Replicas, credited to Gary Numan and Tubeway Army although effectively written entirely by Gary Numan himself, is an album whose influence can be heard in music being made today, nearly three decades after its release.
While this “expanded” edition offers little of fresh interest to anyone but the completist Gary Numan collector (with its extra disc of earlier versions of the album tracks plus a few B-sides), the re-release of Replicas itself offers an opportunity to look back at the early career of an important artist.
The young Gary Numan emerged onto the corpse-strewn battlefield of the post-punk music scene after the cannon fodder of punk’s first wave had cleared a path through the mines. The safety-pin squadrons had destroyed a lot of the old conventions by dint of their aggression alone, but energy was not enough – the time was ripe for something really revolutionary, and a number of smart bands and musicians were searching for it. Numan delivered it in the form of Replicas.
While the synthesizer sounds of Replicas sound dated now, they must have sounded astonishingly fresh when the album arrived. What hasn’t aged at all is the songwriting and the vision of the project as a whole. A mere two years after punk proclaimed the death of concept albums, here was Gary Numan with exactly that – a spooky, claustrophobic and visionary album of narrative scenes from a technology-saturated world of the future.
While the influence of punk’s confrontational attitude toward society is apparent, Gary Numan discusses social issues metaphorically rather than shouting swear words at them. Numan’s untrained and nasal vocal performance is a celebration of the “stand up and do it yourself” attitude, but it doesn’t disguise the insight and intelligence that lies behind Replicas.
Nor does it hide the musical maturity of the songs, which are well-structured, inventive and surprisingly diverse. Replicas has always struck me as a combination of the nihilistic outlook of punk with the bleak futurism of Low-era Bowie – however you care to label it, Gary Numan struck the right note for the times.
What is most interesting is how relevant the material still seems now. The lyrics to album opener “Me! I Disconnect From You” could be a response to our current world of ubiquitous telephonic technology, and the entirety of Replicas evokes an alienation from the world that sounds much like the symptoms of contemporary communication burn-out and nervous breakdown.
Numan also aims a few sharp but subtle jabs at the inverted elitism of the punk ethos, another attitude that has persisted to this day. In “The Machman”, he seems to predict the current state of the music industry:
“there are no independents any more / the tape is a circle, but who really cares?”
But even if Replicas had been lyrically average, it would still have been massively important from a purely musical point of view. The reason Numan’s ideas on Replicas don’t sound fresh now is because they have gone on to saturate entire subgenres of music.
“It Must Have Been Years” welds metal to a kind of robotic funk; the queasy pitch-bend synths of title track “Replicas” bring to mind the studio noodlings of hundreds of knob-twiddler studio bands; “We Are So Fragile” is a proto-industrial blueprint, a map of a route across unknown territories.
And through all this inventiveness, Gary Numan’s ear for melody is inescapable. No matter how many times it is covered, remixed, pastiched or sampled, the original epic riff from “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” still stirs the hairs on the back of your neck, and probably always will. Replicas is not just a document from the past, but a template for the present and the future; it’s no surprise that its creator is still making innovative music today.
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Tags: electronic, Gary Numan, industrial, post-punk, punk, Replicas, synth-rock, Tubeway Army
