1979: The Live EPs - 40 (ish) Years on

Author's Note - As I’ve yet to do a post on Gary Numan’s initial commercial peak of the 1979-1981 period yet, I thought I’d do so by writing about this CD I ordered off the internet a few months ago. Gary Numan has spent much of his career attempting to escape the shadow of his earlier hits and the charting and general acclaim accumulated by Splinter and Savage came as no small relief after a severe period of writer’s block.

For now, as it was the fortieth anniversary of his first two number-one albums this year with both Replicas and The Pleasure Principle seeing deluxe reissues of their demo recordings earlier this year I though I’d do a small post in reverence of this period using one of the more interesting and somewhat obscure documents of this era; the 1979 Live EPs. This will also come as a small break from the Savage entries for this week as ‘The End Of Things’ requires a little more research.

In September 1979, Gary Numan had conquered the UK charts. After topping the charts as Tubeway Army with the dual successes of Replicas and second single ‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’ his first solo release The Pleasure Principle with its lead single ‘Cars’ repeated this impressive feat. In their wake, Numan commenced his first international series of shows where he’d promote both number one albums alongside highlights of the first Tubeway Army offering and a few other odds and ends.

This was The Touring Principle, and eleven tracks recorded from the September 28th show were released on home video under the same name in 1980. These were ‘Me! I Disconnect From You’, ‘M.E.’, ‘We Are So Fragile’, ‘Everyday I Die’, ‘Conversation’, ‘Remember I Was Vapour’, ‘On Broadway’, ‘Down In The Park’, ‘My Shadow In Vain’, ‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’ and ‘Tracks’. The master film from which these were taken has since been lost, leaving these highlights alongside some third party recordings as the only video footage of Gary Numan’s first solo outing. A selection of nine tracks with some overlap were released as the live album Living Ornaments ’79 in April 1981 after Numan’s supposed retirement from touring. The vinyl featured ‘Airlane’, ‘Cars’, ‘We Are So Fragile’, ‘Films’, ‘Something’s In The House’, ‘Conversation’, ‘My Shadow In Vain’, The Dream Police’ and ‘Metal’ and like the video release these were shuffled from the original performance listing. 

Living Ornaments ’79 was released as both a single album and compiled with Living Ornaments ’80 with the resulting box set charting as high as number two in the UK. 

Several years later and after some difficulties locating the master tapes a full concert recording of the show was released in 1998 as a fan club exclusive. The final show of the tour was released in a limited 3000-copy run through Numan’s website under the title Engineers. 

Before that, however, there were The Live EPs. Unreleased until a 5000-copy limited reissue bundled with 30th Anniversary copies of The Pleasure Principle in 2009, this disc features rare and unreleased mixes of the September 28th concert.

January 1980

A-Side - ‘Down In The Park’, ‘On Broadway’

B-Side - ‘Everyday I Die’, ‘Remember I Was Vapour’

The first proper live document featured only one track from Numan’s number one albums, the fan favourite but flop single ‘Down In The Park’. It is presented here in a heaver arrangement than its album counterpart featuring a more abrasive lead synthesiser present throughout the verses and a more ambitious rhythm section courtesy of the late Cedric Sharpley. The final descending melody of the full performance is replaced with audience applause likely for space reasons. The next track was of more interest.

Gary Numan has recorded a handful of covers throughout his career, preferring to rely on his own abilities as a songwriter and taking any direct inspiration from his peers through production techniques or hiring them as session musicians. 

‘On Broadway’ is the most successful of these cover songs and benefits from being a bit tongue-in-cheek, there was self-awareness with lines such as “they say the neon lights are bright on Broadway” being performed in front of The Touring Principle’s extensive lighting display. 

Originally recorded by The Drifters in 1963 and covered with great success by jazz and soul icon George Benson in 1978, ‘On Broadway’ documented the difficulties of a newly successful artist and was therefore of a piece with Numan’s setlist and meteoric early rise to fame. The first and second verses have the singer consider the myths of success, the lights, the glamour and the girls will only last you so far. One day you’ll be “walking down the street” without “enough to eat” and soon enough “the glitter rubs right off and you're nowhere”. The feast of fame is not a satisfying one, despite what everybody says. 

By the time of the final verse the singer pushes against the naysayers and embraces the myth regardless, declaring “they’re dead wrong, I know they are / ‘cause I can play this here guitar”. He either believes in himself enough to go beyond where those before have fallen or he has bought his own hype. Either way, he “won’t quit ‘till [he’s] a star on Broadway”.

