Gary Numan’s ‘The Pleasure Principle’ turns 47 on 7 September
Gary Numan released “The Pleasure Principle” on 7 September 1979 through Beggars Banquet, recorded at Marcus Recording Studios in London.
Gary Numan, the English synth-pop and new wave musician who had spent the previous two years fronting Tubeway Army, released his debut solo album “The Pleasure Principle” on 7 September 1979 through Beggars Banquet. The album turns 47 this year. Numan produced it himself at Marcus Recording Studios in London, with Harvey Webb and Rikki Sylvan engineering and mixing, and Julian Mills and Melvyn Abrahams mastering at Strawberry Mastering.
The record arrived about six months after “Replicas”, his second and final album with Tubeway Army, and reached number 1 on the UK Albums Chart.
How Gary Numan built ‘The Pleasure Principle’ without a guitar
Numan dropped electric guitar from the sessions entirely. In its place he layered the Minimoog he had already used on “Replicas” with a Polymoog, leaning on that keyboard’s Vox Humana preset, an ARP Odyssey, and a Synare 3 for synthetic percussion. Flanging, phasing and reverb ran across the mixes, and solo viola and violin parts sat inside otherwise electronic arrangements.
Paul Gardiner played bass, Chris Payne handled keyboards and viola, and Cedric Sharpley played drums and percussion. Billy Currie of Ultravox added fadeout violin to “Tracks” and “Conversation”, and Garry Robson sang backing vocals on “Conversation”.
Side one of the original UK LP ran “Airlane”, “Metal”, “Complex”, “Films” and “M.E.”; side two ran “Tracks”, “Observer”, “Conversation”, “Cars” and “Engineers”. The sleeve took its title and its staging from René Magritte’s painting “The Pleasure Principle”, with Numan seated in the pose of the original but surrounded by artificial objects, including a glowing purple Perspex pyramid where Magritte had placed a stone. Tony Escott illustrated the cover, Geoff Howes shot the photography, and Malti Kidia art directed. First UK copies came with a printed inner sleeve carrying the lyrics on one side and a band picture on the other.
“Cars” appeared as a single in August 1979, ahead of the album, and reached number 9 in the United States and number 1 in Canada. “Complex” followed that November and peaked at number 6 in the UK across a nine-week chart run. Numan later said he regretted the choice and that “Metal” should have gone out instead.
Reviews at the time were mixed. Robert Christgau of The Village Voice described the album as “Metal Machine Music goes easy-listening”. Red Starr, writing in Smash Hits, called it “not bad, mind you”, but “much too similar” to “Replicas”. Record Mirror’s Simon Ludgate wrote that “detachment and distance are painstakingly sewn into every track”.
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark supported the UK leg of the tour that followed, a production built around banks of neon lights and two radio-controlled pyramids that moved across the stage. Beggars Banquet issued a 30th anniversary edition on 21 September 2009 with a second disc of demos, outtakes and live recordings, and a 40th anniversary set, “The Pleasure Principle: The First Recordings”, on 11 October 2019 across double coloured vinyl and 2CD.
The album’s material has kept circulating outside Numan’s own catalogue. Nine Inch Nails covered “Metal” on “Things Falling Apart” in 2000, Afrika Bambaataa recorded it in 2004, and Basement Jaxx built “Where’s Your Head At” on “M.E.”. Side-Line covered a more recent reading of the same track in [melter] covers Gary Numan hit ‘Metal’ – Watch the video now, and the wider tribute traffic in Gary Numan revisited by various dark wave bands for a vinyl release – check the first video.
About Gary Numan
Gary Numan was born Gary Anthony James Webb in Hammersmith, London, in 1958. He formed Tubeway Army in 1977 as a punk band with his uncle Jess Lidyard on drums and Paul Gardiner on bass, and switched to synthesizers after finding a Minimoog left in a studio during the sessions for the group’s self-titled debut, released in 1978. The band’s second album, “Replicas”, came out in 1979 and reached number 1 in the UK, carried by the single “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”, which also topped the UK chart. Numan dropped the group name that year, keeping Gardiner in the band and adding Chris Payne on keyboards and Cedric Sharpley on drums.
“The Pleasure Principle” followed on 7 September 1979 and gave Numan a second UK number 1 album in the same year. “Telekon” arrived in September 1980 and did the same. He then moved through a long run of albums on his own Numa label and elsewhere, including “Warriors” in 1983, before his commercial standing in Britain fell away through the second half of the decade. The catalogue kept its influence regardless, and by the late 1990s a younger generation of industrial and electronic acts had begun citing and covering it openly.
Numan’s later work brought him back to the same audience Side-Line reports on. “Splinter (Songs From A Broken Mind)” was announced in 2013, covered here in Gary Numan announces new ‘Splinter (Songs From A Broken Mind)’ album and tour – listen to first track!, and “Savage (Songs from a Broken World)” followed in 2017, reported in Gary Numan to release new ‘Savage (Songs from a Broken World)’ album on double vinyl (with 2 bonus tracks). He talked through his studio methods in Gary Numan – ‘After doing this for over 35 years I still get excited about what’s around the corner’ – Tech-Talk with DJ Wildhoney.
Collaborations have run alongside the solo records. He worked with John Foxx on the release covered in John Foxx and Gary Numan collaborate on ’21st Century: a Man, a Woman and a City’ album – out in 2 physical versions, joined Jean-Michel Jarre’s “Electronica” project alongside Pet Shop Boys, appeared on a Chris Liebing album in 2018, and toured North America in 2023 in direct support of Ministry, as reported in Ministry announces 2023 headline tour dates with direct support from Gary Numan & Front Line Assembly. The Tubeway Army years were documented in the book covered in Gary Numan biography ‘Tubeway Daze: The Untold Story Of Tubeway Army’ hits the book shelves.
Forty-seven years on, “The Pleasure Principle” remains the album Numan returned to most often on stage, performing it in full on dedicated tours in 2009 and again across the United States in 2010.
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