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TUBEWAY ARMY
Tubeway Army was originally released as a limited, blue vinyl edition of 5,000 on November 24, and featured different artwork. The black and white shadow face became the album cover when it was re-released, reaching 14 in the UK chart in summer 1979. This second LP sleeve was actually a sketch by Numan's old school friend Garry Robson, who had made a tracing of the singer's face from the sleeve for an earlier Tubeway Army single, Bombers. Although this was the official debut album by the band, Gary Numan had already written a amount a lot of material originating back to a previous punk outfit, Mean Street, formed in 1977. These include many of the live tracks recorded by Tubeway Army at The Roxy and added as bonus tracks on this CD. The band's line-up changed several times in its first 12 months, with drummers Bob Simmonds and Barry Benn, and second guitarist Sean Burke coming in and out of the line-up, along with Numan's uncle Jess Lidyard who always stepped in if no-else was available. The one constant was bassist Paul Gardiner, whom Gary regarded as his best friend and right hand man during the early years. Gardiner, Lidyard and Gary Webb (he changed his name to Numan just in time for the release of the Blue album) played on Tubeway Army's first recorded songs That's Too Bad and Oh! Didn't I Say in Spaceward studios, Cambridge on 16 October 1977. The demo secured them their contract with Beggars Banquet and was released (with the A-side remixed at The Manor studio by Mick Glossop) as their debut single on 10 February 1978. Further sessions on Numan's 20th birthday at Spaceward produced a whole album of punk songs, while Kenny Denton-produced work in April 1978 led to the second single, Bombers - a punkified, jagged take on David Bowie's Five Years which signalled early promise. Although Bombers didn't sell any better than the debut, it was already moving away from the infectiously simplistic That's Too Bad into more artful guitar music. "It's odd listening to that song now," says Jon Marsh of The Beloved, "because it sounds like something Wire might have written." Numan was never committed to being a punk revolutionary, thrashing out discords and spitting at the front rows. The man with bottle-blond hair, black eyeliner and a nasal voice which sounded like David Bowie weeping, was dreaming of stardom. "I used punk solely as a means of getting a contract. I didn't see it as going anywhere. I don't think it has gone anywhere. I was excited by the thing as a whole, that all of a sudden there was something that was completely new - new fashion, new music. I hoped, when it got started that something really great would come out of it but it sort of got destroyed by its own ideas. The anti-hero thing could never happen because England has always had the heroes, it always will do - I think it's a very English thing to make heroes." |
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The first shoots of post-punk songwriting are evident on The Plan, an album which compiles those formative Tubeway Army sessions. Eventually released in September 1984, it veers between the heads-down, pop-punk of the oldest tracks and primitive versions of songs which would end up on the official self-titled debut album. This LP, Tubeway Army - known to those first vinyl collectors as the "Blue Album" - would have been an edgy, new wave guitar record with the odd punk throwback but for Gary Numan's accidental discovery of a synthesiser in the Spaceward studio when he recorded there in July 1978.Even so, there are similarities to The Cure in the descending, echoing riffs of Something's In The House and the hollow, murky sound of Tubeway Army is both sparse and epic enough to be an unlikely relative of Joy Division and Magazine. Numan himself says, "It was not going to be a punk album as such, but it was still very much guitar, bass and drums. It's a difficult thing to explain but I had sounds in my head. More than that, I had a picture, an image, a feeling almost of how I wanted to go, but I hadn't come close to realising it with the band. When I arrived at the studio the previous band had left behind a Mini-Moog synthesiser and so I asked if I could have a go before it was collected by the hire company. I had never seen a real synth before and, to be honest, had never really thought of them very much. Although I liked some electronic music I still associated it mainly with pompous supergroups, like Yes and ELP. To me they conjured up visions of disgusting, self-indulgent solos that went on for half an hour. Luckily for me this synth had been left on a heavy setting, which produced the most powerful, ground shaking sound I had ever heard. I immediately realised this was what I had been looking for." | ||
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| This session, artistically at least, was a turning point for Gary Numan. His longstanding fascination with the dark glamour of '70s icons, David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust was as important to him as Low and Heroes - Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and Marc Bolan, was now complemented by a widening knowledge of electronic music. He later spoke of Brian Eno's Music For Films album, Kraftwerk's Man Machine - in particular Neon Lights - and his favourite contemporary groups, The Human League and Ultravox, as sources of inspiration. However, while he spent the next few years reinventing and piecing together ideas inspired by all these artists, Tubeway Army was a quick snapshot, recorded in a few days and creating a garage-y electronic style. In 1979 Melody Maker's Jon Savage accurately described Tubeway Army as a "post-punk mutation of certain Bowie and Roxy Music elements, made new, different, attractive." The speed and urgency of the recording is vital to the album's fresh twist on '70s art-rock.
