GARY NUMAN – "Cars"

More Kraftwerk connections: The ‘Autobahn’ sleeve depicts cars on the road without drivers whereas here the look on Numan’s face says it all (“waaaait a minute, something’s missing here too…sod it I’ll take to the air instead…”).

I’ll be collecting up sleeves for the early 80s very soon although I’m not sure how much longer it was before someone figured out a way to bring driver and vehicle together at last at the top of the record shop rack.

Aaaaand was the ‘Numbers’ beat directly inspired by this also?

Re #4 Well it’s a nice suit at least. Probably nicked that from ‘Trans Europe Express’ LP cover too (OK I have to stop with constant Kwerk comparisons but they just keep on coming thick and fast).

Solo divness on sleeves is surely going to step up a gear as we move into the 80s and beyond tho!

That sleeve art is AMAZING.

As a side note, I once dressed as Mr. Newman for an 80’s-night extravaganza, and my visual reference point was the cover of “Pleasure Principle” (still a very fine album)

As to ‘Cars’, in this case I think you have it spot on in your final paragraph, Tom. And yet I also agree with nearly everything vinylscot says @ #1 (if that makes sense). My sister was the Gary Numan fan. I was the Tubeway Army fan. I think the change of image may well have had something to do with that.

This is not to say I didn’t play my sister’s 7″ of ‘Cars’ an awful lot. The intro in particular – those several seconds of wobbly synth monotone suddenly punctuated by a tattoo on the drums – is one of the greatest openings of any single I can think of.

He looks like he’s milking a cow on that sleeve.

That sleeve picture cries out for the LOLCATS treatment, actually. May I suggest

INVISABLE JAGYUAR

For some reason I misremembered this song as a US #1 (wrong – the late summer was “Good Times,” “My Sharona” and then into fall, “Sad Eyes” and “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough”) – it just got to #9. But it was unmistakable and impressed me as…different. I know I called him weird before and this is what I mean – there was nothing like “Cars” on the radio, on any station. I never saw the cover, I never saw the video, nothing. The song was more than enough, music from an outsider expressing an outsider’s feelings (is it just me that finds his attachment to his car poignant – it is Aspergerian to feel safer with machines than people for a good reason), and of course it wouldn’t be a hit in the US or UK without monster hooks and hummability, which it has just as much as Michael Jackson or The Knack. It also rocks, but it’s not ‘rock’ as such; Gary Numan isn’t a ‘classic rock’ artist here like Bowie, for instance. And while I know ‘influence’ isn’t a favorite word here, Numan clearly had an influence on early and for that matter current hip-hop (I listened to Tim Westwood and so much of it is synthetic/electro-based):

Afrika Bambaataa has also talked about the influence of Numan’s music on the fledgling American DJ scene: “In the late 70s and early 80s Gary had the rhythms that DJs wanted to get hold of and people waited for his records on the dance floor.” (from the Wiki article on Numan)

I’m not sure why he invites ridicule – which is here, even – he has been a bit of a twerp but he regrets that, and as Mike said on the AFE thread, he is a genuinely modest man who loves to make music. Looking back, “Cars” is one of the least self-conscious #1s of this time…

Re 19, One of the many magnificent things about this record is that less than half way through (approx 1.50) Numan’s vocal disappears altogether and for the next 2 minutes we are surfing a juggernaut synthesizer groove punctuated by brilliant drum fills.

It demonstrates supreme confidence to cut the vocal hook so early (particularly a hook as good as this one).

this is the third and (unless memory deceives me) the last punk rock number one

best titles on my numan best of (reverse order):

5: music for chameleons
4: remember, i was vapour
3: my love is a liquid
2: we take mystery (to bed)
1: me! i disconnect from you

By now he was unequivocally Gary Numan, solo artist, on his own – some say a willing prisoner of machines but my feeling, as evidenced by “Cars,” is that machines liberated him. His second number one is faster and more streamlined structurally than his first, and his vocals sound a crucial tiny bit less neutered or processed vocals, the song’s controlled microexplosions mutating his attitude to alienation from despair to unexpected gladness. The man preparing to leave at the end of “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” has been left with no option save to become machine; yet Numan, and I don’t necessarily think paradoxically, sounds more human as a machine – even with “Here in my car/I feel safest of all/I can lock all my doors/It’s the only way to live/In cars.” Maybe it’s the only way he can live, the engine (ha!) that makes his life comfortable, not to say liveable. “Here in my car/I can only receive/I can listen to you/It keeps me stable for days/In cars.” The small, mobile, self-reliant unit, obliged to no one, least of all family or society, with no need ever to act, simply drive forever, absorb select waves from the world but never refract them.

