The woman’s face was buried in her paperback copy of J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise. This was not an unexpected sight. When you’re lined up for a Gary Numan show, chances are you’ll see someone reading Ballard, William Burroughs or Phillip K. Dick, all influences on him. It’s about as likely as encountering sanctimony and ignorance at your average political rally.
She’d been completely engrossed in the novel, disengaged from her surroundings, bringing to mind Numan’s “Me! I Disconnect from You” from Replicas, the 1979 album he would be spotlighting on this night. It was a welcome change of pace. How often do you see someone reading an actual book these days?
Standing in front of her was a tall, skinny man with a graying Fu Manchu beard and moustache, whose face would mildly shake once in awhile. An attractive 30ish woman passed by, smirking at the line with the superior air of someone unaccustomed to waiting on one. In particular, she focused on the Fu Manchu guy, casually judging him with a cruel smile. In Numan’s “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” the first line is “It’s cold outside.” Tell me about it.
It would be even chillier inside the Gramercy Theatre with an evening of icy synthesizer-based music. The opening act was I Speak Machine, an audio-visual collaboration between musician Tara Busch and filmmaker Maf Lewis. Busch provided the live, gurgling synth soundtrack to the short film Zombies 1985, a faithful homage to the hilariously cheesy/scary horror films from that era. Not amused or frightened was the hefty, expressionless man with long hair wearing an ‘80s metal-head denim jacket a few seats away. He resembled the Frankenstein’s Monster in Penny Dreadful, if the creature was from New Jersey and had a severe case of ennui.
Mary Shelley’s Vinnie Vincent didn’t seem to appreciate that after the movie, Busch gave a mesmerizing set, the highlight being her exceptional cover of Numan’s “Cars.” With just keyboards and ghostly wordless vocals, she sang the haunting synthesizer melodies, sounding like if an angel had joined Van Halen for their ominous Numanesque 1981 synth instrumental, “Sunday Afternoon in the Park.”
In addition to I Speak Machine and Van Halen, Numan impacted a wide variety of artists. Hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa stated in a 2014 Vice interview, “That (Numan’s 1978 single “Bombers”) was one of the early records we used to play when rappers was rapping. I don’t know if Gary even knows there was so many black and Latino youth jamming to his music.”
And for anyone who ever detected Numan in some of Prince’s work (particularly the early stuff), congrats. According to the book Prince in the Studio (1975-1995): Volume One by Jake Brown, Prince asked, “Do you like Gary Numan? You know, his album Replicas never left my turntable. There are people still trying to work out what a genius he was.” The late artist, rightly thought of as a genius as well, probably would’ve had a good time with the rest of the “Numanoids” at the Gramercy. The first half of the show was Replicas in its entirety, plus the B-sides “Do You Need the Service?” and “We Are So Fragile.”
The record was originally credited to Tubeway Army, the band Numan led, and had one of the most iconic album covers of that era. Numan’s dressed in black with bleached blonde hair appearing like Billy Idol’s anti-social younger brother, staring blankly (like Mary Shelley’s Vinnie Vincent) out the window from an empty room. Across the street is the entrance to a park (in reality an illustration), with the words “The Park” on top of the gate shining in orange neon through the darkness, with a Crescent moon above. It’s referenced in “Down in the Park,” where all sorts of horrifying things happen. This futuristic (for 1979) image of isolation came across as Edward Hopper’s Blade Runner. Incidentally, this was three years before Ridley Scott’s visionary interpretation of Phillip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? had been released.
Almost 40 years later, there he was pushing 60, leading his band on the title track. Already Numan was throwing the audience a curve, as it’s the second song on the second side, so the album wouldn’t be presented in order. Good idea. The foreboding, funky drums made for an ideal introduction, and a reminder of why the original hip-hop artists caught on to him before most people.
Guitarist Steve Harris (not to be confused with Iron Maiden’s bassist) made an immediate impression, doing a gawky Scarecrow/Pete Townshend dance to the groove, while adding more guitar crunch. This set the tone, as everything had more power, especially the up-tempo songs “You Are in My Vision,” “It Must Have Been Years,” “Praying to the Aliens,” and “The Machman.” Steve Malin’s liner notes to Replicas 1998 reissue mentioned that the first two “reveal Numan’s teenage enthusiasm for ‘70s rock acts, Queen and Thin Lizzy.”
While accurate, the main antecedent is the ‘60s British invasion. The primitive guitar riffs and young man blues of the early Who and Kinks inform this material more than anything. In particular, the whimsical melodies/lyrics of Ray Davies, which Numan put a bleak, robotic, extraterrestrial twist on, even with “Down in the Park.”
Davies’ narrator was gazing on “Waterloo Sunset” from his window, where he was “in paradise,” and didn’t “need no friends.” Whereas the character in “Down in the Park” looks out his window at the park, “where the chant is ‘death, death, death’ until the sun cries morning.” Numan’s world is clearly much darker, but they’re both content in their alienation from the rest of the world, “alien” being the key word for Numan.
“Down in the Park” contrasted the ugliness of the lyrics with the music’s exquisiteness, which was transcendent in a live setting. You felt completely absorbed in the synth splendor. On a sonic level this was Air years before the French electronic duo existed. “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” got the most enthusiastic response of the night, everyone dropping their fists like hammers and singing the “ber-ner, ber-ner” synth parts leading up to the spoken verses. You know you’ve made an impact when large groups of grown men and women sing along to farty keyboard squiggles you created four decades ago.
The instrumental “When the Machines Rock” wouldn’t have sounded out of place in a Peanuts cartoon, the bouncy synths and handclaps making you envision Charlie Brown and company getting down at one of Prince’s Paisley Park parties. Another instrumental, “I Nearly Married a Human” followed, the previous composition’s endearing quirkiness perfectly countered by the elegiac, ambient beauty of this Enoesque work of art. The title references a relationship that has ended, with spatial synthesizers capturing the sadness of what it’s like when two people have slowly drifted apart from each other, like astronauts floating in the darkness of space. It’s one thing to listen to this on iTunes, but at the Gramercy it became an experience that bordered on holy. Meanwhile, Mary Shelley’s Vinnie Vincent still looked bored.
Watching this album come to life, it was hard to fathom Replicas came out the same year as AM Gold balladry like Robert John’s “Sad Eyes” and the rural ‘70s hard rock Americana of (the British) Bad Company’s “Rock’n’Roll Fantasy,” among the myriad other genres of that time. Numan blazed his own trail by dealing with the impact of technology on humanity, featuring characters known as Machmen who were half men, half machines. Throughout the evening, while these songs of danceable dehumanization were performed, the crowd either held up IPhones or stared at them, their devices seemingly as important as limbs.
We hadn’t become Machmen yet, but we’re almost there.
Matt Leinwohl