Cold Metal Rhythm

It's May, it's 1979 and I'm nine years old.

It's also Thursday which means that it's Top Of The Pops on the television, which in turn means that I'm glued to it, drawn like a moth to a flame.

On the screen a young man with blonde hair dressed in black in singing in a flat, monotone voice over a heavy, doom laden synthesiser, looking like a rabbit caught in headlights.

The man is 21 years old, from London and is the unwitting innovator of a new style of music that will be variously known as new wave, new romantic and electronica.

His name is Gary Numan and he's singing his number one hit single Are Friends Electric?, a tune that would provide the backing for another number one some 23 years later, almost to the week, but this time with vocals by three teenage girls who weren't even born at the time.

Are Friends Electric? became the first single that I ever bought with my own money, and the album that spawned it, Replicas, the first album I bought with my own funds.

29 years later I'm sitting here listening to the just released redux version, complete with an entire disc of previously unreleased demos from the Replicas sessions and I'm nine years old again, falling in love with this cold, electronic, unemotional masterpiece all over again.

So much has changed in the intervening years, people have come and gone, friends have been born and died, but still I love this album more than pretty much anything else that I've ever heard.

This album anchors me to me, is my constant in a life full of change, and is more important to me than I could ever put into words.

In two short weeks I'll be seeing Numan play the whole thing live, and it'll be akin to a religious experience for me, particularly when Down In The Park is aired, a bleak tale of synthetic friends, rape machines, ritualised death and crippling isolation that I have always found strangley cathartic.

And so I sit here, and I feel absolutely complete. I have good red wine, a packet of smooth cigars, and a deep sense of peace and tranquility as I write of my past, which defines my present and future. I am, in short, in a place that I can only describe as Heaven. If I were to die tonight, then it would be in a state of absolute calm and indescribable peace.

Such is the power of music. For a few short hours I am whole, I am complete, and I am happy.


"We are not lovers
We are not romantics
We are here to serve you
A different face but the words never change"

Down In The Park by Tubeway Army (1979)