What is the friend in Gary Numan’s ‘Are “Friends” Electric?’
While UK synthpop had been bubbling away on post-punk’s fringes at the end of the 1970s, one figure in the emerging electronic crowd swooped into the top of the charts to the surprise of the scene’s budding synthesists, no less than the unexpected star himself.
Amid John Foxx pushing his neon-glam Ultravox toward further electro realms, The Human League’s first incarnation dropping ‘Being Boiled’s DIY alien pulse, and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s fizzy ‘Electricity’ first single, Gary Numan scored a number one with his Moog drenched ‘Are “Friends” Electric?’ in May 1979.
Operating under the previous band moniker Tubeway Army, their early singles and studio sessions, later collated on 1984’s The Plan, were a full-throated dive into the era’s hooky punk attack. A chance encounter with a Minimoog in Cambridge’s Spaceward studios while recording their eponymous debut would stand as a crucial creative pointer for his songwriting to follow, the portable synth’s strange tonalities perfectly complementing Numan’s lyrical obsessions with JG Ballard and dystopian science fiction.
While peppered across 1978’s Tubeway Army as a supporting flavour behind the guitar, it would be the sophomore LP which established the classic Numan sound.
Preceded by the gloomy and perennial live favourite ‘Down in the Park’, Replicas‘ second single ‘Are “Friends” Electric?’ presented an entirely confounding composite of buzzing Minimoog and Polymoog synth lines atop its bass and drum parts and a dispassionate vocal delivery with spoken word verses lacking any obvious chorus. Its skewed and disjointed character was burnished in its earliest conception, curiously welding earlier compositions together in a haphazard fashion.
“I wrote it on an old pub piano my mum and dad bought, which I didn’t realise was out of tune, Numan revealed to The Guardian in 2014. “It was initially two different songs, which is why it’s over five minutes long. I had a verse from one, the chorus from the other, and was struggling to mix them together. I got so fed up, one day I played them one after another and suddenly they sounded right”.
In keeping with Replicas‘ overarching theme of android-populated futurescapes, Numan poured his escapist fantasy concepts potently into ‘Are “Friends” Electric?’. Depicting a scenario straight out of Philip K Dick‘s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—later loosely adapted for 1982’s Blade Runner—Numan paints a chromatic vignette of a lonely soul awaiting an electronic “friend” while a mysterious ‘grey man’ ominously looms outside their apartment.
Lines such as “There’s a knock on the door” and “I don’t think it meant anything to you”, coupled with the quotation marks over “Friends” in the title, allude to a robotic sex worker ordered by the isolated client in Numan’s tech-noir visions, later confirmed in interviews over the years.
‘Are “Friends” Electric?’ would set the stage for the even bigger The Pleasure Principle a few months later and the global smash ‘Cars’, and would find renewed life in 2002 as a sampled backing track for Sugababes‘ hit ‘Freak Like Me’, an equally confounding pop reimagining that Numan magnanimously declared better than the original.
