Gary Numan – The Pleasure Principle
By Mark Dohmann
| Label: | Beggars Banquet – BEGA 10 |
|---|---|
| Format: | Vinyl, LP, Album |
| Country: | UK |
| Released: | 1979 |
| Genre: | Electronic, Rock |
| Style: | New Wave, Synth-pop |
“Numanoids never die they just get patched up with new firmware”
Anyone who has ever wondered where the junction of the old paper-based world and the new paradigm of computer controlled life occurred it was most likely 1979. An Englishman from Essex who had felt quite alien living amongst the humanoids had been playing with a Polymoog 203A using the “Vox Humana” preset. This is a mix of waveforms which create an instantly recognisable “noise”.
The Pleasure Principle is the debut solo studio album by English musician Gary Numan. Released about six months after Replicas (1979), the second album with his band Tubeway Army, The Pleasure Principle peaked at number 1 in the United Kingdom.
Having access to a keyboard doesn’t mean you can communicate through it. Somehow Gary Numan figured out a way to communicate to earthlings with the assistance of Moog (a famous Synthesizer manufacturer). For his Tubeway Army recording sessions, Gary Numan famously worked with his first analog synthesizer—the Minimoog. Over the next few albums, Numan’s comfort with analog synthesis grew. Where early recordings were full of monophonic synth lines, primitive even by Numan’s estimation, subsequent work utilised even more synthesizers, including polyphonic machines.
When recording “Cars,” arguably his most well-known track outside of “ME”, Numan deployed a Polymoog. First introduced in 1975, the Polymoog offered users presets for strings, organ, harpsichord, and other instruments in Moog’s distinct electronic sound. Numan eventually owned two 203a’s and six 280a’s, making great use of the Vox Humana preset a number of times.
When Gary Numan first discovered electronic music at the end of 1978 it wasn’t by design. Then a member of the punk band Tubeway Army, Numan was on his way to the studio to record their Tubeway Army debut when he discovered an instrument that would forever change his career. “There was a Minimoog synthesizer in the corner of the control room waiting to be collected by a hire company, which, lucky for me, never turned up, and I was able to use it for two or three days,” Numan said in Jonathan Bernstein and Lori Majewski’s book Mad World: An Oral History of New Wave Artists and Songs That Defined the 1980s. “I’d never seen one before and I loved it”
As luck would have it, the synth’s previous user had adjusted the settings to create a perfect, bottom-end heavy sound that piqued his interest. Without these ideal settings Numan isn’t sure he would’ve done much with the instrument. “I wouldn’t have known how to get that sound; I didn’t know anything about synthesizers,” he said in Mad World. “They were just a bunch of dials to me.”
Fixated with his new toy, Numan spent the next few days messing around with the machine and was soon obsessed with the distinct qualities of the Minimoog. It wasn’t long before it became a central part of his recording process. “I developed a massive passion for electronic musically practically overnight,” Numan said in Mad World. “I very hastily converted my pure punk songs into electronic songs.”
When he showed up at the label offices of Beggars Banquet with Tubeway Army, which he described as a “pseudo-electronic punk album”, one of the label’s directors was so pissed off by the unorthodox sound that he tried to fight Numan during the albums unveiling.
“I didn’t know anything about synthesizers. They were just a bunch of dials to me.”
The angry folks at Numan’s label were soon forced to eat humble pie as Tubeway Army charted in the UK and exceeded everyone’s commercial expectations. Putting aside their initial reservations, Beggars Banquet asked the band to start working on a sophomore effort.
If the modest success of the band’s first album had been a pleasant surprise, the reception of Replicas was a complete shock to both Tubeway Army and their label. Both Replicas and the single “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” both reached #1 on the UK charts in 1979.
Just as Tubeway Army reached peak commercial success, Numan wanted out of the band so he could embark on a solo career and give himself full creative control of his music. While working on his solo material he developed an interest in learning bass and purchased an inexpensive Shergold Modulator bass guitar. The first thing he played on the Modulator were the opening four notes of “Cars”. The catchy bass riff set the stage for an explosive creative outburst from Numan. “Honest to God, “Cars” took me 10 minutes — all the parts, all the arrangements. Another 20, and the lyrics were done,” he said in Mad World. “It was the most productive 30 minutes of my life.”
Numan’s half-hour creation became a #1 record in the UK and a charting hit in the US. Released in August of 1979, “Cars” gave Numan his second #1 song in the same year. This may sound like the stuff of dreams for an aspiring musician, but Numan found his voyage from total obscurity to selling close to 50,000 singles a day in the United Kingdom overwhelming. Interview requests were constant and technology magazines who saw him as some kind of synth wizard wanted his insight — never realizing that Numan himself still didn’t have a great understanding of synthesizers. “They were asking me about envelopes and fills and boffin shit. I just blagged and bullshitted my way through it,” he said in Mad World.
