Released in 1978. MARTIN MILLS – Beggars Banquet co-owner. STEVE WEBBON – Beggars Banquet Records. JESS LIDYARD – Gary’s uncle and original Tubeway army drummer. GARY ROBESON- Long time friend to Gary. STEVE MALINS- Gary Numan PR and biographer. PETER HAYNES – Ex Lurkers drummer. SEAN BURKE- Former Tubeway Army guitarist. TERRE THAEMLITZ – Musician.
GARY NUMAN: The first album I released was a demo album; I did it in a very, very cheap 16 track home built studio so you couldn’t expect it to be highly polished. It was my first tentative steps, full of flaws but first steps into electronic music. I originally went into the studio to record a punk album - a guitar three-piece - guitar, bass and drums. I came out with an electronic album! And the record company went ape-shit and wouldn't release it. And I said, “Well, I'm not going' back in, y'know. That's what I'm doing' now.” They’d originally wanted me to go in and do an album of punk songs; there was tremendous ‘ructions at this time at the record company, in fact me and one of the directors actually squared up to each other twice. It did get ever so nasty at one point because they had originally signed me as a pop punk equivalent to The Lurkers. They were very upset when I didn’t, but to their credit they went with it. I think I’m quite strong willed and know exactly what I’m doing, which is often mistaken for arrogance.
TERRE THAEMLITZ: By the time Gary Numan's first album with Tubeway Army was released in November of 1978, it was as much a commentary on the U.K.'s post-Glam scene as it was symptomatic of that time's gender- and sexuality-blurring snares. Taken one song at a time, Numan's highly emotional and personal lyrics conveyed first-hand accounts of sexually deviant experiences. Grouped together, they contradicted one another's claims of sexual fixation and orientation, refusing traditional notions of the 'healthy individual' whose desires reflect a singular and stable personality.
PETER HAYNES: When Gary went out to do the Tubeway Army album I don’t think, initially, he got the support he needed. To be honest I don’t think that Beggars Banquet understood what he was doing really. I know Gary did have a few tense moments with Nick Austin over at Beggars Banquet but give the guy his due he was definitely prepared to stand up for himself.
GARY NUMAN: I'd gone to a studio and there was a mini moog that had been left behind still in its case. It was a studio in Cambridge called Space Wood. So there was this synth in the corner. I'd never seen one before and it looked great and I said to the studio owner if he'd mind if I had a play with it. I just turned it on and pressed a key and it just sounded huge like 10 rock guitars playing at once, a massive sound. It's just lucky. Whoever had used it before had left it set up on that sound - if they'd left it on a different sound it might have gone “dooop” like one of those laughable BBC special effects in the 70's and I would have thought synth’s were a load of shit. It was just luck that it happened to be there, luck that the hire company hadn't collected it yet, luck that it was left on this amazing sound. So instead of recording a punk album, I had this synth, so as all of my songs were guitar based with chugging riffs and I just converted it to the sound on this synth. I spent two days doing that. I went back to the record company with a pseudo-electronic album and they weren't too happy about it. Luckily they were a tiny little label and didn't have the budget to re-record it so they were just stuck with it I just felt that this was really what I wanted to do. I loved it and I loved the sounds it made. It’s a difficult thing to explain but I had sounds in my head. More than that I had a picture, an image, a feeling almost of how I wanted to go, but I hadn’t come close to realising with the band. JESS LIDYARD: When we recorded the “blue album” in summer 1978, Paul Gary and I did something like 15 or 16 tracks through the night, just bashing through them. Another band had left their gear in the studio. They’d obviously done a previous session and one of the things they’d left behind was this moog synth. Gary started playing around with it but I left the next morning because I’d done all my parts. When I heard it next Gary had added keyboards to the songs. I was surprised but a lot of the material was still quite familiar. It was when I heard back the Replicas album that I really had a shock.
MARTIN MILLS: Most of our bands couldn’t care less about equipment at any point; Gary became totally immersed in it.
GARY NUMAN: There were lots of people around playing synthesisers before me, Kraftwerk and Ultravox! were quite active when I came along in 1978. But they all looked so boring! Kraftwerk were never an influence although they were, for a while, a name to attach yourself to which may be where this influence thing came from. I’ve never actually liked them very much. The punk thing was dying quickly and nobody seemed to see what I saw, that as always, the public wanted a solo star that they could touch. The public was crying out for a solo singer, who behaved like a star.
GARY NUMAN: I first hear “Slow Motion” by Ultravox! at a friend’s party in the summer of 1978. Billie Currie was there though he wasn’t well known then and I wasn’t anything myself then. He brought along a copy of the record, I heard it and thought “this is it”- the synth’s integrated with guitars. They didn’t replace them. The whole electronic thing started taking shape in my mind. I was convinced that electronic music was going to shake the world.
