1978: The Year After Punk

Few artists garner such a schizophrenic critical reception as Gary Numan, frontman of the post-punk group Tubeway Army. Even Numan fans seem to despise and revere him at the same time. He’s one of those guys who followed a series of groundbreaking and influential recordings with an opposite series of badly-executed embarrassments. Unlike other visionaries, including his heroes David Bowie and Brian Eno, Numan sped off the edge of the cliff and then made the fateful mistake of looking under his feet. And even before his 1981 album Dance and its follow-up I, Assassin showed him faltering into musical styles that gave credence to his detractors, Numan had represented himself to the press as a person out for cash (once sinful in rock-speak) and a supporter of early neo-conservatism.

But if we strip all that away, and if we look back to the beginning of Numan’s career where he virtually introduced post-punk (and pop) to the use of synthesizers on the first Tubeway Army album, it becomes incredibly easy to see why he’s loved nearly as much as he’d once been hated. The detached, robotic character created here and developed through Replicas, The Pleasure Principle and Telekon would help define a new kind of mechanical paranoia that is as much 70s sci-fi as it was the haunting specter of the decade just around the corner. If Numan is remembered in the United States for his ’79 hit “Cars,” it is because of its close relationship to the way we felt about the eighties: that maybe behind all the money and coke and Huey Lewis, we were living in a place very much like that particularly danceable nightmare.

Tubeway Army came together in the big hoopla and signing-frenzy of punk. Their early shows (some of which are compiled as The Plan) featured the tinny-voiced Numan ranting over much noisier, punkier music than he would later be associated with. In fact, according to legend, it was this sound of the band that got them signed to Beggar’s Banquet in ’78, and only Numan’s happening upon a Mini-Moog in the studio one evening changed the trajectory of where Tubeway Army would be going.

The album begins with a pulsing bass sound, soon joined by Numan’s computer-recording voice. A Tron-like synthesizer joins in as Numan shifts his vocal to a high-pitched alien whine. “Please Listen to Sirens” builds up in layers of sound as our narrator implores his listeners to obey the mores of a dark futuristic world left mostly unexplained. The bouncy rhythm and wailed lyric of “Shadow in Vain,” is a supremely eccentric tale of loneliness and despair caged in the electronic future its music constructs. The pointless struggle of its narrator breaks to pieces as sound fades from one speaker to the other.

“The Life Machine” is almost a ballad compared with the songs that precede it. Featuring acoustic guitar and playful Jean-Jaques Perrey-style synth jingles, the song isn’t life changing but certainly sticks out like a sore thumb in the midst of the post-punk scene. The harder-edged “Friends,” though leaning heavily on guitar to carry the melody, hints at the kind of incisive, gut-punching synthesizer-rock Numan would later make himself synonymous with. The slower-paced “Something’s in the House” keeps this up, adding that good old paranoia back into the mix. “Everyday I Die,” another acoustic-tinged tune, is one of the weirder tunes (chipmunk voices, 60s pop feel, robot singing) ever recorded on the theme of masturbation.

“Steel and You” and “My Love is a Liquid” reuse some of the themes and sounds we’ve already heard earlier in the album, though anywhere else they would stand out as signposts of a changing mood in the post-punk world—and the latter does feature the rather memorable line, “Did you know / friends come in boxes?” Things really start to come back together, however, with the superbly Numanesque song “Zero Bars (Mr. Smith),” where the dark sci-fi themes and synth-laden melodies combine perfectly. It’s easy to imagine yourself in a dive bar in the middle of Blade Runner, which is probably a pretty good place to be (no economic catastrophes in Blade Runner, after all—just cyborgs and programmed memories). Here’s where Numan introduces us to the hardened sound a synthesizer can make when it’s not floating through a movie soundtrack or standing in for an orchestra on a Yes album. The song punches and glides like a heavy, rusted out robot trying to boogie to Motown.

Okay, maybe that analogy is ridiculous. But with Tubeway Army, Numan and his cohorts laid the groundwork for the industrial movement and helped show another angle for an instrument deeply associated with the prog movement the punks so despised. Sure, great acts like Wire, Devo, and others grabbed up synths in the late 70s, but Gary Numan was the first to really get on the map with this crossover sound. Hits from this record’s follow-up made the synthesizer cool for a generation of British musicians. The difference for me isn’t that Gary Numan can claim the first synth-rock hits, though. The great thing about Tubeway Army is its glossy imperfection, and the darkly forward-thinking way Numan was able to hit the ground running with a sound distinct and all his own.

With his next three albums, all masterpieces of sci-fi detachment, Numan built up a rabid following, some vitriolic critics, and the perfect answer to the roots-rock argument posited by many a punk-rocker.