Gary Numan: The Pleasure Principle [BEGGARS BANQUET]

Why you'll love it

This remastered edition presents the original ten-track album. The Pleasure Principle went to No. 1 on the UK Albums Chart and features "Cars," Numan's biggest hit.

This edition

• Remastered
• Original 10-track album

About the album

Gary Numan was having quite a year in 1979. "Are 'Friends' Electric?" had just topped the UK singles chart for Tubeway Army, Replicas was at No. 1 on the albums chart, and he was already in Marcus Music Studio in London recording the follow-up, now under his own name.

He threw out the electric guitar entirely, and the result is the most purely electronic, robotic sound of his career: Minimoog and Polymoog (that chilly "Vox Humana" preset is all over it), synthetic drums, lashings of flanging and phasing, and, unexpectedly, solo viola and violin. "Airlane" opens with an instrumental glide, "Metal" is sung from the point of view of an android who longs to be human, "M.E." (Mechanical Engineering) and "Films" pulse along, and "Cars" is one of the great synth-pop singles, a song about feeling safe behind a windscreen.

Numan said the songs were thoughts about where technology would take us, and much of synth-pop, industrial and hip hop followed the map. He wrote it in 1979, and the rest of us now spend a fair bit of the day talking to machines, so it's held up rather well.

Also at Kops: more Gary Numan on vinyl · browse Electronic

Tracklist

Listen

On Beggars Banquet (cat# BBQLP 10), a reissue of the 1979 album.