Numan’s version stripped out all of the original recording’s arrangement, replacing the jazz band with a sparse drum machine and keyboard embellishments using his vocals (punctuated by a vocoded ‘Broad-way’) to carry the track’s first half. He replaced the jazz band’s workout in the outro with an extended synthesiser solo courtesy of former Ultravox! keyboardist Billy Currie. A few have joked that Currie’s performance was his way of auditioning for his newly-reformed band, which he’d soon rejoin after the tour.

Numan integrated ‘Broadway’ into the grand finale of a three-song suite united by a Roland preset in the middle of the setlist during the UK Touring Principle. Aside from an even more tongue-in-cheek duet with Leo Sayer in 1984 (complete with revealing his Berserker-era cobalt hair on the line “looking at them just gives me the blues”) Numan’s not revisited the song since.

Humourously, the original Drifters’ version includes the additional lyric “I’ll have my name in lights”. Throughout his 1985 to 1992 tours, Numan’s light shows would do just this.

‘Everyday I Die’ was one of the highlights of the first Tubeway Army album, even intended to title the album at one stage. The song features an intriguingly seedy lyric from Numan at the time, that of the pleasures of the ‘little death’ or masturbation, hence the name. Biographer Steve Malins claimed the song “turn[ed] adolescent masturbation into a solitary rejection of love”, and this promise would later flourish with subsequent live performances often reaching a hysterical climax.  

The studio version, while boasting a pretty intricate arrangement of acoustic guitars, synthesisers and drums came across as a bit insubstantial and was pretty much finished by the two minute mark. Live, ‘Everday I Die’ was taken out of its box and lengthened to four minutes plus by the 1980 Teletour making this recording an interesting document of the song’s development. That said, even the arrangement here expands the handful of riffs in the first half into an array of countermelodies making the original take seem a little tossed-off in comparison. This take is a little tentative, as if the band is still feeling their way around the track and it ultimately peters out a little although this could be chalked to Numan’s relative inexperience as a performer this early on. A more complete reimagining would emerge on Living Ornaments ’80. 

The final track on the EP was ‘Remember I Was Vapour’, an early glimpse at the then-forthcoming Telekon and an early indicator that the new album would be an altogether more downbeat affair. 

Musically the track was rather austere, centred on the same Roland preset as ‘On Broadway’ with the bass and keyboards offering some restrained riffs until the bridge allows for a subdued climax before sinking back beneath the beat. 

Early plans for Telekon revolved around telepathy, Gary said in autumn 1979 “It’s going to be about a man who can finally harness the power of telekinesis … he can move things by thinking about it. He realises he can do it, and it just increases and snowballs; because of his power he ends up destroying everything, including himself.” 

This early idea evoked similar themes to his inspirations Philip K. Dick and William Burroughs, the allure of power and its inevitably corrupting and self-destructive nature, a trajectory that his own career would eventually emulate. 

Lyrically speaking ‘Remember I Was Vapour’ served both concepts well, lines like “Remember I am human / Remember I feel just like you” encapsulating the perspective of a man who had transformed beyond recognition in the span of little over a year from a punk rocker to an international success. 

The performance is fairly similar to the final album version, save for the final and possibly ad-libbed line “there’s nothing here but me”.

By front loading the EP with two relative obscurities Numan would potentially be achieving two aims, showing casual fans that his abilities stretched beyond the synthpop leanings of ‘Cars’ and making ‘Down In The Park’ the hit he felt it should have been.

For reasons unknown the Live EP was cancelled and the mixes of ‘Remember I Was Vapour’ and ‘On Broadway’ were instead compiled onto a free vinyl single given away with initial pressings of Telekon in the UK. These were both included with the 1998 CD reissue of The Pleasure Principle.

September 1979

'Bombers'

 

On the liner notes the version of ‘Bombers’ is included as a part of this EP however I do not believe it was ever intended to be such. For one thing it would mean that sixty percent of the tracks would be ones based on the Roland preset rhythm which would make for a fairly monotonous EP. Furthermore it is not featured on the working documentation provided with the CD and Numan researcher Paul Goodwin does not include it as such in his works and many of Numan’s subsequent live EPs have featured four tracks at most. 

It’s possible that ‘Bombers’ may have been a candidate for Numan’s ‘Year Of The Child’ performance (see below) but its omission from that tape’s working copy and the presence of audience noise in the recording casts doubt on that theory. 

As the live versions of ‘Bombers’ and ‘Me! I Disconnect From You’ were both later released as B-Sides to the ‘Complex’ single I believe that this track is an alternate mix of said B-Side included for posterity. The only difference I can detect between the versions is that this one features audience applause at the beginning whereas the final mix does not.

