Top of the Pops, 24th May 1979: Rise of the machines

Watching re-runs of old editions of Top of the Pops reminds me that the show could be exciting, tedious, brilliant and stupid, often within the space of forty infuriating minutes. Whichever week of whichever year you’d care to drop into, you’ll find that the charts were pretty mediocre, with sometimes only the occasional gem sparkling among heaps of anodyne rubbish. On a bad week, Top of the Pops could make you feel that the music business existed just to rub your nose in the futility of existence. On other occasions, the stars would align and the tastes of Joe and Josephine Public might roughly coincide with yours. Then you could allow yourself to believe that everything in the world was good and that pop music was a truly wonderful thing.

Once in a lifetime, you might win the lottery and encounter an episode that so faithfully reflected your musical worldview that you’d be tempted to think that the producer had rifled through your record collection and opted to share your exquisite taste with the nation. This happened to me one evening, late in May 1979. An episode of Top of the Pops (shown recently on BBC4) featured Roxy Music, David Bowie, Elvis Costello, Blondie, ELO, The Skids and a ‘new’ act that had already exerted a powerful grip on my musical imagination. I loved all of those named artists, but the new act that night – Tubeway Army, led by Gary Numan- somehow felt like ‘my’ discovery.

I had heard Tubeway Army for the first time a couple of months previously, while listening late one night to John Peel’s show on BBC Radio. Sitting in a corner of our living room with the headphones at ear-damaging volume, I would have been hoping that the show would throw up something interesting. John Peel played stuff you wouldn’t hear anywhere else and -if you could abide the default setting of 'indie bloke' freemasonry- you could usually expect to find some excellent music in among the (often deservedly) obscure flotsam and jetsam. Midway through what had been an average middle-of-the-week show, he played a track called Down in the Park and duly transformed my musical world. It was a menacingly atmospheric, yet hauntingly beautiful slice of electronic pop and I hadn’t heard anything quite like it.

I couldn’t quite grasp all of the detail, but I knew that the song told a story. The lyrics seemed far removed from the bog standard new wave fare, painting a nightmarish scene in which the park was not a place for the local folk to gather and enjoy the scenery; it was, instead, part of a minatory landscape in which killers, government agents and ‘rape machines’ roamed, brutalising a cowed populace. At the end of the track, Peel said something like: ‘Blimey … that sounds like a Pink Floyd for the 1980s’. He was wrong about the Pink Floyd bit, but absolutely right about the ‘blimey’. To a lonely teenager imagining himself at the centre of an alienated and hostile universe, Gary Numan really hit the sweet spot.

That weekend, I hunted down the Replicas album and quickly became absorbed in its dystopian and decadent fantasies. It appeared to be a concept album set ten minutes into a totalitarian future in which population control was maintained by government surveillance agents, people had relationships with synthetic humans and the city was patrolled by thought police and sinister assassins in trench coats. Numan’s musical schtick was part-Bowie (particularly the Low album) part Kraftwerk, part Brian Eno, with maybe a little dollop of early Ultravox thrown into the mix.
Lyrically, it was clear that he was heavily influenced by the paranoid, hallucinatory writings of Philip K Dick, William Burroughs and –to a lesser extent- JG Ballard. For a young reader who was devouring dystopian science fiction by the bucketload, this album seemed like a perfect reflection of my view that the world was on the verge of forming a strange and unsettling relationship with burgeoning technology. Whatever was going to happen, I just knew it would involve synthetic humans, sinister government conspiracies and androgynous young guys in make-up, playing synthesisers.

Utterly mesmerised, it was the first time that I was aware that an artist’s image might be almost as important as the music. Numan had perfected an androgynous robot stormtrooper look (no doubt heavily influenced by Kraftwerk) and it made him stand out a mile in an era when most new wave bands made little concession to ‘image’, beyond wearing drainpipe jeans and perhaps a skinny tie. On that iconic Replicas sleeve, Numan looks fantastic: dyed blond hair, kohl eyeliner, black nail varnish, black shirt, tie and trousers. With respect to the Replicas narrative, the cover shot is ambiguous; it’s not clear whether the guy in the room is a victim or a victimiser. Why is he dressed like that? Is he one of us, or is he one of those 'machmen'? Is he a government agent or maybe one of those synthetic humans working in the sex trade? What’s going on in the park outside his window? How come the ‘reflection’ in the window has his hands clasped together while the person in the room hasn’t?