Beyond their initial sales and success, both “Cars” and the Pleasure Principle had wide-reaching influence on various artists and genres of music. “Cars” is considered by many to be one of the seminal new wave/synth pop records of the late-70s and 80s. The sounds of Pleasure Principle also influenced Chicago house, early Detroit techno, and inspired artists like Lady Gaga (see “Paparazzi”) and Nine Inch Nails.
Despite respect and admiration from some elite music industry peers and a mild critical and commercial success with 2013’s Splinter (Songs from a Broken Mind), Numan seems to have a very modest opinion of himself. “I don’t really play anything very well,” he told the website KAOS2000 in 20001. “If I have any talent at all — and I know that is questionable, depending on who you talk to — but if there is anything that I can do that sets me apart, it’s putting noises together.”
The Pleasure Principle has been described as featuring synth-pop and new wave throughout. Numan completely abandoned electric guitar on the album. This change, coupled with frequent use of synthetic percussion, produced the most purely electronic and robotic sound of his career.
In addition to the Minimoog synthesizer employed on his previous album, Numan made liberal use of the Polymoog keyboard, particularly its distinctive “Vox Humana” preset. Other production tricks included copious amounts of flanging, phasing and reverb, plus the unusual move of including solo viola and violin parts in the arrangements. Numan was also influenced by Kraftwerk; the track “Cars” had the same musical “glides” as “Autobahn” and both songs used the same synthesizers.
Nowadays musicians try to regenerate these original waveforms on restored vintage gear or emulators in digital variants from modern keyboard manufacturers. Some techie stuff for the eggheads can be found on the following 3 videos:
Polymoog “Vox Humana” preset | Showcase & Tutorial
Garry’s Polymoog 280a Part3 (by Synthpro)
polymoog 203a demonstration (by Synthpro)
Not everyone’s cup of tea is Numan’s vocal style (but then Neil Young manages to cut through with an equally different vocal style), the songs he created on Pleasure Principle and Replicas have stood the test of time. He went through a period of trying to be someone else around 1982 and his computational algorithms failed to reliably reboot until the mid-1990’s when he made Sacrifice (the start of new coding and upgrades to his Numanoid processor).
Numan has had a few firmware upgrades since 1994 and now plays to packed houses of new fans and the older ones who managed to keep their firmware patched. Musicians such as Nine Inch Nails were influenced by Numan and now Numan has been influenced by NIN to upgrade the original tunes with newer more aggressive layering whilst maintaining Cedric Sharpley’s drumming to power the back end.
To hear him live nowadays is still an impressive event regardless of the venue and Melbourne’s Forum and Metro or Sydney’s Enmore have been wowed by Numan and his new band. It’s an event not to be missed.
When he plays the tracks from Replicas and Pleasure Principle in the new more raw style it’s the sound of Vox Humana which ties the new coding together. A massive throng of Numanoids then oscillate in unison and mosh pit awe of the alien Numan exploding on stage.
AllMusic’s Greg Prato rated The Pleasure Principle 4.5 of 5 stars. He explained that “there is not a single weak moment on the disc” and that “the quality of the songs gets stronger and stronger as the album progresses”. He concluded: “If you had to own just one Gary Numan album, The Pleasure Principle would be it.”
Dig out the rare Living Ornaments Live Album and play it loud (used to be only when fellow Numanoids were present as the missus would threaten divorce otherwise). No longer a guilty pleasure it’s the principle that’s important to allow Vox Humana to breathe.
Track listing
A1 Airlane 3:18
A2 Metal 3:33
A3 Complex 3:14
A4 Films 4:09
A5 M.E. 5:37
B1 Tracks 2:52
B2 Observer 2:53
B3 Conversation 7:38
B4 Cars 3:53
B5 Engineers 4:00
Musicians
Bass – Paul Gardiner
Drums, Percussion – Cedric Sharpley*
Engineer, Mixed By – Harvey Webb, Rikki Sylvan
Keyboards, Viola – Christopher Payne*
Mastered By – Julian Mills, Melvyn Abrahams
Producer – Gary Numan
Vocals, Keyboards, Percussion [Synthetic] – Gary Numan
Written-By – Gary Numan
Tracks (Violin [Fadeout Violin] – Billy Currie) 2:52
Conversation (Backing Vocals – Garry Robson Violin [Fadeout Violin] – Billy Currie)