But no, that façade breaks down in the very Ballardian third verse: “Here in my car/Where the image breaks down/Will you visit me please/If I open my door/In cars?” (Ballardian in the sense of young Jim the Shanghai PoW rubbing his eyes at the end of Empire Of The Sun and getting back into the world, but is it his world (see also Concrete Island for the same story told from the other side of the mirror)

“Here in my car/I know I’ve started to think/About leaving tonight/Although nothing seems right in cars.” Following which, with half the record still to go, he disappears altogether. I note that neither of his number ones has any discernible chorus, apart from the repeated melodic and rhythmic instrumental motifs; but I also note the crisp but slippy mechanics of the rhythm track which the likes of Bambaataa would find importantly alluring. So his pleas and waves did manage to refract from beyond the confines of the car door (see also “Warm Leatherette” for the obverse self-destruction perspective but see especially Grace Jones’ version of the latter wherein Sly and Robbie draw their own unwitting – or was it? – line from “Cars”).

And finally I note that I have quoted the entire lyric here, but then the lyric is a coldly minimalist one slowly acknowledging and turning into warmth; the riff continues but the string synthesisers begin to play chords and sustain odd, wavering sonorities – the reverse of that frightening, low (or should that be Low?), wobbling drone at the record’s beginning – and they sound like invisible but deeply perceptible clouds embracing the already reborn driver to allow dreams free of sheep, with new vision, new perception and renewed life. Difficult really to go further without drawing a possible parallel between Numan and myself which would explain the whole thing outright but I’ll leave that for others to work out. He sits, driving through his own city (even if he finds content – in both senses of that word – in stasis) and in the neighbouring club, bodies which are not quite those of robots start to dance. Much of the rest of Popular will journey down the motorway both he and they built.

I was thinking of three blokes from Woking and a certain multi-racial combo from Coventry. How you can count Gary Numan as “punk” (even in the wider sense of new) and not them is beyond me.

I’m really not sure that this whole punk number 1 debate is anything other than meaningless, the usage of the term too liberally, or to narrowly applied, to add anything of value here.

Punk Number 1s – Adam, the League, Paul Hardcastle, Dexys, and none of the above.

“Much of the rest of Popular will journey down the motorway both he and they built.” Yes – exactly!

Same as for the last Numan. Only blander.

This message is brought to you from a breakfast table in Handsworth, Birmingham. Along with a headache and a post-curry thingy. Very nice!

Yes, “Complex” was an underwhelming follow up. “Metal” would have been a better choice from the PP album.

You are right about the credibility comparison with AFE. At school, although we all secretly liked “Cars” it seemed less cool and obscure than its predecessor. Perhaps the name change had something to do with it as well – as alluded to in an earlier comment. Your younger brother bought “Cars”. You had AFE and, if you were very hip, “Down In The Park”.

Now, I too oscillate between the two as to which I prefer. I love them both, but “Cars” is undoubtedly the more polished production, and the one I listen too most.

I really liked Numan’s trilogy of white-funk singles from 81/82 as well – particularly “She’s Got Claws” which I think I’m right in saying was the first Top 40 single to introduce us to the wonderful sound of Mick Karn’s fretless bass (and saxophone).

Ah yes, that’ll be during his hair transplant phase, when every record sleeve featured him wearing a hat.

“we can battle it out when we get to them lee, but i think i probably won’t count em as punk”

If you had made that sentence end ‘i probably think, i won’t count em as punk’ it would have scanned PERFECTLY with the song.

Yes, this is as good as it got for Numan, although his commercial decline was a fairly slow one. He had quite a few top ten singles after Cars, and I think the next album Telekon went to no. 1.

Punctum is certainly right to reference Bowie’s Low, there’s a lot of resonance there. Numan is a minimalist and Bowie is way more eclectic, but a lot of the first side of Low is agoraphobic, about retreat to a room, with overlaid self-pity, just as this song is retreat to the confines of a car, with the self-pity coming through at the end of the lyric. Thematically, there’s a similarity with Sound & Vision. Also structurally: both songs have a very short lyric that takes up less than half the song.

Cars is an incredibly strong single, I think – better than AFE. It’s not easy to do something that is so simple and yet still manages to strike an original note.

Also because it sounded like the Penguin Cafe Orchestra playing Tubular Bells.

…as opposed to Esso S…

It was that “Empirical time” ((c) Neil Tennant) for Gazza New..

(edit: That sounds a bit “It was a strange one but we loved it…”)

I thought AFE was my fave Nu-rave until I played this the other day for the first time in years. Woo! Ahem. It’s rather exciting.

p^nk s #22. “music for chameleons” is a truman capote steal! or is the law just for band names?

#45 – I didn’t catch Dale this week but I’m not surprised that he was flippant about “Je T’aime…”. Not exactly one for his playlist when he personally entertains, it seems to me.