As a growing army of teenaged Numanoids wrestled with these questions, the prosaic reality gradually emerged over the next couple of years as Gary went on to become a massive pop star. We discovered that he was actually just a shy young man (diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome) who had managed to articulate and brilliantly exploit his melancholic fantasies about alienation and androids. He was just a 21-year old kid from Slough who didn’t know much about anything. Jesus, he even admitted to voting Tory in an interview. If he’d been more worldly wise, he’d have known that that was an unforgivable sin in the right-on world of rock journalism. Needless to say, he was pilloried for years on the back of it and his relationship with the press quickly declined from curious to bad to catastrophic.

In spite of the various press maulings, it’s probably fair to say that Numan has had the last laugh. Two decades after it first appeared on Top of the Pops, Are ‘friends’ electric? was brilliantly re-imagined by the Sugababes for their number one hit Freak like Me. He has enjoyed a recent upturn in commercial and critical fortunes and his music has been cited as a powerful influence by the likes of Basement Jaxx, Armand Van Helden, Foo Fighters, Afrika Bambaataa, Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson.

By the time Are ‘friends’ electric? had made it onto that edition of Top of the Pops in May 1979, I was already boring my friends rigid with my ridiculous zeal for Gary Numan’s music. My ‘discovery’ of this weird and wonderful artist allowed me to feel quite smug as his song made its steady way to the summit of the charts over a six-week period, progress which –by today’s standards- seems positively glacial.

During that time, the synthesiser was transformed from being a progressive rock instrument played by classically-trained bearded blokes in capes into something quite sexy, sitting right at the epicentre of pop culture. And, without anything resembling a recognisable chorus, a strange song about a robot prostitute topped the charts for four incredible weeks. I’ll always love Gary Numan for that.

In the words of the song: “You see, it meant everything to me.”

Keep on rocking in the free market

Enchanted by an image of itself which is decades out of date, rock and pop music continues to strike a rebellious pose, in denial of the Faustian pact its dreary narcissism has allowed it to make in order to accommodate the vagaries of advertising and fashion. Where once it might have been informed by genuinely counter-cultural impulses, rock and pop’s sheer ubiquity makes it ludicrous to argue that it is, in any meaningful sense, ‘anti-establishment’. 

Yet in spite of enjoying the riches generated by its cosy niche within the capitalist machine, the rock aristocracy, ostensibly at least, has long held an overwhelmingly leftist-liberal ‘stick-it-to-the-man’ worldview, with very few willing to deviate from the stifling orthodoxies of the party line.  

It was easy (and profitable) for John Lennon to ‘imagine no possessions’; not only would he never have to worry about actually having no possessions, he knew that the sentiments expressed in that anodyne lyric would strike a chord with an audience primed to accept easy answers to complex problems. The notion that all we have to do is to ‘imagine’ a better world in order to make it happen is, at best, a tad naïve; at worst, it is a fatuous piety. But Lennon, after all, was only writing a song; it’s hardly a big deal that most rock and pop lyrics are about as profound as the kind of sentiments normally expressed on cheap greeting cards.          

The actual business of rock can be more problematic. Take Radiohead, for example. At the turn of the century, they announced that they would not be ‘promoting’ their new album -Kid A- in the sense that other big acts ‘promoted’ their work, but would instead be running a low-level campaign aimed to ‘dispel the hype’ about the new record.   

