Gary Numan's first "official" album as a solo artist, The Pleasure Principle debuted at number one in September 1979, shortly after the album's hit single Cars also hit the top of the UK charts. The main difference from Replicas is Numan's decision to completely phase out his guitar-playing in favour of the sweeping, filtered electronics of the Poly-Moog, viola and piano. "I wanted to experiment a little by making the album without guitars," he says. "It wasn't intended to be a great artistic statement although I did feel synthesisers were, to this new form of music, what guitars had been to most of the musical styles that had gone before. They provided an opportunity for people without any great musical training or ability to make pop music. You could rent them fairly cheaply, record them in little studios and they would sound incredibly powerful."

Recording had actually started back in April 1979 at a tiny studio, Freerange, just off the Strand in London. According to Numan, "we kept some of this demo material, such as the weird viola part on the song Complex, because we couldn't recreate it when we went to a bigger place, Marcus Music." Although he once again worked quickly in the studio, by the time he'd finished the album Numan was a fully-fledged pop star. "We were actually working in Marcus Music when Are "Friends" Electric? and Replicas went to number one, so they were incredibly vibey sessions." However, if anything this success made Numan even more self-conscious about his songs. In one interview he revealed his shyness about singing his material in front of other people. "I've rarely ever sung the songs the way they're going to be before I go into the studio to do them," he confessed. "I've never sung them at home. I normally write the vocal line on the piano, playing the notes because I don't like singing. I write at my family's house where nobody can hear me getting it wrong as I'm writing it. So I do it very quietly and tend to play it on the piano because I don't like them to hear. It's funny but it's true. I've always been embarrassed by it."

On the sleeve of The Pleasure Principle, the reticent star credits his band for "turning basics into songs". The line-up still featured his old mate Paul Gardiner on bass, but Jess Lidyard had left to be replaced by Cedric Sharpley, Chris Payne joined on keyboards and viola, and the band was completed by the arrival of Billy Currie from Ultravox who had split up after the departure of their original vocalist, John Foxx. This band also completed a second John Peel session on 25 June which showed off the new tracks, Airlane, Films, Conversation and Cars.

In recent years, The Pleasure Principle's analogue Moog sounds and '70s futurism have come back into fashion. The likes of Beck and Smashing Pumpkins, who have both covered Numan songs, are using the squelchy, filtered textures pioneered by the electronic acts at the end of the 1970s in their own music. Their promo videos and photo sessions have also paid a retro debt to the neon-tubed, man-in-black-image of Numan. Furthermore, a wave of underground American synth-pop acts, including The Rentals, Six Finger Satellite and Pulsars, all sound like they've got a vinyl copy of The Pleasure Principle at the front of their record collections. One man who rarely uses analogue and now fully embraces the possibilities of digital technology is Gary Numan, who doesn't share younger acts enthusiasm for the old ways. "I think I've used them enough don't you? I may dig out the Moog again at some point, but I was regularly using analogues for the first ten years of my career." Before the inevitable backlash arrives against yet another squiggly Mini-Moog keyboard line on a pop song/hip hop track/techno anthem, artists continue to draw inspiration from the limits of these '70s instruments. The Pleasure Principle now belongs to an oddly attractive, easily defined pop scene - a world which neither us, or indeed Gary Numan himself, belong to anymore. Jaron Lanier writes in the technology magazine, Wired; "Pop style has stopped happening. Style used to be, in part, a record of the technological limitations of the media of each period. The sound of The Beatles was the sound of what you could do if you pushed a '60s-era recording studio absolutely as far as it could go. Artists long for limitations; excessive freedom casts us into a vacuum. That is why "vintage" synthesisers are hotter right now than more flexible and powerful machines. Digital artists also face constraints in their tools, of course, but often these constraints are so distant, scattered and rapidly changing that they can't be pushed against in a sustained way."

