Replicas is Tubeway Army's second album, recorded in five days at the 16-track Gooseberry Studios in Soho, London in early 1979. This followed a brief demo session at the studio in late '78, where versions of Me, I Disconnect From You, The Machman and Down In The Park were recorded, convincing Gary Numan's punk label Beggars Banquet that they should invest in an electronic pop record. The restless, 21-year-old technology freak plays all the keyboards and guitars on the album, further developing the fat Mini-Moog sound after the garage electronics of the self-titled debut a few months earlier.

Released in March 1979, the dreamily-epic, proto-industrial Down In The Park was the first single to be taken off Replicas, selling 10,000 copies to a new cult audience but failing to chart. Radio One DJ John Peel was very supportive of the track, and in addition to giving Down In The Park late night airplay, Tubeway Army recorded a three-track session for him on 10 January. A raw version of the single was featured alongside Me, I Disconnect From You and I Nearly Married A Human.

Numan's commercial breakthrough came in May 1979 with Are "Friends" Electric? which climbed to number one after live appearances on the TV shows Old Grey Whistle Test and Top Of The Pops. The latter was particularly important in turning Numan into a fully-fledged pop star and he planned every aspect of how he was to be seen for the first time by the public. "I told the set designers I didn't want any of their flashing, coloured lights, I just wanted white light, and a lot of it, on the floor to make the presentation stark and different. I wanted everything about the way we presented the song to express its theme, the atmosphere . . . The cold, alienated stare was as much nerves as image. Whether people loved it or hated it, we did look different."

The compulsive, motorik beat of Are "Friends" Electric? featured on the British charts for a total of 16 weeks, selling a million copies in the UK. The song was later covered by Republica, Moloko and Belgium pianist Ana Pierle, amongst others and there have also been remixes by Renegade Soundwave and Liberator DJs. Numan is the first to confess that Are "Friends" Electric? was a complete accident. "It was over five minutes long because it's actually two different songs put together. I had the main verse and chorus part but I couldn't think of a suitable middle 8 for it. I also had a ballad that I couldn't quite work out a conclusion for. Then I was playing the parts of one and went straight into the other song and was amazed to realise they fitted together perfectly. The main keyboard melody was also different at one point. I was playing it back on my piano, some time before it was recorded, hit a wrong note and thought it sounded much better, so I kept it even though it was actually a bum note."

Although Numan felt the full force of an immediate critical backlash as Replicas joined Are "Friends" Electric? at the top of the charts, there was some sensitive, analytical journalism. One Record Mirror critic accurately summarised the appeal of the album; "Replicas was where things began to gell; it was a world of science, alienation, solitary figures in dark, dull rooms. It was Numan's highly, vaguely personalised feelings locked in a different context - impenetrable, futuristic ideas provoking charges of almost justified pretentiousness . . . Numan is as personally un-stable as he is financially stable. But for all the cold, distant exterior, for all the inverted complexities of his music, the recluse has something. There's no way his work can be branded "emotionless" - it's just powered by emotions of a very personal, inhibited nature. There's another level, too, and the one which looks like rooting Numan at the top of the tree for some while yet; he's producing some of the most optimistic, forward-facing pop of the '70s."

The Record Mirror noted the contradictions in Numan which inspired the album and have remained unresolved throughout a 20-year career. "He's trapped between poles; influenced and motivated by the rock 'n' roll sparkle, the flash of a Hank Marvin guitar on '60s TV, entranced by the breadth of Bowie and William S Burroughs; he relishes his success but at the same time feels inclined to withdraw from the limelight which that success naturally bestows."

The man-in-black cover image originated in short stories which Numan started writing in childhood. "My characters always used to look like him," he said at the time, "like I do now. Only they were taller, always wore black, had very white skin and they were very strong, very powerful, arrogant and completely ruthless. In Replicas they became machines with human skin, very clean, pure."

- Me! I Disconnect From You

- Are 'Friends' Electric?

- The Machman

- Praying To The Aliens

- Down In The Park

- You Are In My Vision

- Replicas

- It Must Have Been Years

- When The Machines Rock

- I Nearly Married A Human

- Do You Need The Service?

- The Crazies

- Only A Downstat

- We Have A Technical

- We are So Fragile

- I Nearly Married A Human (2)

."I am a human being who has had intercourse with a machine. I am a Machman."

Garth Murphy, Twilight Of The Machman, Oz 43, July 1972.

John Gill investigated the Oz story in the NME, shortly after the release of Replicas. "In the magazine, Machman refers to mankind's use of machines to upset the ecological metabolism of the Earth. Numan had read the original article and used the name to describe the predatory humanoids appearing in his "theme" album." The singer also drew heavily from Philip K Dick, Oz, George Orwell, '70s movies such as Westworld, Logan's Run and Soylent Green, and his own stories to create, "half men, half machines with a skin that was human, but designed and genetically engineered." Although they were fantasy figures, the Machmen reflected a growing fascination in the '70s and early '80s with the possibility of technology being used in the human body. Ray Coleman wrote, "Gary's central theme in his song The Machman and throughout the Replicas album was that humanity had reached what he describes as "cross-over point - the fact that people now had arms that worked by impulses because doctors could connect arms to a nervous system." "That's half man, half machine," agreed the 21-year-old performer, "and that's the vision I was writing about. They've already got artificial hearts, hip joints, arms with fingers that move. I know of a girl who wears one of those and she can grip cups and drink it through being connected from her hand through her nervous system."