No advance copies of Kid A were circulated, but the album was showcased under strictly controlled conditions for critics and at special listening parties for selected fans. Yes, it was played in full on MTV, but apart from that (and all the clips on the internet and the articles in magazines), there was hardly any promotion; in fact, I remember seeing lots of Kid A posters in town telling me that Radiohead wouldn’t be promoting the album. In spite of their best efforts, the hype was not dispelled and the album duly shot to the top of the charts. In the summer of 2000, the band toured Europe in a custom-built tent that was smugly declared to feature no corporate logos. Having enjoyed the album (released through an obscure little cottage-run label called Parlophone-EMI) the fans could go along to the concerts, safe in the knowledge that they had not succumbed to any horrid multi-national business practices.  Lots of folk enjoyed those gigs, but some will have noted that capitalism failed to collapse in the face of Radiohead’s disdain.

Student angst is one thing, but perhaps a more egregious example of rock’s apparent hypocrisy was provided by U2. Their spokesperson Bono is fond of preaching about the crippling debt of African countries and about the developed world’s abject dereliction of moral duties, yet in 2006 his band decided to move its publishing operation from Ireland to the Netherlands in order to exploit a more lenient approach to taxing sensitive artistic types.  This in spite of the fact that Ireland’s tax regime was generally perceived to be quite favourable to artists. 

With an accumulated net worth said to be well in excess of €800m, U2 had plenty of motives to avoid paying tax, but it’s not the avoidance that grates. After all, how many people and how many businesses on the planet would volunteer to pay more tax than they have to? Their tax avoidance was merely sound business sense; what makes them deserving of opprobrium is their insouciant ability to preach one thing and practice another. U2 wanted to pay less tax into the very system that they argued should have been doing more to support poorer countries. In other words, they wanted support for African countries to increase, but just not on their dime. 

With the music business providing the perfect illustration of capitalism ‘red in tooth and claw’, it seems rather odd that we’d struggle to find many examples of rock artists being brave enough to kick against the prevailing intellectual orthodoxy to actually make the case for free-market capitalism. Enter stage left (or should that be stage right?) Jean-Jacques Burnel, bass player with The Stranglers. In 1979, JJ released a solo album called ‘Euroman Cometh’. It appeared to present an argument -in as much as a rock album can present an argument for anything- for a federal United States of Europe. JJ was all kinds of wrong about that, but the single from the album did strike an unusually libertarian, pro-market note.   

‘Freddie Laker – Concorde and Eurobus’  managed to get a dig at the protectionist policies of the United States (who fought long and hard to stop the Concorde landing on their shores), but was also a celebration of the work of Freddie Laker, one of the first airline owners to adopt the ‘no-frills’ business model. Up until the mid-seventies, transatlantic air travel had been mainly the preserve of folk with a higher-than-average disposable income.  The airline industry -heavily unionised and shackled by outdated protective practices- would have kept its iron grip on transatlantic travel for decades without Laker’s determination to challenge the vested interests of the established companies. After years of legal battles (which included having his licence revoked by the Labour government in 1975) Laker finally saw his Skytrain take to the air for the first time in September 1977. It flew from London to New York, charging a fare that was about one third of the price at that time charged for a transatlantic flight by the established airlines. 

‘Freddie Laker - Concorde and Eurobus’ was released in April 1979. Sadly, it created barely a ripple in the nether regions of the pop charts, but remains, nonetheless, a bracing little slice of abrasive pop. JJ wasn’t much of a singer and you had the feeling that he was only getting to do a solo album because the record company wanted to appease the bassist in The Stranglers, who were –at that time- a very successful new wave act. 

This video captured something of the anarchic joie de vivre of the song. The use of the vocoder brought a certain ominous energy, a hint of dystopian menace. In 1979, a vocal like that sounded like it came from the future, from a strange and exciting world in which some of our key assumptions (about nationhood, about business, about art) might have been broken down. We may even have imagined that the act of singing in a band might one day be the preserve of industrially-manufactured art robots. 

So hats off to Jean-Jacques. He set his sail against the prevailing wind and made his personal statement, cocking a snook at the received orthodoxies of his peers.  

Now doesn’t that represent the authentic spirit of rock and roll?