As the album progresses, the machine like precision of the arrangements, the reedy vocals and the icy scenarios of the lyrics, we feel the theme surfacing. A dystopian sci-fi world of androids and humans with a mounting alienation and nihilism spreading through the nightscape. While the songs have the quality of cinematic scenes and suggestions of narratives within themselves, they can also break out and refer to each other until the world takes form.
Are 'Friends' Electric bursts on stage as a stadium sized factory of synthesised architecture. A grounding riff pumps a pattern of fifths as a descant sounds a partial seventh. When the cold, thin vocal appears it's delivering half of a conversation between a character and his home delivery replica sex worker. The only problem is that the human has begun to extend his feelings beyond the replica's function and it's starting to feel like love with all the pain and alienation that can entail. The massive grinding arrangement pauses for a kind of middle eight with bright keyboards circling around sevenths and the vocals change to spoken word. It hurts and he's lonely. This gives way to a soaring, blissful restatement of the circular figure but higher on the scale. When the factory grind reappears it feels like more of the same of this isolation. A shorter verse features the title and the aching realisation: "and now I've no one to love". After another middle eight ("I don't think I mean anything to you") we leave on a fade with the melody of the "no one to love" repeating to silence.
This extraordinary sci-fi dystopia story was released as a single and made it, without a singalong chorus to number one. The song is a weighty downer but anyone who heard it at the time with an inclination to the new and the unusual heard electronic music that bore no resemblance to familiar forms the way Kraftwerk's later '70s work did. Are "Friends" Electric is closer kin to Donna Summer's barnstorming trance I Feel Love than Autobahn or Trans Europe Express. And this includes the other factor that Gary Numan persisted with in his initial run of success: rock instrumentation. It was cold and spiky rather than cock rock overdrive but it was rock music. The guitars, drum kit and bass are all audible along with the electronics but they are not dominant, there is no sense that the synthesisers are a red faced gimmick and there is nothing of the gymnastics of prog rock: the united front of rock band with committed synthesis is presented with full power. It felt like a first. It had precedents galore but this lean fusion had not been heard before. It was cinematically compelling and offered a credible path out of the dust of punk's crushing demise.
The Machman begins with a guitar riff that sounds like a routine genre figure until the vocals and synths arrive. The replica's encounters with the living are cryptic and paranoid in an urban nightscape. Praying to the Aliens does something different again by preferring an electric piano with a slapback echo (which always reminds me of Bowie's We Are The Dead from Diamond Dogs) which creates a nervous energy. More technoir with statements about sexual identity and function without a clear speaker position. The stuttered Rhodes figure constantly flits around the arrangement as confusion swells. While the sense of concept album is clear throughout the record, it's application is often reduced to a kind of stream of consciousness account, not intended to further a narrative but continue the flow with a disjointed scene like both of these. If this album were a movie it would be Blade Runner as directed by Zulawski.
Then we come to the big one. I can recall speeding along the South East Freeway in a friend's car, seeing the towers of the Gold Coast form on the horizon in 1980 as the booming knells of Down in the Park rolled out of the speakers. It put me into the movie and until the next person spoke I was speeding towards intrigue. Big tolling notes on bass, synth and electric piano form a seven note sequence. A shiny descanting synth figure comes in. Another night scape. The vocal comes in after two iterations calling out images and statements that are picked up like litter on the set. The War, rape machine, a friend called Five. It's a walk through of an underworld of brutal entertainments that can leave their human participants dead. The verses are sung over the nearly unchanging ground of the opening figure but there are bright and flowery inserts which add more modal melodic material with a carnival feel. After each of these the main theme is played out as a slow, heartrending instrumental in the synthesised strings. Most of the imagery made it on to the album art, with Numan, platinum blonde and pale, standing like a mannequin in a dimly lit room as his reflection looks at him in a way not possible with the angles. Another man (probably from Are "Friends" Electric) is looking through the window. In the distance outside, a neon arch forms the letters The Park. After the storm of the main song has passed we're left with a repeating figure from the relief section that finally, lands with a big droning bass from below. A perfect side closer, by now you are immersed in the world.
