head, Reasons To Be Cheerful, After The Love Has Gone… hell, even the also-rans such as the Beach Boys’ “Lady Lynda” and (most especially)
Voyager’s “Halfway Hotel”… I’d challenge anyone to find a better soundtrack to teenage life, love, laughter and longing.

And topping them all: only Tubeway Bloody Army, if you please! Having previously dismissed them as bunch of third-rate fag-end-of-punk chancers who had been lucky to get a Peel session, nothing could have prepared me for the template-setting WTF Future Shock of “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”, whose length and lack of chorus didn’t stop it from being THE defining pop record of that early summer. Everyone I knew loved it, a good half of them owned it, and you couldn’t spend more than a few minutes walking our corridors without hearing it (or its excellent B-side “We Are So Fragile”) booming out of somebody’s study.

Of course, and like most of us, my interest in Gary Numan rapidly waned – but more of that another time – and it took a full 29 years and a freelance assignment for me to re-assess both the man and AFE’s parent album Replicas. Numan turned out to be one of my favourite interviewees: frank, forthcoming, perceptive and grounded, the worst of his demons long since laid to rest, happy to see his influence finally acknowledged, and – on the eve of his fiftieth birthday and his thirtieth anniversary in the music business, profoundly grateful for his survival within that business.

By way of a thank-you to his fanbase, Numan broke his anti-nostalgia rule and toured the Replicas album this spring. I had never seen him live before, and was astonished by his performance. As for his rendition of AFE, “ambushed by unexpected emotion” scarcely begins to cover it, as the the symbolic significance of those lyrics coupled with the overall mood of alienated longing hit harder than they had done in decades.

“It meant everything to me.”

Hated it then, hate it now.

My position on ‘synthesised’ music is complex and difficult to put in a few words. A lot of it is the physicist in me, which sees that carrying out the necessary Fourier analysis to produce funny noises, which I can do, is rather less of a wonder than the sounds that can be made without hard sums but with natural materials and a lot of practice, which is something I can’t do with any great facility and which I envy in those who can. And there’s a lot of music which makes extensive use of electronic sound – going back to the 1930s and Messiaen’s embrace of the ondes martenot and coming forward to the present day – which I love.

But Gary Numan lays the electronica on with the proverbial trowel, and squwarks over it in that flat dreary voice. The overall effect on me is not dissimilar to an old-fashioned dentist’s drill.

Well, Numan has always (rightly) bridled at being described as a primarily synth-based artist – and as crucial as those massive synth riffs are to “AFE”, they actually ride on top of a fairly traditional guitar/bass/drums line-up, that underpinning fuzzed-out guitar squall serving as another crucial ingredient.

And of course, this is by no means the first major synth-led hit, so it’s not as if Numan was working without precedent – indeed, he faced sustained Cool Police derision for allegedly serving up weedy, adolescent, reductive re-gurgitations of Ziggy Stardust/Diamond Dogs/Low – but nevertheless, a clear line was being drawn in the sand, even if I find myself struggling to describe it!

A few years ago Gary Numan announced that he believed he had Asperger’s Syndrome (although he’s never been formally diagnosed). I don’t claim any great medical knowledge, but I think the alienation and “androidness” of this song does seem to reflect an Asperger’s personality (and this may also explain why Numan was seen as a bit of a pillock).

Incidentally, Tubeway Army’s previous single, Down in the Park, which is also on Replicas, is one of the creepiest and most unsettling songs ever.

It’s a good track this, and the vweeeee-vwoooor sound is one I am very much in favour of. I don’t like Numan’s vocal on this though, all gulping and straggly. Must do better, cross, red pen, see me after class.

Re: #2

I think UK pop had proved it could be weird a long time before this.

I wrote him off as a Bowie copycat at the time, I liked Down In The Park but I think this getting to #1 brought out the insufferable 17-year-old music snob in me and one time I was working at WH Smith two girls came in to buy Replicas and I couldn’t stop myself from telling them if only they heard Low and Diamond Dogs they’d realize what a rip-off Numan was and see the error of their ways. Put a young man behind a record store counter and he turns into an opinionated prick, even in a WH Smith.

Now I’ve grown out of all that this reminds me of the summer I lost my virginity so I do remember it fondly.

Once in a while, one comes across the odd record which one adored back in the day but can’t stand in the here and now. One extreme to the other, in other words. There haven’t been too many examples of these for me but I fear that this is one. Back in the day, I felt that AFE had real attitude and that the electronic bits and bobs supplied an impressive dosage of cred. Pale, strange little Numan was, I felt, the perfect messenger and for a brief while I considered that an original, leading and potentially important artist had been hatched to rival Bowie, if you please! Of course, calling AFE a Gary Numan hit was not strictly true, since the name on the label said “Tubeway Army” but as later with Wham, when “everyone knew it was George”, everyone knew that this was Gary.

