Shot on the front of Replicas, Gary Numan look much like the embodiment of Bron Helstrom, the former male prostitute of Samuel R. Delaney's pan-cultural science fiction novel Triton. Hair peroxide blond and clad entirely in black, the man born Gary Webb stares into the middle distance in a room illuminated by a single, naked light bulb. Out of the window is The Park, an area much like the lawless free zones a citizen can choose to live in as part of Delaney's ultra-liberal futuristic society.
Both the image and Helstrom's character are highly ambiguous, avatars of a 1970's in which computers and the cold war were melding science fact, in which paranoia and the boundaries of sexuality, personal politics and our mechanistic existences began to dissolve. A dystopianly themed concept album, in musical terms Replicas came heavily influenced by Low-era Bowie and perhaps less fashionably, the chugging guitars of glam. Numan had discovered synthesizers by accident during its recording process and experienced a career changing epiphany in the process, one which gives the only Tubeway Army album some odd juxtapositions. On songs like Praying To The Aliens, The Machman and You Are In My Vision for example the emphasis is on arty, post-punk atmospheres, the singer's atonal voice providing a monotone cyborg appliqué.
The master stroke however came in bringing the doom-soaked Moogs to the forefront, either on filmic instrumentals such as I Nearly Married A Human or When Machines Rock, but especially in the claustrophobic Down In The Park, or the album's focal point Are Friends Electric. A surprise number one at the time, the latter was both maudlin and authoritarian, Numan forlornly seeking empathetic love from an emotionless machine, vulnerable flesh and blood in a world of hard wired logic.
Continue reading: Gary Numan - Replicas, Telekon & The Pleasure Principle Reissues Album Review
Gary Numan performing live
