In early 2008 Gary Numan celebrates his 30th year in music and turns 50. To celebrate this, the pioneering electronic album Replicas will be re-issued as Gary Numan & Tubeway Army - Replicas Redux on February 23, 2008. This is a week before Numan performs the original LP plus B-sides on a 15 date UK tour in March 2008. The album includes the breakthrough single 'Are 'Friends' Electric?', which gave Numan his first simultaneous Number 1 single and album when Replicas joined it at the top of the charts a few weeks later. 'Are 'Friends' Electric?' originally charted as a picture disc and Beggars Banquet are promising a very limited edition picture disc of the track plus 'Down In The Park' as the flipside as recognition that both songs have remained influential for three decades. The new Redux re-issue also features for the first time a complete earlier version of the Replicas album recorded in late 1978 and January 1979, along with the original B-sides and further out-takes, adding up to 27 tracks across the two CDs.
Released on the punk indie label Beggars Banquet in March 1979, 'Down In The Park' was the first single to be taken off the album, receiving great support from Radio 1 DJ John Peel who booked the 21-year-old from West London for two sessions in the same year. At the time Numan was still operating with a band name - Tubeway Army - although in effect he wrote all the songs and played everything on the LP except for bass and drums. He changed to a solo act in time for his second number 1 single of 1979, 'Cars', which was swiftly followed by The Pleasure Principle so that he headed both album and single charts again. The next three albums, Telekon, Living Ornaments and Dance reached 1, 2 and 3 and in 1981 he sold out three nights at Wembley Arena but lost money because the stage set was the biggest moving structure seen in this country at that point.
Different generations have identified with Replicas' atmospheric music, images of technology out of control and a ripped-up London of the near future. The imagination of one young man in Cleveland, Ohio, namely Brian Warner, was fired by the 'apocalyptic' imagery of 'Down In The Park' and as Marilyn Manson he later recorded the track with producer Trent Reznor (also a fan) from Nine Inch Nails. Nirvana's Kurt Cobain namechecked the guitar-led 'It Must Have Been Years' as an influence in his journal and The Foo Fighters covered 'Down In The Park' for the X-Files soundtrack, Songs In The Key Of X. In the late '90s Damon Albarn recorded the more obscure Replicas 'outtake' 'We Have A Technical' and of course Sugababes scored a UK Number 1 in 2002 by sampling 'Are 'Friends' Electric?' for their single 'Freak Like Me'. Other acts who have covered tracks on the album include DJ Hell, Smashing Pumpkins, Beck and Moloko.
As the NME argued recently, 'Numan's influence on electronic music is unparalleled.' In fact Mojo said of his 2006 album Jagged that the 'innovator of the late '70s never sounds like he's having to play catch-up' and Kerrang concluded after listening to the album that 'Numan is still as vital as ever.' So, 30 years after Tubeway Army's first single in February 1978, Numan is currently recording a new album and has several releases already scheduled including the Jagged Live EP (www.musictvstation.com/acatalog/gary-numan.html) and Jagged Edge - a set of alternative versions and mixes from the 2006 CD, due out in the new year.