I have a mate and work colleague, Brian, who is about five years younger than I (and was thus an early teen in 1979) who maintains a passion for early eighties music and particularly of the “electronic” genre of which this record is a pioneer. His presence last year in a revival club of such stuff up in London won him the opportunity to pick up a day’s work as an extra in “Ashes to Ashes”, the sequel to “Life on Mars” (no spoilers coming up, Bunny, I promise you). The scene involved Keeley Hawes (yes, please) being taken by a “yuppie” to the Blitz club, the place run, so Brian tells me, by Steve Strange of Visage, a leading New Romantic, who employed Boy George as a cloakroom attendant (my mind reels with all sorts of comments about that), as well as a policy of denying entrance to anyone who didn’t look like a dickhead… sorry, not “New Romantic” enough. The TV shot involved Visage’s “Fade to Grey” being played, whilst about a dozen or so extras danced around three of the main actors. Brian, bless him, looks tremendous in full pirate’s regalia, distinguished by a tartan scarf and is quite clearly in shot more than once in the close proximity to Keeley, the lucky dog. He was paid £100 and given a meal for a day’s work. Very nice experience, he said and I was delighted for him.

This could never have been me, btw, as I came to loathe this kind of music and I suppose this had a knock back effect on AFE, which I now regard as childishly simplistic and totally annoying. I would therefore have never found myself in a revival club celebrating this kind of thing nearly thirty years later, as I would rather have spent the evening at home hanging myself.

Tom #6 – I think ever since the Chicory Tip debate started on the wrong thread, actual spoilers have become less and less of an issue, and the Spoiler Bunny game just adds to the jollity on here. Most of us treat bunny-baiting as a bit of fun, it’s just the posters who try to discourage it I don’t like. Monday’s reply from you to lonepilgrim was exemplary in this respect.

Quite coincidentally – after a vote – I’ve been planning a 1979 Top 20 at my own gaff, and it’s occurred to me that it’s my year dot for really tuning into pop on my own terms. Looking through the books and seeing things like Nick Lowe’s ‘Cruel to Be Kind’ has sparked all sorts of memories and recollections of early opinions/understandings.

Anyway, this monster was one of my early templates for getting a grip on music, its Prokofievian marching synths the bedrock for my love of electronic pop. It’s still perfectly huge, with the rising middle eight almost Queen-like in its pomp. Sounds like an event.

Still thought Numan was a prat, mind, but his changing hair colour fascinated me.

Number Two Watch: “Up The Junction” by Squeeze, which I guess has its fans, and Janet Kay’s divine “Silly Games.”

# 6 + # 21 – Erithian’s right, of course. Quite right. Bunny-baiting is good. I can see no reason cos there are no reasons to stop it. What reasons do you need to be shown, Tom?

The “Stanley”/”handy” rhyme always bothered me.

There’s loads of dodgy half-rhymes and forced rhymes in it (that drinking/proper stinking one is the worst IMO), which I always assumed was intentional on their part – rhyme scheme clumsiness mirroring the protagonists emotional cack-handedness. Actually I’d no idea it was #2 when this was #1 – what a bleak pairing.

“We stayed in by the telly/ although the room was smelly” is the one that I always find particularly clunky.

I saw Chris Difford perform ‘Up The Junction’ a couple of years ago. People were trying to sing along, but couldn’t quite manage it. He thought that we were being shy, but really its because the song doesn’t have a chorus, and people were trying to remember what the lines were as he sung them.

Squeeze were the first gig that I ever went to by the way – an anti-poll tax free festival in Blackheath in 1988. Support came from Rankin’ Roger and Skint Video, with Malcolm Hardee as compere and speeches from the likes of Rodney Bickerstaffe. Another time, another time.

I saw Glen Tilbrook and the Fluffers perform “Up The Junction” a couple of years ago, and duly bellowed my way through the whole thing! (Thankfully, I wasn’t the only one.) Not only is “Up The Junction” in the grand “The Dean And I” condensed novel tradition, but it’s also made for bellowing along to. (If you’re me.)

My six-year old reaction was ‘scary robot man!’ and having no understanding about what the song was about (not a problem that I had with his next single). I was attracted to it though, it seemed otherworldly and enticing.

Thinking about it now, the thing that strikes me is how apart it sounds from the synthpop that followed it, and with which it is often bracketed alongside. The League, The Associates, Soft Cell etc – even the glacial and disconnected Visage, all of the greats, they use synthesisers to sound nimble and playful. Whereas the steam-powered slowness and long playing time of this sounds stately to me. A very sad world evoked by slowing things down – and that extraordinarily wracked sounding-voice!

I’d add Roxy’s ‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache’ to Marcello’s list of points of comparison.

My six year old reaction was… well, to be honest, I don’t think I was even aware of this! My pop coverage at this time was spotty and I obviously had other stuff on my mind through most of summer ’79: there’s a big stretch of songs I have no recollection of at all, right up to close to the end of the year in fact.

(I played this to Lytton yesterday – he watched attentively though showed no excitement. He now understands the question “Do you like…?” so some binary feedback may be possible.)

I remember an entire mini-article in NME once devoted to sniggering at Numan’s song titles, many of which now seem awesome! Personal favourite (never heard it so I dunno if it lives up): “I Nearly Married A Human”

I recall “Private Eye” once suggesting in their Lookalikes section Gary Numan and Sheena Easton. Spooky. Also, Breshnev and Frankie Howerd, and Mao’s portriat in Tiananmen Square and Val Doonican.

Quality.

yes, savage was VERY fast onto all the “ballardian” (anti)pop, and (at sounds) one of its primary vectors into the rock press

“the LP where gary is looking dyspeptically at a glowing plastic pyramid” = pleasure principle (obv). but cover vaguely inspired by

http://www.galleryofart.us/Rene_Magritte/Principe+du+plaisir,+Le.jpg.html

(only just noticed that logged in users can get marked as spam again! i hacked our spam thing to stop that, but i guess i forgot during one upgrade or another…)