GARY NUMAN: When I first got into electronic music, I used to listen to Ultravox a lot. They were the only people really who were doing things where they mixed synthesizers - electronics - with conventional instruments, and that's what I wanted to do. I didn't want to replace old instruments the way people like Kraftwerk had done - with just all electronic. That kind of didn't work for me. The things that Bowie and Eno were doing were kind of not really what I was after either, but Ultravox were very much in the same sort of vein. So, I listened to them quite a lot. Before that, I really wanted to be a pop star/rock star because of people like T Rex and Marc Bolan and so on. I was a Bowie fan for a while, but not for that long.
GARY NUMAN: When I first began with the synthesiser after the guitar, I began to realise what a difficult instrument this was going to be if I was going to be a star with it. You can’t run around the stage with it, as you can with a guitar. It’s not very interesting to look at a great set of keyboards with this bloke behind it. So I decided that if it was to be the synthesiser for the main thrust of my music, I’d have to have a strong and different image to stand out.
STEVE WEBBON: For the first album we at Beggars Banquet had a bit of a fight to get Gary to let us call it Tubeway Army because from Gary’s point of view Tubeway Army were gone. We thought it was a bit silly to throw away all the recognition that we had with Tubeway Army so we kept the name for the first album which was only really intended to be a demo tape anyway.
GARY NUMAN: We kept the name for the second album because it was also done in the same phase.
GARY NUMAN: Tubeway Army is not an embarrassing album. Not particularly well produced but quite interesting. You tend to be more adventurous then; you get a bit safe when there’s more to lose.
GARY ROBSON: I don’t think any of us knew whether Gary was going to be successful or not but I remember him saying “this is all I want to do and I’ve got to see it through to the end, successful or not.
GARY NUMAN: I had nothing to lose. I’d made a mess of school, had no conventional career to fall back on, nothing to stop me devoting myself to it absolutely.
GARY NUMAN: I only got into keyboards when my mother bought me an old piano two weeks before I was due to go into the studio. I started to play some of the tunes on the piano and learned to add bass notes to certain chords. I learnt to play piano by watching a man at college.
“LISTEN TO THE SIRENS” Debut live performance: 1994 “The Sacrifice Tour.” Recorded Wednesday 23rd August 1978 – Spaceward, Cambridge.
TERRE THAEMLITZ: During the 1970s, Great Britain found itself in the midst of yet another sex panic. Culture was once again at the crossroads of decay, as seen in such symptoms as Glam's fascination with gender-blending and ambisexuality. In particular, the visibility of gay male sexuality and cruising in public parks became a target of violent police actions aimed at entrapping and arresting Gay men. The potential for seduction by undercover police officers sympathetically soliciting sex from other men was captured in the opening lines to the first track of Numan's premier, self-titled album with Tubeway Army: the lyrics to “Listen To The Sirens” is an obvious homage to Philip K. Dick's sci-fi novel, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said.
“MY SHADOW IN VAIN” Debut live performance: 1978. Recorded Tuesday to Thursday 7th to 9th March 1978 – Spaceward, Cambridge. Re-recorded July 1978 – Spaceward, Cambridge. Re-recorded again for the 2003 Exposure album.
GARY NUMAN: I wrote that song when I was about 18 so no wonder I struggle with that one; I can’t remember the words to the song I just wrote.
GARY NUMAN: In this song I sing the line “Here am I more Roche 5 than pain.” When I was younger, school age, I was sent to a psychologist in an attempt to find out why I was “disturbed” as they put it. They put me on the drugs Nardil and Valium for about a year. Roche 5 was written on the Valium tablets.
“THE LIFE MACHINE” Never performed live. Recorded Tuesday to Thursday 7th to 9th March 1978 – Spaceward, Cambridge. Re-recorded July 1978 – Spaceward, Cambridge.
GARY NUMAN: You know when a person’s heart stops and they sometimes stick them on a machine that keeps them going- a life support machine, when the person wants to die and the doctors won’t turn them off, well it’s about that.
GARY NUMAN: I saw a programme where there was this man looking down at his own body and he watched as the people came in to see him. Even though these people still love him he’s not quite the same. They love him because they are supposed to, and that is basically what this song is about. The torture is in the man’s mind, where he can’t go and yet he can’t stay either.
GARY NUMAN: I was putting myself in the situation of the person who wants to die, he’s in limbo and he can’t go to heaven or wherever he’s going ‘cos they won’t switch the machine off that’s keeping him alive. And he can’t be in his body because he’s dead. He’s just sort of floating.
GARY NUMAN: I believe if somebody is dead, they should be turned off. I don’t see the any point in keeping somebody’s heart going when they don’t even know they’re alive.
“STEEL AND YOU” Never performed live. Recorded Tuesday to Thursday 7th to 9th March 1978 – Spaceward, Cambridge, track titled as “This Machine.” Re-recorded July 1978 – Spaceward, Cambridge as “Steel And You.”
GARY NUMAN: The song “Steel And You” evokes human life reduced to machine minding, “Just my steel friend and me/ I stand brave by his side/ this machine is all/ I live for.” It makes you think I suppose.
