Tubeway Army’s triumph: How 1979’s song of the summer shaped the 1980s
In the final months of the 1970s, Gary Numan and his Tubeway Army took everyone by surprise, swiftly standing as synthpop’s first bona fide star.
He seemed to come out of nowhere. By Summer 1979, electronic music had yet to entirely untether itself from the disparate corners of NRG-disco, industrial snarl, or the new age noodles pioneered by the likes of Vangelis or Jean-Michel Jarre. Even Düsseldorf pioneers Kraftwerk had yet to release ‘The Model’ as a legit single in the UK, despite having already appeared on the previous year’s The Man Machine.
Yet, a coalescing of like-minded synthesists up and down the country were able to take advantage of the increasing portability and financial viability of synths and begin to see their potential in the pop world.
Following David Bowie’s ‘Berlin Trilogy’ lead, a cohort of post-punks and art-rockers were feverishly laying synthpop’s switched-on foundations, The Human League’s Mk I cutting the alien ‘Being Boiled’, John Foxx’s Ultravox adding a layer of glowing electric neon to their new wave theatre, and The Normal’s razor ‘Warm Leatherette’ birthing Daniel Miller’s Mute Records.
Among this new electronic air was Numan. While sci-fi concepts and artwork were evident from the get-go, 1978’s debut ‘That’s Too Bad’ adorned with a futuristic, 2000 AD comics style cover, Tubeway Army were little more than just another London punk band gobbled up by the indie labels. An encounter with a Minimoog at Cambridge’s Spaceward studios would change not just the creative direction of their eponymous first LP, but alter Numan’s entire sonic course with just one curious press of its analogue keys.
“It was the most powerful thing,” Numan told The Quietus in 2016. “It was like an earthquake, and I just loved it. And before the band was even finished setting up the gear, I was in there working on changing the songs we’d arrived with into pseudo-electronic songs.”
Tubeway Army would drop in late 1978 with a dollop of synthesised sheen, but 1979’s Replicas sophomore meshed the keyboards with the live band set-up even deeper, introducing the Polymoog for richer stirs of string sirens and marking Numan’s signature ‘Vox Humana’ phantasms. Such synth immersions would first turn underground heads with ‘Down in the Park’s dystopian visions, but May’s ‘Are “Friends” Electric?’ would soar to the top of the UK charts despite its confounding character, sweeping past the rest of the competition before they’d even heard of him.
It shouldn’t have worked. A buzzing two-note mishmash of separate song ideas lacking any discernible hook and lyrically concerned with robot sex workers—a prospect growing ever more tangible in the automated age—but ‘Are “Friends” Electric?’ rode to the top of the UK charts by its futurist aura alone, spending four weeks at number one from late June and largely carried by the unwittingly captivating command of Tubeway Army’s unlikely frontman, all staid machine schtick and android energy ensuring kids were talking about “who the hell was that weird robot last night on Top of the Pops?”
The summer of 1979 was Numan’s pop moment, with August seeing his even more popular ‘Cars’ also topping the charts, as well as cracking the US Top Ten. Far from steamrolling the competition, however, Numan’s fell swoop into stardom opened the floodgates for all the rest of the synthpop generation, setting the stage for the next decade’s budding synthesists following Tubeway Army’s intrepid and uncharted route to the mainstream.
