2023/4 Albums Thing 385 - Tubeway Army “Replicas”
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Hearing “Are Friends Electric ?” in early 1979 was something of a revelation. We knew about Ultravox! so electronic music wasn’t totally new to us. But Gary Numan’s (for let’s face it, Tubeway Army was purely his baby) way of doing things, mixing Punk guitars with Kraftwerk like synthesizers was a big deal. I hadn’t been seduced yet by Kraftwerk or Bowie’s Berlin period, this was 1979 and most of us were still happily leaping about to the the Pistols, The Jam and The Clash. The Human League were making records already but we weren’t really aware of them for another year. Ultravox’s “Systems Of Romance” was the only yardstick we had to measure this by and although Numan was obviously a big Ultravox(!) fan this was good enough to stand up to any comparisons.
Tubeway Army had made a couple of Punk sounding singles (“That’s Too Bad” and “Bombers” with Numan going under the moniker Valeriun) and an album for Beggars Banquet in 1978. The synthesizers and vocal stylings were in evidence on the album but this was a guitar band album with added keyboard colouring rather than being an electronic record, there’s acoustics all over it particularly on the rather fine “Jo The Waiter”. The final song “Zero Bars (Mr Smith)” is as close as this Tubeway Army gets to “Replicas”.
So the sound was already fermenting even though we later get the story of Numan intending to record a Punk album until he chanced upon a Minimoog synth that had been left set up in he studio, and the rest as they say (listen to “You Are In My Vision”, much more like that first Tubeway Army album and barely a synthesizer in evidence”)…Whatever, he mashed up all those childhood sci-fi stories he read with his Bowie and Ultravox! influences and released a 4th single for Beggars which sold a million. “Are ‘Friends’ Electric ?” (the quote marks around Friends in the title was to denote that the particular robot in question in the song was supplying services of a personal nature, as Numan later confessed “I had a No 1 single with a song about a robot prostitute and no one knew”) caused quite the stir in our little world from the first time we heard it. The cold atmosphere of it, dominated by that repetitive synth riff but with real drums, bass and growling guitars to give it some life had us all hooked.
“Replicas” is loosely a concept album set in the future where machines have taken over. They supply services to the humans via “friends” while human looking androids (the Mach-men) keep the humans in control, under the orders of anonymous officials (the Grey Men). Take the Ultravox song “Slow Motion”, Bowie’s “Low” and Kraftwerk’s “The Man Machine” and you basically have the sound Numan achieved on “Replicas”. I’m not running the album down by saying that, but it’s undeniable. Numan however was the only one to put all that together and make something of it.
“Replicas” and this period of Numan’s music (what he calls his Robot period including follow up album “The Pleasure Principle” and then “Telekon”) have become quietly influential. You can definitely hear their influence on later Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails and Rammstein to name just a handful. We already covered a couple of Numan’s more recent albums and honestly, his sound hasn’t changed all that much since “Replicas”, maybe, like for Kraftwerk before him, the technology improved. He also seems a really decent fella. This was a groundbreaker back in ’79 and helped open a lot of eyes to electronic music.
Down In The Park - https://youtu.be/9GQS-iFCzus?si=DgiJJ5I40HBKCdmY