SEAN BURKE: As “This Machine” this song didn’t go down all that well, the thing to remember is it was a really odd situation, we used to do gigs with other Beggars Banquet artists and we used to be billed with the Lurkers. The Lurkers were like the Ramones and with us on the same bill their crowd got to know Tubeway Army and of course the punky stuff went down well but when we threw in things like “This Machine” they thought “what the hell is going on.” It was like trying two totally different styles of music. Paul used to call it “The weird stuff.” It didn’t go down well at all. And that was the problem in the band. Gary once accused me and Barry of being entrenched in punk; I wasn’t entrenched in punk at all I was just confused about where the band was going.
STEVE MALINS: “This Machine” was effectively Numan’s first electronic pop song. The song presents a man who is fading in and out of focus, to the point where he literally doesn’t have a grip on reality because he can’t even see himself in the mirror.
“FRIENDS” Debut live performance: 1978 as “Do Your Best.” Recorded Tuesday to Thursday 7th to 9th March 1978 – Spaceward, Cambridge. Re-recorded July 1978 – Spaceward, Cambridge.
GARY NUMAN: I’d spent the two years previous to the 2000 Pure album singing the lyrics to “Friends” over what would ultimately go on to be the title track of the Pure album.
“SOMETHINGS IN THE HOUSE” Debut live performance: 1979. Recorded Tuesday to Thursday 7th to 9th March 1978 – Spaceward, Cambridge. Re-recorded July 1978 – Spaceward, Cambridge.
GARY NUMAN: My songs were often a rambling, disjointed mix of things; this song is a good example of that.
STEVE MALINS: “Something’s In The House” and “My Shadow In Vain” were both Tubeway Army zeniths.
“EVERY DAY I DIE” Debut live performance: 1979 “The Touring Principle.” Recorded July 1978 – Spaceward, Cambridge. Re-recorded again for the Exposure/ Hybrid album.
GARY NUMAN: One of my favourites on the album.
STEVE MALINS: This song turned adolescent masturbation into a solitary rejection of love.
GARY NUMAN: Smashing Pumpkins have covered "Everyday I Die" but they haven't actually released it as yet.
“MY LOVE IS A LIQUID” Never performed live. Recorded July 1978 – Spaceward, Cambridge
GARY NUMAN: About test tube babies, you fertilise them, put them in a tray and they grow, the line “Did you know that friends come in boxes?” was actually about a future technology whereby a man could masturbate into a box of “stuff” and from it the child of his choosing would grow. A bit like add water and stir.
“ARE YOU REAL?” Debut live performance: 1996 “The Premier Hits Tour.” Recorded July 1978 – Spaceward, Cambridge.
GARY NUMAN: A song about cloning, what might happen if you met your clone and the conversion that would go on.
“THE DREAM POLICE” Debut live performance: 1979 “The Touring Principle.” Recorded July 1978 – Spaceward, Cambridge.
SEAN BURKE: I remember Beggars insisted we change one of the lyrics on “Bombers” from Junkies to nurses. That’s why Gary wrote that line “Junkies won’t get radio time” on “The Dream Police” from the Tubeway Army blue album. I wrote the opening riff to “The Dream Police.” It was me that actually got that song started. The band drove it and Gary wrote the lyrics over the top. I was fed up that I didn’t get any publishing on that, especially as the riff was my idea. At the time, however, I just didn’t bother.
“JO THE WAITER” Debut live performance: 1993 “The Dream Corrosion Tour.” Recorded July 1978 – Spaceward, Cambridge.
GARY NUMAN: Like “Basic J” this song was inspired by an ex girlfriend. “Jo The Waiter” is my wife Gemma’s favourite song. Actually that’s her favourite song by anyone, ever. Funnily enough I don't like “Jo The Waiter” very much.
GARY NUMAN: Jo was actually a girl, my first love or so I thought. It was a teenage thing, I was seventeen and it got very silly, but at least I got a song out of it. The storyline in the song is fictional although she did used to think I was a bit strange apparently. I found that out long after she'd left. The reason for the gender uncertainty in the song was simply a clumsy attempt to cover up who I was singing about. At the time the only people that heard my songs were friends so I didn't want them to know it had anything to do with her.
TERRE THAEMLITZ: Some of Numan’s early songs remain deliberately ambiguous, if not deceptive, about the gender of Numan's object of desire. Such is the case with “Jo The Waiter.”
“ZERO BARS (MR SMITH)" Never performed live. Recorded Wednesday 23rd August 1978 – Spaceward, Cambridge.
STEVE MALINS: The electronics were added to “Zero Bars” and “Listen To The Sirens” during a second session in August.
directors actually squared up to each other twice. It did get ever so nasty at one point because they had originally signed me as a pop punk equivalent to The Lurkers. They were very upset when I didn’t, but to their credit they went with it. I think I’m quite strong willed and know exactly what I’m doing, which is often mistaken for arrogance.
TERRE THAEMLITZ: 