Also important is Numan's tunnel-like sense of direction. He was able to convince Beggars Banquet to finance a brief, second session on 23 August where he added more electronics to Zero Bars and Listen To The Sirens. He knew exactly where he wanted to go; "I enjoyed being in the studio. I was fascinated with every gadget, every knob, button, switch and fader and I wanted to learn how every one of them worked. I loved it every time someone would say to me, "You can't do that with it, because I would try to find a way of doing exactly that with it. I worked constantly to find new ways of creating sounds, of using effects, of doing everything. I felt that by some freak of chance I was working with sounds that nobody else had stumbled across. I became slightly obsessed with getting the album out, quickly. I was terrified that other people would come along and put out this sort of music before my album was released. I was convinced that electronic music was going to shake up the world," he says with a flourish. By the time it was released, the impatient 20-year-old, who didn't go out on tour with the record, had already written most of the songs for his breakthrough album, Replicas. "Plagiarism doesn't matter", concludes Savage in an early Melody Maker on Numan, "what does, is being on the ball." For many fans who own the Tubeway Army album, there's another vital ingredient to its appeal - the nasally metallic vocals which perfectly articulate introspective, adolescent lyrics. Numan's awestruck pillage of William S Burroughs, Philip K Dick, JG Ballard, Anthony Burgess and George Orwell was punked-up into visual lyrics, set in scenes ripped off his favourite authors but expressing his own very private feelings. This odd mixture of ambitious, literary plagiarism - he continued to use Burroughs for the next 15 years - and oblique, reticent emotion is uniquely his own and has caused him as much grief as the backlash against synthesisers, or his theatrical stage shows. At the end of the day it's not cerebral writing, just personal stuff relocated into some fantastic situations. Numan may have been interested in the idea of cloned humans but the singer is far too self obsessed to simply theorise about it. The lyrics ultimately refer to exaggerated parts of himself, or observations about people around him. "I find it hard to understand human nature a lot of the time, he says, "which is part of the problem." Or as William Burroughs once wrote, "mankind is a bad animal." "I very rarely write about ordinary things," he argues in his autobiography, Praying To The Aliens, "and this album was a clear indication I looked at things slightly askew." Numan's writing technique, which involves writing individual lines or phrases into notebooks and then later piecing together songs out of them, means that any individual track might touch on a half-a-dozen or more different subjects, experiences and time-frames. The pulsing opener Listen To The Sirens is a typical example, connecting random ideas as if they're the thoughts of an isolated, confused, slightly schizophrenic individual living in a distinctly pulp-science fiction atmosphere. Numan's obsession with age, time, nostalgia and the future means that all through his career he's written songs which go into the future in order to look back, or revisit the past to peer forward.William Burroughs articulated his most extreme feelings about humanity but Numan's constant talk of real/unreal, past/future also echoes themes probed by Philip K Dick, and it's lasted right through to his 1997 album Exile. One track, The Life Machine is a spine-chilling lament for euthanasia, while the acoustic Jo The Waiter flips the sexuality of an old girlfriend to quietly achieve the first mini-classic of Numan's career, which has reappeared in his live set in recent years. Quickfire, random imagery shoots through Friends - later covered by Pop Will Eat Itself - , The Dream Police and My Shadow In Vain, while Everyday I Die turns adolescent masturbation into a solitary rejection of love, a typically dramatic conclusion which is siphoned into one of the coldest, raw-edged vocals in Numan's career - partly thanks to the rough analogue equipment and cheap microphones he used on the session. In 1979 Phil Sutcliffe wrote in Sounds, "Everyday I Die is about masturbation in a machine age. It's the most carnal song Numan has recorded and it's full of disgust. Self-disgust? It drew out a sleazy, sweaty, fleshy involvement I wouldn't have expected him to submit to." He adds, "the song Steel And You evokes human life reduced to machine minding: "Just my steel friend and me/I stand brave by his side/This machine is all/I live for." As Numan hopes, it makes you think." Tubeway Army's extreme emotions, rundown metropolis chic and frantic, obsessive edge set the blueprint for a new popstar. Numan had set his sights. "At the time of the first album I was a skinny little man, with no real worldly experience, still living in a small room in my mum and dad's house. I didn't go out much, didn't socialise well and had a fierce ambition that was often misinterpreted - or accurately interpreted - as stubborness, self-rightousness and arrogance." - Steve Malins |
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| All currentcatalogue is available from the Alma Road MAIL ORDER - see link | |||
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Link to Gary Numan's official web site
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!) |
Steve Malins is the co-author of Gary Numan's autobiography, "Praying To The Aliens".
Numan Biography |
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