Notice that the hanging light-bulb is missing from the print.



Released April 1979.
MARTIN MILLS – Beggars Banquet co-owner.
DAVE THOMPSON – Rock biographer.
STEVE MALINS – Gary Numan PR and biographer,
BILLIE CURRIE – Ultravox keyboard player.
NICK SMITH- Studio engineer.
DAVE GIUFFE – Musician (BrainClaw).
PAUL ROBB – Musician (Information Society).
JIM COLLINS – Musician.
DAVID QUANTICK – Journalist.
JAMES B – House DJ.
ADE ORANGE – Musician, the Gary Numan band
TERRE THAEMLITZ – Musician.


GARY NUMAN: I had the most fun making Replicas, because I wasn't successful I had nothing to lose and everything to gain, it was incredibly exciting as I'd been signed and the whole world was on offer really. Everything about being in a studio was new; I was learning a huge amount every second I was in it. Everything seemed fresh and it was the most amazing period to make records in.

GARY NUMAN: Replicas was a definite concept based on a character from the stories that I’d written prior to the album. I wasn’t cut out to write a novel, I couldn’t stretch it further than one chapter. The stories themselves were flawed but some of the basic ideas and imagery, when converted into songs, worked quite well. The songs were filled with creatures from the stories, sometimes used as song titles sometimes just as part of a lyric. I set the stories in the not too distant future. It was basically what London- or any city really- could be like in about 10 or so years time, as people get more automatic cars, automatic car making machines, automatic buses, trains, planes-so everyone that’s employed with them would have nothing to do, so they’d go back to basics which revolved ‘round sex, violence and sleeping. Everyone would wipe each other out. Gang fights would get completely out of hand and there’d be gang battles with guns and everyone would just be destroyed. The machines wouldn’t even need to take over- there wouldn’t be anyone there to stop them. They’d just carry on running everything like they are now. As an album it was a very accurate prediction of how the world was going. These days they’ve already got artificial hearts, hip joints, and arms with fingers that move. People said then that what I wrote was a science fiction story and it was silly and childish but within two years Replicas was beginning to come true. It will get even truer as the years go by I’m sure of that. Replicas was just an extreme view of the future, it was what I saw around me, in particular the violent side of human nature. Violence seems to go hand in hand with technological advance, everyone is getting more leisure time because of machines and with this time on there hands people are beginning to revert to their primal instincts- those are being violent. Many of the songs were about the degeneration of humanity, the isolation of the individual and I put myself into the songs.

GARY NUMAN: In the society I was thinking about there was a curfew, you weren’t allowed out of your house or anywhere else after ten o’clock at night. Whatever entertainment you wanted for the evening you would ring up for, you had to ring up for these particular half men-half machines to come along and they were called “friends.” They were the same as Machmen, you couldn’t tell if they were human or not. They always wore grey coats in my image of them, with grey hats and would always be smoking cigarettes to give off that nonchalant look. They did everything with ruthless efficiency and provided whatever you wanted, whether it was sex or playing chess. This man would visit your house in a grey coat and grey hat and the neighbours would never know the difference between him and a real human being.

GARY NUMAN: I saw the city in Replicas bathed in constant light and everything was white. The walls of all the city buildings are light sensitive and glowed as soon as it reaches dusk, which meant there were no dark corners to hide in. In the stories I visualised some of the metropolis in great detail. No Humans, all machines, so it was clean, no dust, no pollution, nothing.

GARY NUMAN: I got the image for Replicas one night I was out; I went out to a club
once and there was a bloke walking around all dressed in black and I thought “Christ that looks good” so I got the image from him really, I got some of the titles for the album from a William Burroughs novel as well as a few ideas from those 70’s OZ comics that got banned. So basically I just put all these pieces together.

GARY NUMAN: Some of the early music sounded a bit sparse because we were all learning how to produce electronic music. It took a while to learn how to get the best  out of it. But, at the end of the day, you pick up a guitar and it sounds like a guitar.
And there's not much you can do with it, unless you plug it into a thousand pedals and then it sounds a bit like synthesizer anyway. You've treated it so much; it's not the same thing. It's become almost synthetic. With a synthesizer, you can go in and you can manipulate sound to such a degree that you end up with things which are just absolutely unique and beautiful, nothing to do with the melody or the rhythm at all.
The sound itself can be a thing of beauty. And I love that about the synthesizer. I  really do.

GARY NUMAN: I have often been given a lot of credit for being the person who
introduced mainstream electronic music into the music business. I don't know whether that's true or not. I was one of the people that were there at the beginning, but I wasn't the only one. But I do tend to think that, if I was the person who opened that door, normally, if you open the door to something new, the person who first pokes his head
around the corner gets a punch in the face. And that's what I've felt has happened to
me. I was the first person to put my head around a corner of the door of electronic
music, certainly the first one to open it so that the public actually noticed - 'cause it kinda happened before, but it had never really taken off. And it was considered to be a little bit weird and strange and bizarre at the time.

MARTIN MILLS: It was bizarre at the time because Gary was marginal to the punk
scene - he didn't even like punk very much - but he worked with it and then quickly moved to the electronic side of things, quickly following Ultravox - well as quickly as our finances would allow! Every time we made a few quid in the record shops he'd want to spend it on a synthesiser. And his progress was only limited by the amount of
money we could give to buy the equipment. All of this was happening at a time when
we were financially pretty precarious. We were funding the whole record company out of the cash flow of the record shops and there was a point when we were actually bouncing salary cheques.

