Replicas Redux

We Say...

Review by Phil Sutcliffe

Listening to the almost-ridiculous, toytown-beepy synthesiser introduction to "Me, I Disconnect From You," it would be hard to imagine Gary Numan inspiring a radical phalanx including Nine Inch Nails, Blur, Beck, Hole and Marilyn Manson. But stick with Replicas and you'll soon hear how this (then) self-styled one-finger synthesiser novice got under the skin.

Partly, it’s the bleak simplicity of lurching riffs like "Are ‘Friends’ Electric?" or "Down in the Park"; partly it’s his rough, but rather more skilled, guitar offsetting the elementary keyboards — kind of funky on "The Machman," kind of punky on "It Must Have Been Years." Crucially, it’s the gold seam of pop tunesmithery he’d struck and the way he twisted that sing-in-the-shower appeal with lyrics that signpost Numanworld, a weird place "peopled" by man/machine robots, machmen and downstats. Here, civilisation’s a bust. In the park, machmen enjoy a killing spree and restaurants offer customers use of "a rape machine." Numan’s imaginative coup is to invest his ambiguous humanoids with the human pain of philosophers comprehending Weltschmerz — or teenagers feeling lonely: "You know I hate to ask/ But are ‘friends’ electric?/ Only mine’s broke down/ And now I’ve no one to love."

Supplementing Replicas’ original 10 tracks, the Disc 1 extras and the whole of Disc 2 comprise somewhat weaker versions, interesting to hyperfans only, except for three songs which match the album’s quality: "We Have A Downstat," "We Have A Technical" and "The Crazies" — the latter of which boasts the arresting line, “I only exterminate in my spare time”!