As well as the "classic" Moog sounds surviving into the '90s, The Pleasure Principle is also more rhythmically inventive than Replicas, with the rich bass sounds stabbing alongside Cedric Sharpley's powerful rock drumming on tracks such as Metal, Films and Cars. Inadvertently Numan came up with a percussion-heavy style which was to influence the birth of hip hop and electro in America. According to Afrika Bambaataa, whose

- Airlane

- Metal

- Complex

- Films

- M.E.

- Tracks

- Observer

- Conversation

- Cars

- Engineers

- Random

- Oceans

- Asylum

- Me! I Disconnect from You (Live)

- Bombers (Live)

The Fall's Mark E Smith, a man not given to complementing other artists on a regular basis, recalls "While I was in South Chicago recording an album in 1992, I went to a few clubs and all the black guys with machine guns worship Gary Numan - Snoop Doggy Dogg samples his stuff." The highly underated British hip hop innovator, The Underdog, also enthuses about the track Films, which he and up-and-coming rap talent Lewis Parker, covered on the 1997 Numan covers album, Random. "That track's got the baddest drums on it," says Underdog. "I wanted a chance to get my hands on the baddest hip hop break ever and flip it . . . electro and hip hop wouldn't have existed if it hadn't been for Gary Numan. He was into mad, dark electronica but he played live." Although Films was name-dropped by some, it was the Top 10 American success of Cars in 1980 which reached furthest into the black clubs, later re- emerging in this new culture through sampled excerpts in tracks by Sir-Mix-A-Lot (he also sampled Zero Bars from Tubeway Army) and Kool G & DJ Polo.

Meanwhile, Numan's standing as "a symbol of something new - I wouldn't venture anymore than that", his technology-led music and forward-looking lyrics created a package of ideas which later inspired the original Techno pioneers in Detroit. Juan Atkins defines Techno as "technological. It's an attitude to making music that sounds futuristic; something that hasn't been done before." Later, '90s artists such as Luke Slater, The Orb, Richie Hawtin, Dave Angel, Robert Armani, Claude Young and Dave Clarke have also acknowledged Numan's influence, with Clarke arguing; "Gary Numan had more influence on me than Kraftwerk ever did - he's the dark side of electronica." In 1998, many of these artists contributed to Random 2, an album of techno remixes which includes Mike Dearborn's Cars and Armani's Metal.

In many ways, the aspirational styling of Numan's early albums is as important as the music itself. Mojo magazine recently concluded a feature on Techno, by trying to predict the next phase of electronic music; "My guess is that right now some alienated young soul there in the cybernetic jungle - or maybe a lock-up in Dagenham - is probably thinking, Hmmm, if I mix Derrick May's fucked-up salsa beat with this Gary Numan B-side and Kraftwerk's . . . . . . "

Back in 1979, Replicas and The Pleasure Principle had a major effect on the British music scene, opening the floodgates for new synthesiser bands who were being prioritised by record companies above all their other acts. Depeche Mode biographer Dave Thompson, writes in Depeche Mode: Some Great Reward, "Numan was a star from the moment he struck his first pose; by the time he ditched the punk roar of his first LP and sold his soul to the synth brigade, he was already the first true genius of '80s pop . . . Numan was unstoppable, not only signposting the way the world would turn thereafter but also giving everyone such a coldhearted kicking that Martin Gore, for one, still hasn't recovered."

Lyrically The Pleasure Principle is a mixture of sci-fi, relationships and personal observations as Numan had his first taste of fame. In his autobiography he explains; "The track Metal is pure science fiction. One of the images in it actually came from an advert for Castrol Oil. Their slogan used to be Liquid Engineering, so I stole that and out it into a song about a robot's desire to be human - "and I'm frightened by the liquid engineers". Another line in the song, "if I could make the change, I'd love to pull the wires from the wall", was a play on the sex change wishes of some human beings in relation to the machine's desires to be human.

"Complex is more personal and describes a situation where a girlfriend had let me down. It also has another, entirely separate theme, about the fickleness of fans. When I wrote the song I was not successful, but I was beginning to see small signs. Complex voiced my early concerns about the way fans can come and go, some time before I actually had any.

