are friends electric

On This Day… 8th March

/ UK #1s blog / 6 Comments

For our second On This Day feature, we start with a birthday. New wave, synth pop, goth rock legend Gary Numan celebrates his 66th today. He is probably best known for his solo number one ‘Cars’, but I’m going to link this to his slightly earlier chart-topper with Tubeway Army, the eerie, industrial ‘Are “Friends” Electric’.

Looking back, I think the period between 1979 and 1981 had some of the strangest, most un-commercial sounding #1s, and this has to be one of the strangest, most un-commercial sounding of the lot.

On this day in 2016, the world bid farewell to producer Sir George Martin. He is of course most famous for his work with the Beatles, but he also sat behind the desk on #1s for Billy J Kramer, Gerry & The Pacemakers, Cilla Black, and on the best selling single of all time, ‘Candle in the Wind ’97’. Here though is his first chart-topper, the completely unexpected, yet quite magical, ‘You’re Driving Me Crazy’, by the Temperance Seven.

While in 2003, March 8th saw the death of one of the first modern British pop stars, Adam Faith. He had two number ones, the second of which, ‘Poor Me’, also happened to be at the top on this day in 1960. I remember quite liking the dramatic strings and Buddy Holly-inspired vocals when I wrote my post on it, and it remains a striking number one record. Faith moved into acting, and remained on stage and screen right through to his death. And on the anniversary of his passing, it would be remiss of me not to quote his supposed final words: “Channel 5 is all shit, isn’t it?” Few truer words have ever been uttered.

439. ‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’, by Tubeway Army

/ UK #1s blog / 6 Comments

Symbolically whacking Anita Ward’s trashy disco ditty off top-spot… Time for something a bit different. The eighties have arrived.

Are ‘Friends’ Electric?, by Tubeway Army (their 1st and only #1)

4 weeks, from 24th June – 22nd July 1979

There have been synths right through the seventies, from Chicory Tip through to ‘Gonna Make You a Star’ and, most memorably, Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’. But even Giorgio Moroder didn’t use them as aggressively as this. These churning and grinding synths leave you feeling kind of woozy. A riff hammers away, going low like a grinding gearstick, then high like a wonky police siren.

There’s no chorus, no verses or bridge. Just different themes on the same dreamy, trippy riff. But – and I don’t mean this to sound negative – this is a bad dream; one bad trip. Over the top of it, Gary Numan… Sings? Chants? Announces? It’s cold outside, And the paint’s splitting off of my walls…!

What this song is about I have no idea, really. Numan tells a story of a ‘friend’ – note the inverted commas – who may or not be human. The friend is broken down, and he’s lonely. So I head to Google to find out a little bit more… Numan is autistic, apparently, and struggles with interpersonal relationships. So he wrote a song set thirty years ahead, in a dystopian future, in which robots have replaced lovers (hence the ‘friends’). The title references the Philip K. Dick novel ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ Numan puts it best: “I had a number one single about a robot prostitute and nobody knew it.”

For large parts of the song he also talks, making it a fairly spoken-word heavy #1. So now I’m alone, Now I can think for myself… He sounds – and maybe this is just me – a lot like Marc Bolan. ‘Plummy cockney’ is the way I’d describe it. You see this meant everything to me…

Is it my imagination, or does this song slow down and speed up at random? Each time I listen to it, I notice this effect but in different places. I think I’m just getting lost in its rhythm. I think I might have a nightmare involving this song tonight, and I’m ready for it. Of course, I’m no stranger to the main riff, sampled for Sugababes’ first chart-topper ‘Freak Like Me’, one of the early-2000’s finest pop songs. (Apparently Numan himself classes it as better as this original.)

Tubeway Army were originally a punk act, but Numan found himself increasingly drawn to electronic music. ‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric’ was their first single to make the charts; and their last. However, almost the same band will be back in the number one position in just eight weeks… with a single credited solely to Gary Numan.

Finally, I make this the 5th number one by a New Wave act in the last six months… And if they all haven’t sounded completely different to one another! A fertile time for popular music. I know we have six months left to go, but I’m sticking my neck out now and naming 1979 as the best year of the whole decade, in chart-topper terms…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzSM3pRtgcM