The first full-length from synth-pop pioneer Gary Numan, 1979’s Replicas (Beggar’s Banquet, 2008), plays like The Man Who Fell to Earth come to life. That isn’t a mistaken reference to David Bowie’s sweeping 1970 song “The Man Who Sold the World,” but rather to Nicolas Roeg’s arty 1976 film with the pop star as a freaky-deaky dehydrated spaceman.
Granted, David Bowie exerted a significant influence on Numan, who sported a similar bleach-blond hairstyle at the time he recorded this album–gone by the time of “Cars”–but it wasn’t the glam racket that appealed to him as much as the trio of chilled-out platters the Thin White Duke cut with Eno in Berlin (Station to Station, Low, and Heroes).
Numan’s lyrics extend the sci-fi themes Bowie first explored in “Space Oddity.” Just add a dash of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a dose of Philip K. Dick, and Gary’s robotic phrasing, and there you have it: “Me! I Disconnect from You,” “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”, “Praying to the Aliens,” “When the Machines Rock,” and “I Nearly Married a Human.”
The song titles tell the whole story. Just as Numan felt “disconnected” from the punk movement, he appeared to feel a similar remove from the entire human race. (Billing Replicas as a Tubeway Army album was the record company’s idea, not his.)
As the liner notes reveal, Numan (born Gary Anthony James Webb) was just another London punk when he chanced upon a Moog in a rented studio. Tired of the violence at pub shows, the synthesizer allowed him to reinvent himself–to make a new kind of music and to attract a less aggressive kind of audience.
As he explains, “It was clear to me that the scene was dying and I wanted to do something else.” As a model, he looked to Ultravox, another British act with ties to Germany. Numan soon eclipsed the ‘Vox–even swiping keyboard player Billy Currie–and this #1 UK record holds up wonderfully well 29 years later (during which, his songs have been covered by everyone from Blur to Beck).
The unholy union between Tangerine Dream-like ambience and proto-metallic crunch never sounds as schizophrenic as it should. “Down in the Park,” which strikes the perfect balance between pop melodicism and Existential dread, remains one of the most seductively spooky singles of the post-punk era, up there with Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control” and Bauhaus’ “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” The second disc features outtakes, which sound almost as polished as the final product. The biggest difference is that Gary Numan sounds softer, warmer–almost, well, human.