November 1979 (Year Of The Child)

A-Side - ‘Me! I Disconnect From You’, ‘Conversation’

B-Side - ‘Metal’, 'Down In The Park’

During the 1979 International Year of the Child Concert held at Wembley Stadium in celebration of the titular bill passed at the start of the year Gary Numan mimed to performances of ‘Metal’ and ‘Down In The Park’ taken from the September 28th performance and mixed so as to exclude the audience noise. Although only two tracks were performed a total of eight tracks received this treatment. However, some of these tracks were evidently later remixed to replicate the ‘live’ sound for the above cancelled EP and the remaining four not already discussed are included here as their own EP. 

There is no indication that this EP was ever intended for commercial use and it is included here likely for completeness sake. Interestingly, former Tubeway Army drummer Jess Lidyard mimed to the tracks during broadcast rather than the current drummer Cedric Sharpley. Critic Paul Sutton theorised that this may have been down to the Musician’s Union viewing the South African-born Sharpley’s presence as a violation of the trade embargo against the apartheid state South Africa but I couldn’t find anything conclusive. 

‘Me! I Disconnect From You’ benefits from the live treatment with its opening riff now played at a much faster tempo and the rest of the band bursting in at once soon after as opposed to the more subdued studio take. As mentioned earlier this track did see commercial release as a bonus track to the twelve-inch single release of the ‘Complex’ single in November 1979 and replaced the studio version in the 1987 Exhibition compilation. 

‘Conversation’ and ‘Metal’ are very faithful to their studio counterparts with the only differences being the synth presets sounding slightly different and the drums sounding a little more electronic. I do think this works to their advantage though, particularly for ‘Metal’. Finally, ‘Down In The Park’ sees it’s second EP appearance here, now mixed without audience applause and featuring the final part of the track including Numan’s banter “thank you, but you’re still sitting down!”

Living Ornaments ’79 (Vinyl)

A-Side - ‘Airlane’, ‘Cars’, ‘We Are So Fragile’, ‘Films’, ‘Something’s In The House’

B-Side - ‘My Shadow In Vain’, ‘Conversation’, ‘The Dream Police’, ‘Metal’

The second half of this compilation features the original vinyl mixes of the Living Ornaments ’79 album as it was released in April 1981. As the vinyl version of Living Ornaments ’80 saw a rerelease in 2005 alongside a recently uncovered show from another date of the tour, it was considered prudent to round out the experience for those in the fandom who wanted all versions of both releases.

The vinyl release showcased three tracks from the Tubeway Army debut, all of them benefitting from some slight rearrangements. ‘Something’s In The House’ was bolstered by a more Polymoog-dominated lead melody giving it a more otherworldly air than the more rock-orient album cut. Additionally upon the final line “nothing has changed and nothing is new these days” Numan quips “is it?” adding a bit of levity to a largely serious and straightforward concert. ‘My Shadow In Vain’ has a slightly sparser arrangement, removing some of the Tony Visconti-inspired stereo panning from the coda to allow the riff to conclude the track instead. ‘The Dream Police’ is the real revelation here though. Although a solid track on the album, when performed live it was turned into rich pickings for violist Chris Payne to let loose, at times sounding like he was waging sonic warfare against the rest of the band. 

As the main impetus for the tour The Pleasure Principle gets the lion’s share of the record with five of the nine slots (six if you count the lengthy ‘Conversation’ as two) showing Numan was capable of translating his more electronic fare into the live arena from the start. The differences between these tracks and their studio counterparts are largely minimal although Sharpley’s drum fills around the 1:30 and 2:20 marks remind me of the opening to 1982’s ‘We Take Mystery (To Bed)’. 

As a result only one track from the Replicas sessions is featured here, ‘We Are So Fragile’. Originally the B-Side to ‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’, the track remains popular amongst the fanbase and lines such as “we could always go home / but everyone says this is the place to be’ translated well to live performances. 

Altogether, it’s a shame that the Live EP was never released as at the peak of Numanmania (Numania?) it would have likely been successful and canonise a few relatively obscure tracks to the casual public. A hardcore fan will find value in this disc as it showcases Beggar’s Banquet’s early attempts to document Numan’s live work although with the full Hammersmith concert available on iTunes in all its uncut glory these mixes are now largely of historical interest only. 

Top to bottom, rear cover to '1979 The Live EPs', front cover, disc, inside front cover, inside rear cover, front cover to Living Ornaments '79 and inside rear to '1979 The Live EPs'.