Side two starts with a grumpy rock figure in the guitars. It even starts with a drumstick count in. There's a synth drone to add some texture and colour but this is the Tubeway Army as they thought of themselves to begin with. The driving overdriven riffs continue the album's pattern of playing persistently between vocals, often just insisting on a single chord. Where in Johnny B. Goode or even Breathe, this carries the mood whether rocking or dreamlike. On this album and throughout Gary Numan's earlier years, spare bars of guitar band sound more like an idling machine, grunting at attention for the next use. The vocals sing a quite bright melody that leads to a chorus of the title. The kind of entertainment of the Park is seen up close with live sex and violence with generous dollops of surveillance. And with this comes the understated flow on effect of the indifference to the humans at the results of the brutality. All that in an upbeat rocker.
The title track takes us back to the cinematic magnitude of Down in the Park and "Friends". A bass throb plays a constant heartbeart while banks of humming and groaning synthesisers form a bed for a lyric about isolation. The narrator walks outside through crowds of nameless figures. There is a sense of shame in his non-conformity. He turns on the crowd but at best they treat him with the caution of crowds faced with irregularity, violence, delusion, and smile nervously. When the police arrive, he pleads guilty but is allowed to walk away. Between the verses the synthesis blooms to a poignant figure that is both cold and heartrending, as though a machine were trying to emote or a human was trying to be mechanical. The song ends as the heartbeat slows and a persistent howl falls into reverberation.
It Must Have Been Years starts with the same instrumentation playing the heartbeat but this is quickly obscured by loud riffy rock with nary a keyboard present. The vocal is the most rock like of the whole album. The warmer approach to the arrangement tells us that the observer of the stagnation he's describing is not a machman. However, the verses are like a day in the life of a machman sex worker. This one is either at the end of their career or in such a state of intense overuse that they are headed for landfill. Is the title/chorus a passing but repeated occuring thought that the figure at the centre has lost track of time but figures their career had begun wholecloth years before. The sole instance of a guitar solo is as frantic as the rest of the song and heightens the sense of panic before ending on a downward bend before vanishing. Just another spasm hitting its shelf life. I used to get annoyed at the rock of that solo. How could it belong in such a richly new field, sounding like some schoolkid ace guitar player with a Gibson copy and a fuzz pedal. Really, it works. It does sound like the playing of a young musician aiming to impress but it also expresses the emotional content of the song. In an album that was met with criticism for its apparent coldness, these few seconds of flashing lead guitar spike and give the lie.
When the Machines Rock a chirpy synthesiser workout that breaks for a grandeur as big as the factory floor. I Nearly Married a Human begins as a druggy version of the synth line of the opening song but adds textures like an emulated drop and ripple effect as well a small number of motifs for development with the electrodrums coming in in sections. The music develops between the two figures with bright hazes of swells and piercing glissandi. This sounds like it started as an afternoon's noodling on the keyboard but Numan takes it well beyond that. Add an evocative title and the rest is up to you, a romatnic montage between two figures before the penny drops and all we are left with is the fading two element rhythm. And in the end the data you give is equal to the data you live.
Replicas gave a younger audience what Bowie had started but kept going until cities rose from its grooves and an adventure of sadness and action awaited. As punk's bonfire was settling into ash and the suits were trying to replace its figures with newer, easier to control units, we knew we could do much worse than listen to this. Gary Numan said he was in a music shop one day and walked past a synthesiser. He stopped and pressed a key. It had been set up with a fat bass sound that resonated through the building. In that moment all the things he'd been thinking about as he walked under the clouds and the towers, all the books of crashes, high rises and dreaming androids bloomed before him. The mechanical punk of Tubeway Army gave way to something that sounded like those ideas and felt as big as a tower block.
I didn't get all the words and I was in Townsville where the rain meant monsoons and smelt of mangoes and mosquitos and I still got it. And that was just as I'd got the thrill of seeing the Saints and the Sex Pistols on tv a few years earlier. This was different but it came from the same place. Music seemed to be changing every month until you stood back and realised it was just getting wider. This record was one that clung to me, though. I still have no hesitation in calling it one of the best of its era. And driving back from the Coast to Brisbane with the rain stinging my eyes while I pushed my head out the passenger window for as long as I could, the song was thunderous in the car and I was yelling the chorus:
You are in my vision!
You are in my vision!
Listening notes: I walked around with this in earbuds, hearing the hi-res download but at home listened to a late '90s CD with extra tracks. Both versions are free of the brickwalling compression of the loudness wars and have a joyous, dynamic clarity.
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