"The song M.E. is sung from the point of view of the last living machine on earth. The people have all died, the planet is laid waste and its own power source is running down. I used to have a picture in my mind of this sad and desperately alone machine standing in a desert-like wasteland, just waiting to die.

"Films is pure paranoia, my dislike of everyday life and the dangers I saw lurking in every stranger's face. Despite the title, it's not about movies - the "actors" in the lyric are people, the "show" is life. "We're so exposed" is me being outside, walking down the street, and the "scenery" and the "set" are the city around me."

"Observer states that I'm on the outside looking in, that I was watching the world rather than being part of it. Fantasy stuff really, but it was very much the way I felt at the time. "I could stand here for days, I could stand here for hours, I could stand here for a lifetime watching you and waiting always." Phil Sutcliffe accurately summarised the track Conversation in his 1979 Sounds review: "With Conversation Numan offers a perspective on his place as a performer: "We are not gods/we are not men/we are making claims/we are only boys." The humility is utterly sincere. Then he told us where the crush barriers go up: "I've got no intentions/Of saying "I love you." As in,"We love you Hammersmith!", "We love you England!""

Tracks is an oblique song about swapping his identity with an older person for a while to experience the future and the past, and, according to Numan, the last track on the album, Engineers was "inspired by a short story, written by Philip K Dick probably. It's the story of men who spend their entire lives working underground. All the roads are actually conveyor belts, but on a massive scale running all over the world. These engineers keep them running and feel very bitter because they live in darkness, never coming to the surface or being allowed to use the roads themselves."

The songs on The Pleasure Principle formed the backbone for Numan's first solo tour in autumn of that year. As well as an ambitious musical set-up featuring 18 analogue synthesisers, plus guitar, viola, bass and drums (later captured on Living Ornaments '79 album) he was determined to make the look of the show an old fashioned showbusiness event, albeit with a modern twist. "I think I'm just taking it back to cabaret," he commented at the time. "Showbiz for showbiz's sake more than anything. And use the set and image as a visual expansion for my songs. To be honest I used to hate all that stuff but fairly recently I've got to really like Bing Crosby and now I like Frank Sinatra. I never did before, but the way he just breezes among his crowds, as if they're in a circle and not on stage - he's so relaxed."

Numan certainly did put on a show, adding another element to his new vision of how a star should be in 1979. The stage set was based on the cityscape of Replicas. "I saw the city as constant light and everything was white. No humans, all machines, so it was clean; no dust, no pollution, nothing. The set was to be that, originally - two big skyscrapers which lit up, but we kept sticking effects into it. Then I had the pyramids. I made them bigger and turned them into robots so they could dance and swivel around the stage. With all the white lights, it was very stark."

The package was completed by the new promo video format, which was tailor made for Numan's assault on the adolescent audience. Cars' futurist chic defined the artist as much as his dyed jet-black hair and truculent on-stage expression. The artwork for the early releases, including The Pleasure Principle, was also important in establishing Numan as a new star. "The album cover is a parody of the Rene Magritte painting, The Pleasure Principle. In the painting a man is sitting at a desk, with his body turned towards a small rock to his left, on the edge of a desk. He's wearing a business suit and instead of a head there's white light coming from out of the neck. The reason why I'm looking at a glowing pyramid is that it just happened to be lying around the studio and I thought, that looks cool."

At the time Numan took the flak as an artist who was trying to the anti-thesis of the anti-star punk ideal, but 20 years later the lineage which he became part of has flowed from Bolan through to Shirley Manson from Garbage; "When people are so self-conscious about being cool," Manson said in 1997, "that's not cool. Everybody wants a leader to look up to, a cartoon to live through, a fantasy figure to travel with. Nobody wants reality in their face. They want something bigger than they are. That's why people get into music or religion or whatever. They're all looking for an escape. Something bigger to make sense of things for them."

- Steve Malins

The Beggars Banquet Gary Numan catalogue is being made available on Real Audio courtesy of Joey Lindstrom at World Wide Webb, so you can get a lo-fi idea of what the albums sound like (if you don't already know!)

Numan Biography