Tubeway Army

England, early Seventies: glam, spiders from Mars and Ziggy stardust touching down on a suburban street to sublimate his dreams from the lunar age: second-hand art, cabaret, science-fiction suggestions. Germany, mid-Seventies: kosmische-kraut opens its eyes and blinks at pop with the pulsing rhythms of Neu! and the motorway melodies of Kraftwerk. When he records "Replicas", Gary Numan — frontman, songwriter and undisputed leader of Tubeway Army — is a twenty-year-old hopelessly seduced by all of this, as well as, like many other new post-punk recruits, by the electronic androgyny of Berlin-era Bowie, synthesis and summation of a new way of making music. Raised on science fiction, an avid reader of William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard and Aldous Huxley, a passionate devotee of films such as "A Clockwork Orange", "Fahrenheit 451" and "Logan's Run", and a devourer of George Lucas's pre-"Star Wars" work, Gary already boasts a musical background of some substance, honed over the previous two years first tinkering with punk, then with the synthetic wails of "Tubeway Army", the eponymous debut album released in 1978, which already hints at his fascination with synthesizers, which stand alongside the guitars, Jess Lidyard's bare-bones drumming and the essential basslines of trusty Paul Gardiner.

If the promising debut on the label somehow set the coordinates, "Replicas" defines, not without surprise, a set of approaches that make it not only a cornerstone of synth-pop, but also a work whose influence would extend over the years from hip-hop to industrial, while also providing fresh ideas to chart-topping pop, which it would itself sensationally scale to number one in its homeland (a feat repeated with the two subsequent projects: the other masterpiece "The Pleasure Principle", and "Telekon"). And yet here we have an album that, in its themes and sound, seems to possess everything except mass appeal. Obsessions, anxieties, aliens, mutants, degeneration, the inability of man to communicate as he fails to master the machines, which end up crushing him. Man is alone, and loneliness dehumanizes him, worsening his depersonalization. The machine, forged with the laudable intent of escaping the drama into which he has fallen, evolves until it overlaps him, ultimately replacing him: a new and more threatening enemy added to his existing ghosts.

We're talking about a cybernetic concept album dense with visual references, the story of an apocalypse that could just as easily be a book or a film screenplay, but which instead is scattered here and there across the lyrics of a record conceived as the sum of icy, impressionistic fragments. The "Machmen" are humanoid policemen, the cities are disconnected oases of concrete, so many little worlds within the world, and control of this hyper-reality is entrusted to an artificial mind that, based on mathematical calculations, determines that the ultimate error is mankind itself, which must therefore be eliminated. It understands, however, that not everyone can be killed, since it would be defeated by rebellion long before completing the program. So it makes use of human collaborators and creates an army of mutants, imposing a "quota test" on everyone else. The "quota test" is a method of assigning intelligence quotient; anyone who fails to reach the set level is taken away and re-educated, making it much easier to kill them.

The difficulty level of the test is raised periodically, so that the machine can eliminate people starting with the weakest, gradually working up to the strongest. By the time they realize what's happening, there will be too few of them to mount any meaningful resistance, and the final annihilation will be swiftly carried out. The "Crazies" live underground, they're the only armed humans, and they go out at night in search of means of survival. But no one is allowed to hold weapons, and all the city walls light up at nightfall so that no one can evade the curfew. The park is like a prison where offenders are dragged, tortured and killed by dedicated machines while, from the Zom Zoms Club looming above, people enjoy the spectacle. In the park you witness fights reminiscent of the Roman arenas, with the "Crazies" forced into combat for the entertainment of humanoids and the chosen few. Few survive a night outside, none survive two. The "'Friends' Electric" are replicant machines similar to the "Machmen", but rather than embodying the law, they provide services: with them you can just as easily play chess as satisfy the most obscene sexual fantasy, since they all resemble one another and lack any personality of their own.

The plotlines Numan used to inspire both the lyrics and the sounds of "Replicas" draw on the obsessions with humanity's collapse found in Burroughs' novels, just as the unsettling connections between real and unreal, and between past and future, are very close to the work of Philip K. Dick, the great American science-fiction writer whom Ridley Scott would bring to the big screen in 1982 in the cult movie "Blade Runner". If the metronomic aplomb of the tracks recalls the Kraftwerk of the previous two years, it's through the anti-pathos of the voice and the simultaneous use of traditional instrumentation that Numan brands his sound, effectively making it unique. Certainly to be counted among the disciples of David Bowie, despite lacking his technical gifts, he displays a uniform register modulated by breaths of now impersonal delivery, now detached despair, gliding over synthesizers that dictate the melodies, robotic electric guitars, and an essential, compact rhythm section, whose hand-played drumming is often treated with flanger effect and sometimes flanked by a drum machine.

Just a few devices, but so revolutionary that they perfectly rendered, in rock-pop form (that's where the revolution lies), all the disturbances it set out to evoke. Indeed "Are 'Friends' Electric?" is alienation made pop and given a name. Wrapped in a fabric of circular keyboards from which it's impossible to break free, it became a sensational hit despite lacking the classic chorus that usually characterizes pop hits. For this reason it set a standard that, beyond the general public, seduced both rappers, thanks to the lethal combination of rhythm and spoken word, and professional sample manipulators: in 2002 a substantial sample of it was used in "Freak Like Me" by the Sugababes, which took it back to number one in the UK, twenty-three years after the original version.

But every track shines with its own light. From the steady beat of the opening "Me! I Disconnect From You", which cements the bond between the synth riff and the voice of a numanoid, to the synthetic boogie of "Machman", from the disarming simplicity with which an untold number of interlocking melodies swallow up the bass and vocal lines in "Praying To The Aliens", to the muffled, thoroughly modern atmospheres of "Down In The Park", the first single, which went unnoticed on release but today boasts numerous samples and covers (from Terre Thaemlitz to Marilyn Manson, from the Foo Fighters to Christian Death).

"It Must Have Been Years" marks continuity with the old Tubeway Army, resting entirely on the bass-guitar pairing, to the point of granting the latter a brief solo, while what stands out is the tonal contrast between the two instrumentals that close the album, the march-like "When The Machines Rock", which turns into a night with no return in the sci-fi enchantment of "I Nearly Married A Human".

In an album of such great inspiration, it's worth remembering also the songs left off the original work that appear in current reissues. Above all "We Are So Fragile", which ended up on the B-side of "Are 'Friends' Electric?", and which would become a live warhorse for the hieratic British musician.

"Replicas" paved the way for a movement, that of electronic pop, which would set the rules in years to come, turning into a trend for many. Numan himself would ride the phenomenon at least until 1983, stringing together genuine gems ("The Pleasure Principle") alongside misfires ("Warriors"), but the suggestions of this record and its icy characters remain a case apart. Even today, wherever machines rock, a humanoid in black still watches over them from a window.

Contributions by Federico Orlandi

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05/10/2007