1979 Tubeway Army: Are 'Friends' Electric?

If 'Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick' represented the milestone of being my first bought single, then as the first album I ever walked into a shop by myself and bought with my own money, then Tubeway Army's 'Replicas' was another. And I bought it largely on the strength of hearing 'Are 'Friends' Electric?' on the radio. It was a permanent fixture over the summer of 1979, though - confession time - the fact I thought Gary Numan looked rather cool and mysterious on the cover played no small part in this purchase. To my impressionable mind, the shot was every bit as 'alien' as Bowie on the cover of my brother's 'Ziggy Stardust' album, especially when I noticed that his reflection in the window didn't correspond with the way he was looking into it. But whilst Ziggy was to be found roaming around at large in central London, Numan was trapped indoors in a bare room, which made it all the more menacing. And it was 'mine'. Mine mine mine mine. So that didn't hurt either. But I'll come back to that.

'Are 'Friends' Electric?' came to my attention fully formed and vacuum sealed, a whole package of sound and vision unlike anything else I'd been exposed to. For a quite some time it was my idea of what the 'punk thing' I'd been hearing about looked and sounded like. It was my only real point of reference; I'd never heard of Kraftwerk in 1979, but Numan had. And how. That whole tight shirt, tie and sensible hair image came wholesale (I was soon to learn) from their 'The Man Machine' era, but whilst such peripherals were easy enough to appropriate, the music was less so; Kraftwerk always ran on oiled ball bearings but in comparison, 'Are 'Friends' Electric?' has a wooden leg fashioned from a minimoog.

But wait, that's not a criticism per se, and the Kraftwerk comparisons are a bit one eyed on my part - after all, the Germans were hardly working in isolation as the be all and end all of electronic music. My point though is that, suffice it to say, most of the music of this type I'd come across at that point tended to be melodic, almost novelty affairs that exploited the metronomic precision that synthesisers could bring to a tune (like Hot Butter's 'Popcorn', or Space's 'Magic Fly' to give two rather perverse examples), or else they were ambient, synth mood washes of sound that did nothing but wash ambiently (side two of Bowie's 'Low' and Tangerine Dream on Virgin were my main reference points at this time). I think it's fair to say there's nothing light or ambient about 'Are 'Friends' Electric?'

If I'm going to maintain the comparison, then Numan's song is the sound of Kraftwerk as played by Black Sabbath - huge, two fisted slabs of doom laden slog wheezing along like an unstoppable steam driven machine, so much so that Numan has to shout to be heard on his own song. Numan had already namechecked sci-fi author Philip K Dick's work on Tubeway Army's debut album, and the menacing paranoia of what Numan was shouting could have been cribbed from one of Dick's later novels. In fact, I could fill volumes with the various interpretations that the angst filled adolescent me gave to these lyrics over the years, but all of them concerned alienated outsiders lost in an indifferent world that didn't understand them and offered no place for them to call home (I've repeated some below, for all our amusements).

Which I suppose wasn't really that far off the mark, and this is where that album sleeve became important to me - there was never an official promotional video for 'Are 'Friends' Electric?'* but to my mind one wasn't needed - that cover shot illustrates the song (rather than 'Replicas' as a whole) well enough. When Numan sings:"It's cold outside, and the paint's peeling off of my walls. There's a man outside, in a long coat, grey hat, smoking a cigarette"** and: "Now the light fades out, and I wonder what I'm doing in a room like this" then he's singing it from that room while gazing at (rather than out of) that window.***

And the dirge-like tune of 'Are 'Friends' Electric?' seems a fitting soundtrack to that particular landscape, (I like to imagine Numan has it playing loudly on a stereo just out of shot). To an extent anyway - 'Are 'Friends' Electric?' is over five minutes long and there's only so much anybody can take of that major/minor opening riff, but just at the point where you might start thinking about reaching for the off button, it shifts key into a bridge of a cascading synth motif where Numan abandons his android squawk and provides a monologue that allows an element of humanity to creep into the song. The device is repeated again toward the end and each are section is bookended by the "I don't think it mean anything to you/You see it meant everything to me" complaint that lies at the heart of the track - 'Are 'Friends' Electric? is just another 'my lover's gone' song dressed up as a sc-fi B movie . It seems that even if androids do dream of electric sheep, they can have their hearts broken like the rest of us.

So at heart nothing new, but on the surface it's arguable that the image conscious, synth driven/New Romantic haunted 80's started here and with this. And not only that - it's also arguable that its obscure and angsty tone made Numan a forbearer of the black raincoat, Camus reading indie scene that was just around the corner. Not that I'm claiming any prophet status for him, but the level of critical abuse that has always hurtled his way has been a tad unjustified. Time may have shown Numan up to be something of a one trick pony on just about every front with the ideas first heard on 'Are 'Friends' Electric?' plundered, stretched, re-interpreted and just plain repeated for many years to come. But just as all tricks are at their best when you see them for the first time, the multiplicity of source material and general ham-fistedness struck lucky by generating an originality of its own and a weirdness that doesn't often find itself at number one. Another song that I rarely tire of listening to.

* Adolescent, angst filled interpretation #1: I placed great significance on the inverted commas around 'friends'. To my mind, Numan was saying people only let you down and you'd be far better off with a robot for a mate. Only they wouldn't be a proper mate because they were robots. So a 'mate'. Then.

** Adolescent, angst filled interpretation #2: We can't see the man in the hat outside the window, but that's because he isn't there in the physical sense at all. It's just a manifestation of Numan's conscience that wouldn't let him rest. Rather than sourced from any paperback philosophy, this little bon mot was born from hearing Cheap Trick's 'Dream Police' that year. Which incidentally was also the title of a song on the first Tubeway Army album - hey, maybe P.K. Dick was on to something after all.....

*** Adolescent, angst filled interpretation #3: An outsider looking out at a world that he's alienated from - blimey, what a pretentious twat I was, but to my eternal shame it would get a lot worse before it got any better. But I'm OK now.