GARY NUMAN: I think I became a success because at the time there was an overwhelming shortage of heroes. It was all bands. I honestly believe people wanted one person and that suited me. I thought Replicas would make me an interesting cult figure. Boy was I wrong!

DAVE THOMPSON: Numan was a star from the moment he struck his first pose; he was the first true genius of 80’s pop.

JIM COLLINS: I begged my parents to take me to find Numan's albums and I
purchased Replicas on vinyl and The Pleasure Principle on vinyl and 8-track!

GARY NUMAN: The spoken part was about an incident that happened at Christmas (1978). It speaks for itself, S.U. was a person. The rest of it is about the theme, where you can buy friends-you hire them by the hour. They’re electric. You ring up and say you want a friend for something-it can be for sex, for talking, whatever you want- and they’ll send one along. The friends were all identical- a grey
man in a long coat. Grey hair all smoking a cigarette- so that nobody knows what you’ve hired them for.

GARY NUMAN: The song was basically about how life in the near future would be, a world of personal alienation. The song was inspired by living in tower blocks in England, I was feeling very de-personalised at the time.


GARY NUMAN: It was a picture disc to start with; it had already got to No 48 by the time we got to do the late night rock show The Old Grey Whistle Test.  Our appearance was a part of their new policy and we were the token New Wave band that week.

BILLIE CURRIE: I remember Gary driving me back home once and he said "This is the new single” and he showed me the picture disc for “Are “Friends” Electric?” And it was good; I suppose I was quite jealous really. The next minute it was an absolutely massive thing, it was absolutely huge.

GARY NUMAN: I couldn’t see anyway that the song could be a hit, it just didn’t seem like a chart single, it was too different, too much away from straight pop.

MARTIN MILLS: We all along regarded it as a vehicle to sell the album, none of us could believe it. That “Are “Friends” Electric?” should reach No1 astonished us, it was such an off-the-wall song to do it.

BILLIE CURRIE: Gary asked me to do The Old Grey Whistle Test, so I did that and then it just so happened that we did a Top Of The Pops because it was up in the breakers the same week, which was amazing luck for Tubeway Army, to have the single played twice on television in the same week, and then it just escalated from there.

GARY NUMAN: My music literally went from being a hobby to becoming a multi-million pound business in a few months.

GARY NUMAN: When it got to No 2 it was such a dream come true that I wouldn’t let myself believe it’d go to No 1 so that I wouldn’t be disappointed if it didn’t.

MARTIN MILLS: In retrospect “Are “Friends” Electric?” is still an amazing record.
Five and a half minutes long, it's got no obvious tune and no one knows what it's about, but it's an absolutely fabulous piece of music. It literally changed our lives. It was a number one single, the album it came from went to number one, and the follow up album with "Cars" on it - The Pleasure Principle – also went to number one. Suddenly in 1979 we had three Gary Numan albums in the top 20 and two number one singles, four number ones in the same year, and it took A&M like 15 years to have their first number one hit single. So it all came in a big rush, it was all very disorientating but it was a lot of fun and were at the point of almost going bust.

GARY NUMAN: I had a carefully worked out plan but it when wrong. Everything
happened faster than I thought it would. We never thought “Are “Friends” Electric?” would go to the top. I thought it wouldn’t happen until “Cars” the second single- and by that time I would have had more experience with performing.

NICK SMITH: Gary doesn’t write songs in a conventional way. He doesn’t write verse, chorus, verse, chorus outro. He doesn’t come into the studio with an acoustic guitar and then sit down and play the song. Basically he makes it up as he goes along. Most of his stuff is recorded that way. When you listen back to “Are “Friends” Electric?” that song is weird.

GARY NUMAN: I kept the piano that I wrote it on, it doesn’t work anymore but I’ll keep it forever.

GARY NUMAN: Funny, but up until “Are Friends Electric?” I didn't even have a synthesizer of my own.

ADE ORANGE: I remember seeing Gary on TOTPS for the first time with “Are “Friends” Electric?” and he just stood out, he’s been standing out ever since.     
                                            
GARY NUMAN: The girl in the song (Sue) gave me a book called The Magus which has left me paranoid to this day and the paranoia started with her. It was only intended as a simple gift but I’m sure that it was all part of a plan to mess with me. I’d always been fairly distrustful of people before and that book just about finished me off.


MARTIN MILLS: “Are “Friends” Electric?” is one of those outstanding singles like ‘A
“Whiter Shade Of Pale”, one of those singles that really stands out.


JAMES B: Not a lot of people knew that Paul Gardiner was a big dub reggae fan but the influence is obvious to those that know their reggae, “Are “Friends” Electric?” features a very well known bass pattern. 


STEVE WEBBON: When “Are “Friends” Electric?” went to No1 we got a telegram from WEA that said “Welcome to the big league.” Personally I didn’t know whether to smile or wince.                                                                                     


GARY NUMAN: They could also see with great clarity for many miles. They had very white skin and were very strong, very powerful, arrogant and completely ruthless. In Replicas they become machines with human skin, very clean, pure.

GARY NUMAN: The name “Machmen” came from an underground magazine OZ while I was at school, half men, and half machines with a skin that was human but designed and genetically engineered. The album sleeve also depicted me as a
“Machman” looking out the window at a “friend.” I wore the make up for the shoot because it was no good trying to be a “Machman” with a spotty face!