“Are Friends Electric?” by Tubeway Army

"Are Friends Electric?" is the chilly heart of Replicas, Tubeway Army's 1979 album, and when it came out as a single that May it went all the way to number one in Britain and stayed there for four weeks. Gary Numan, the band's frontman, wrote it, produced it and sings it, and it was the band's last single before they broke up.

Numan first worked it out on a creaky old pub piano that wouldn't hold its tuning, and it was stitched together from two separate songs. On record it's startlingly bare: Paul Gardiner's bass and Jess Lidyard's drums hold down a plain backing while Minimoog and Polymoog synthesizers do the talking, with a heavily flanged guitar, subdued vocals and a spoken passage drifting over slow arpeggios. Robots never sounded so lonely.

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