{"id":880,"date":"2008-09-02T23:14:51","date_gmt":"2008-09-02T22:14:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/?p=880"},"modified":"2013-10-11T11:28:49","modified_gmt":"2013-10-11T10:28:49","slug":"tubeway-army-beggars-banquet-records-1978","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/tubeway-army-beggars-banquet-records-1978\/","title":{"rendered":"Tubeway Army – Beggars Banquet Records – 1978"},"content":{"rendered":"

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That’s Too Bad<\/a><\/p>\n

Oh Didn’t I Say<\/a><\/p>\n

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Bombers<\/a><\/p>\n

Blue Eyes \/ O.D. Receiver<\/a><\/p>\n

I fancied a bit of Tubeway Army tonight to fulfil the Numanoid side of my brain which is still relatively intact and gently throbbing away in my psyche, \u00a0at least is was right up to the 1980 LP ‘Telekon’ which\u00a0was released\u00a0around the same time as\u00a0the 7″ singles ‘We Are Glass’ and ‘I Die You Die’ which were\u00a0great synth pop\u00a0material.<\/p>\n

After this LP in 1980\u00a0Numan disappeared from the Penguin radar, not\u00a0to be sighted that much again, although saying that I vaguely remember something about him crunching a plane up…getting married to\u00a0the top ranking Numanoid in his personal fan club, and driving around in superb Italian sports cars!<\/p>\n

I loved the period from 1979 – 1980 from this band, I was just a tad too young to remember, or to have owned these two early 7″ singles when they were originally released, but I managed\u00a0to purchase\u00a0them off the\u00a0back of the Tubeway Army ‘Down In The Park’ and ‘Are Friends Electric’ success, ditto the first Tubeway Army LP.<\/p>\n

Bandwagan jumper? Hell yes!<\/p>\n

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Heres a short bio courtesy of wikki pee’d e eh:<\/p>\n

Gary Webb, aged nineteen, had fronted London band Mean Street in 1977 (their song “Bunch of Stiffs” appeared on the Live at the Vortex<\/em> compilation, and was the B-side of the Vortex<\/em> 7″). Leaving this band acrimoniously, he auditioned as lead guitarist for another band called The Lasers, where he met bass-player Paul Gardiner. The pair left The Lasers soon after and formed Tubeway Army, initially with Webb’s uncle Jess Lidyard on drums. Webb rechristened himself “Valerian”, Gardiner “Scarlett” and Lidyard “Rael”.<\/p>\n

Webb was quite a prolific song-writer and ambitious for commercial success. The band began playing gigs on the punk scene in London and managed to secure a record deal with the independent Beggars Banquet label. They released two guitar-heavy, punk-style singles in the first half of 1978 (“That’s Too Bad”\/”Oh! Didn’t I Say”, and “Bombers”\/”Blue Eyes”\/”OD Receiver”). These failed to chart.<\/p>\n

Soon afterwards, the Tubeway Army<\/em> album was released on blue vinyl. Webb had now adopted the name “Gary Numan”. Apparently Numan actually got his new pseudonym from a local Yellow Pages where a plumber called “Arthur Neumann” was listed.Rather than continue with the German spelling,Numan dropped the “e” and the second “n” and became Gary Numan. Whilst still largely guitar\/bass\/drums-based, the album saw his first tentative use of the Minimoog synthesizer, which he had come across by accident in the recording studio during the album sessions. Lyrically the record touched on dystopian and sci-fi themes, Numan being a fan of authors such as Philip K. Dick (the opening lines of the song “Listen to the Sirens” are a direct lift from the title of Dick’s book Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said<\/em>). Whilst the album’s modest initial pressing (which included a large batch of warped editions) sold out, it did not enter the album charts at that time, and no singles were lifted from it. By this time Tubeway Army had decided to abandon live shows \u2013 Numan was unhappy with pub-venue gigs on the often violent London punk scene (the only known recording of a Tubeway Army concert \u2013 a London show from February 1978 \u2013 was released as a bootleg album in the early 80s; it was later officially included under the title Living Ornaments ’78<\/em> as bonus tracks on the 1998 CD re-release of the Tubeway Army<\/em> album).<\/p>\n

Following swiftly on in early 1979, excited by the possibilities of synthesizers, Numan took Tubeway Army back into the studio to record a follow-up album, Replicas<\/em>. The result was more synth and science fiction orientated than ever. The first single from the album, the bleak, slow-paced keyboard-driven song “Down in the Park”, failed to chart. However, the next single, “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” was more successful. A special picture-disc helped boost sales but what particularly grabbed the British public’s imagination was Tubeway Army’s appearance on the BBC show The Old Grey Whistle Test<\/em>, followed soon after by a slot on Top of the Pops<\/em>. The band appeared all dressed in black and near-motionless, Numan in particular giving a performance often referred to as being “like an android” (a style that was later reported to have been a means of covering stage nerves but which then became his trademark). The single climbed steadily to stay at number one in the UK charts for 4 weeks, with Replicas<\/em> following suit in the album charts. With Tubeway Army still avoiding live shows, Numan recruited some additional musicians to make these television appearances (see above).<\/p>\n

Numan became the first synth-based artist in Britain to break through into major commercial success. At this point, he dropped the Tubeway Army name and subsequent releases were made under the artist name Gary Numan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That’s Too Bad Oh Didn’t I Say Bombers Blue Eyes \/ O.D. Receiver I fancied a bit of Tubeway Army tonight to fulfil the Numanoid side of my brain which is still relatively intact and gently throbbing away in my psyche, \u00a0at least is was right up to the 1980 LP ‘Telekon’ which\u00a0was released\u00a0around the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-links-downloads"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=880"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7212,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880\/revisions\/7212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}