From the Archive: Gary Numan & Tubeway Army's “Replicas” at 45
45 years on, Gary Numan's vision of the future seems as accurate as ever.
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Note: I first wrote this brief review as part of a writing exercise/challenge. I’m resurfacing it today to mark the record turning 45.
KA—
We’re going to become caretakers for the robots. That’s what the next generation of work is going to be.
~Gray Scott
When I was a kid, I dreamed of the day when flying cars would be a reality.
A steady diet of Jetson’s cartoons, Star Wars, and an overactive imagination fed my idea of the future. Robots would work for us, and we’d zip around town via airways. Other people had bleaker visions.
On Replicas, Tubeway Army’s 1979 record, Gary Numan and co. paint a picture of that latter world realized.
An antiseptic story told from the perspective of a robot, the record is dark and cold.
The synthesizers paint a picture of a time when the robots have come, seen some things, and realized they have zero interest in any of this. Cold melodies and Gary Numan’s vocals speak of a murky, depressing world.
It’s catchy and catching all at once.
Replicas sounds like what might’ve happened if Kraftwerk and Devo found themselves double-booked in the same studio.
There is a sterile architecture here, to be sure, but not to the exclusion of an occasional melody. Like the grass that insists on pushing through concrete, there are bursts of pop & melody. And Numan’s disaffected delivery is punctuated with occasional spikes that evoke a sliver of hope.
40+ years ago, I was dreaming of a bright future. 8000 miles away, Tubeway Army was writing a different version in the form of a record that didn’t sound like anything else.
Neither has quite come to pass, but neither is entirely wrong.
Top Tracks:
Me, I Disconnect From You
We Have a Technical
Click on the record & listen on your platform of choice:
As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this record! Did I get it right, or am I way off the mark?
Thanks for being here,
Kevin—
Kevin, this is a total tangent, but at least the time horizon is right. I'm looking for bands that blend goth and punk, in the formative style of Bauhaus and Joy Division, but also crossing over to punk bands like Rudi P or even Neurosis. TL;DR: do any punkish-goth bands come to mind? I'll give this record a listen now.
Always liked Numan's music, he realized that if you're going to replace a band with synths to make electronic pop* you need to replace everything; melody, harmony, rhythm. So there was depth to his music that was missing in other nominal electronic acts (I'm looking at you Soft Cell) . I'd been listening to electronic music for years when this came out and it was the first time I heard that complete sound in a pop song format.
* I know some people will go 'Gary Numan's not pop!', I mean the 3-4 minute song that you would hear on the radio (Cars, Are Friends Electric?), with the Verse-Chorus-Verse structure. Not sounding like The Archies.