Review:

on 2011-07-02 CharlesMartel Said:

At the end of the seventies the record companies thought they had punk under control. They believed that their taming of the anti-establishment threat had secured their ability to control what the mainstream masses would hear, thereby making their future profits secure. In celebration, EMI issued yet another bland and boring single by Cliff Richard.

Around the same time, a group of one-time punks led by a peroxide blond kid calling himself Valerian (a.k.a Gary Numan) put out a single on the independent Beggar's Banquet label which used synthesisers to provide the lead and rhythm parts to the whole song, a drum machine underpinning it, and the occasional long sustained chord from a guitar (again put through a synthesiser to distort it). Then, capitalising on his androgynous appearance, Valerian sang the lyric as if he were some disembodied head or an android.

That single, "Are Friends Electric?" shook things up no end. It stormed to the top of the charts, smashed Cliff Richard from the top spot and remained there throughout the heady summer of 1979. The musical world would never be the same again. The foundations of synth pop had been sown, a musical style which was to have enormous influence on the eighties music scene and beyond.

Yet, in truth, Tubeway Army were not that original. A few years earlier and anonymous individual calling himself the Normal had produced a startlingly bleak single called "TVOD" backed with "Warm Leatherette" which featured the same synthesiser layer upon layer and robotic, almost monotone vocals. And, of course, Ultravox had been doing this sort of thing for some time but never got the recognition they surely deserved. Jon Foxx, the frontman of Ultravox, had gone solo in an effort to sustain his musical vision while the rest of the band went commercial. So, like a lot of music which comes to the attention of the mainstream, it was not new.

Nonetheless, it remains a great track. And for a while it wiped the stupid smug expression of the faces of the record company executives.
Rating: 8/10