“Are Friends Electric?” by Gary Numan

"Are Friends Electric?" is where Gary Numan found his future, a 1979 song he wrote and produced for his band Tubeway Army and put on their album Replicas. Out as a single that May, it went to number one in the UK and sat there for four weeks, and it turned out to be the band's last single before they split.

It started life as two separate songs, stitched together at a creaky pub piano that couldn't hold its tuning, but the finished record is cold machinery: Minimoog and Polymoog synths with sliding portamento lines, a plain bass-and-drums backing, heavily flanged guitar in the instrumental break, and Numan's vocal kept low and detached, drifting into spoken word over slow, arpeggiated chords. Numan had stumbled onto synthesizers by accident, and it shows in the best way.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.