Replicas is a fractured, atmospheric mixture of ideas which he adapted from his own abandoned adolescent science fiction novel. "I was more interested in the scenes and characters than the narrative and I couldn't work out an ending." In his autobiography, Praying To The Aliens, he describes the world he created in rich, visual detail. "Replicas is filled with images of decay, seediness, drug addicts, fragile people and the abandonment of morals. The bisexual allusions are partly based on encounters I had with gay men, most of whom were much older than me, who had attempted to persuade me to try things. I was never interested in gay sex, never felt the slightest bit tempted, but the seediness of those situations left an impression which I used in Replicas.

"The stories were flawed but some of the basic ideas and imagery, when converted into songs, worked quite well. I set the stories in the not too distant future. Cities have become isolated from each other, worlds within a world. The actual city that the stories revolved around had given control over to a machine created specifically to sort out the near anarchy that life had become. The machine decided that the cause of the problems was humans themselves, and so it set about ridding the city of people, with only a select few being aware of and involved in the scheme. The machine realises it can't just kill everyone, it would be destroyed by rebellion long before the job was completed, so it develops a quota test. The quota test is a method of assessing people's IQ's and anyone who falls below a given level is supposedly taken away, re-educated and made a better person. However, no one comes back, they are all killed. The quota tests' level of acceptability is raised periodically, so the machine systematically gets rid of all the weakest people first and then moves on to eradicate everyone. By the time the people fully grasped what was going on, they would be too few to put up any meaningful resistance and the final annihilation would be swiftly carried out. The tests were administered by the Grey Men, the image of which I used on my Dance (1981) and I, Assassin (1982) album sleeves.

"The songs are filled with characters from the stories, sometimes used as songtitles, sometimes just as part of a lyric. The Machmen are Terminator-type creatures, machines with a cloned human skin that go to form a super police force. The only way you can spot them is by the difference in their eyes - they have a horizontal bar across the eye, instead of a circular pupil, which you can see on the back of the Replicas cover.

"The "Friends" in Are "Friends" Electric? are similar machines but they provide services, as opposed to being the law. You can call for a Friend to play chess with, or indulge your most obscene sexual fantasies, or anything in between. No one else will know because they all look the same. As anonymous as a plain brown package. The governing machine has imposed a curfew and no one is allowed out after dark. The walls of all the city buildings are light-sensitive and glow as soon as it reaches dusk, which means there are no dark corners to hide in. In the stories I visualised some parts of the metropolis in great detail.

"I had certain parts of the streets and buildings where I would write about things that happened. No one is allowed guns but one of the characters in it has an old rifle, passed down secretly from generation to generation. He's one of the people who fights against the machines and he goes underground to where the Crazies live. They aren't actually crazy, they realise what is going on so hide where they can and fight back as best they can. The machine puts out propaganda against them to alarm other, more gullible citizens.

"The Crazies come out at night because, for one thing, they don't pay any attention to the curfew. They scavenge for food and equipment to maintain their survival. Much like the gladiators of Roman times, the machine has created a spectacle for the chosen few to keep them amused. It has created specialised killing machines located in the main city park. They're also light-sensitive and activate when it gets dark. All captured Crazies and other law breakers are put into the park, which is actually a prison. Very few people survive more than one night, no one survives two. The machines are programmed to commit all sorts of atrocities - rape, murder, torture - against anyone they can find. The chosen few, however, the administrators and so on, are allowed out at night and their favourite hang-out is a club, Zom Zoms, which overlooks the park. From this vantage point they can watch the machines at play, purely as entertainment."

A host of freaks and misfits identified with Replicas violent sci-fi themes and hints of sexual deviance. The imagination of one young man in Cleveland, Ohio, namely Brian Warner was fired by the "apocalyptic" imagery of Down In The Park and as Marilyn Manson he recorded the track with producer Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails. The song was also featured on the sountrack, Songs In The Key Of X, to pre-millenium paranoia series X-Files, via a valium-ed out version by The Foo Fighters, while Californian analogue-fetishists, Sukia, named after a Portugese "el paranormal" porn comic, re-visited Me, I Disconnect For You on 1997's cover LP Random.

On Replicas Numan created a new form of introspective electronic pop music which was youthful, punk-flavoured, minimalist and theatrical. It's also a surprisingly varied album, the ethereal-sounding Down In The Park, title track and ambient instrumental closer I Nearly Married A Human providing a stark contrast with the guitar-laced You Are In My Vision and It Must Have Been Years, which reveal Numan's teenage enthusiasm for '70s rock acts, Queen and Thin Lizzy. However, it was Numan's use of electronics which really caught the attention and changed the British music scene. Ray Coleman sums up the singer's overnight importance in 1979; "Numan tailored his image with astuteness and care and finally delivered his ace; instead of using a guitar, which had dominated pop since its birth in the fifties, he switched to the synthesiser and became the instrument's first visual star."

The new star's impact on the music scene was reminscent of his idols David Bowie and Marc Bolan, a parallel which the acclaimed Bolan biographer Mark Paytress acknowledges. "The Pale One sensationalised the strange, as Marc Bolan had done several years before. He also divided audiences in much the same way."

- 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