Music Reissues Weekly: Beggars Arkive - Gary Numan's 1979 John Peel session

Tubeway Army’s “Are ‘Friends’ Electric” hit the top of the UK single’s chart in the last week of June 1979. It stayed there for four weeks. Its parent album, Replicas, lodged itself in the Top 75 for 31 weeks. In April, just as Replicas was out, Tubeway Army began recording demos for the next album: the band which had been assembled for the task debuted on BBC2’s The Old Grey Whistle Test on 22 May.

At this point, Gary Numan – who, effectively, was Tubeway Army – was beginning to think a change in terminology was necessary. On 29 May, just a week on from the OGWT appearance, he and Billie Currie (keyboards – on loan from Ultravox), long-standing musical partner Paul Gardiner (bass), Chris Payne (keyboards) and Cedric Sharpley (drums) went into the BBC’s Maida Vale studio to record a session for the John Peel Show. When it aired on 25 June, it was billed as by Gary Numan.

That week, “Are ‘Friends’ Electric” was just-short of topping the charts. Tubeway Army was the name on the single and of the band seen on Top of the Pops. Yet, for radio listeners, Gary Numan was solo. The album which had been begun in April became The Pleasure Principle, the first Gary Numan solo album, released that September after its trailer single “Cars” became another smash. Before this, for a short time, Tubeway Army and the solo Gary Numan co-existed.

Gary Numan’s first (and only) Peel session has reappeared on vinyl, as part of a series of BBC recordings issued by his/Tubeway Army’s label Beggars Banquet. The four tracks are “Cars,” “Airlane,” “Films” and “Conversation.” This has been out before: most notably in 1989 when the Numan session was teamed with the earlier, and sole, Tubeway Army Peel Session.

The blurred boundary between Tubeway Army and the solo Gary Numan is further rendered opaque by “Cars” being a rewrite of “Zero Bars,” the final track on Tubeway Army’s November 1978 debut album. “Conversation”, the very John Foxx-esque instrumental “Airlane” and the bubbling “Films” were all-new though.

In their for-radio iterations, each of the four tracks is more skeletal than the released version. On the OGWT, performing “Down in the Park” and “Are ‘Friends’ Electric,” this band had a power which is less apparent here: and considering that demos for the next album had already been recorded by the time the session was completed, this is surprising. It’s not that there is no energy or forward motion, more that a deliberation is palpable. Listeners to the John Peel show on 25 June 1979 heard something which had not yet arrived at its destination.

Central to this flux, these recordings are from the week Gary Numan decided that the Tubeway Army handle was to be ditched and, from this point onwards, it all rested on the name he had adopted for himself. For a few more weeks though, while “Are ‘Friends’ Electric” was still a live chart proposition, Tubeway Army and the solo Gary Numan were active entities in the same continuum. A form of parallax the science fiction-favouring Gary Numan doubtless appreciated.

• Next week: The reappearance of Pendulum and Trio, ill-fated British jazzer Mike Taylor’s super-rare Sixties albums  
• More reissue reviews on theartsdesk
• Kieron Tyler’s website

@kierontyler.bsky.social