Where Will You Be (When The World Comes Apart) / Pledge Demo
Album Version
Single Edit
Live At Brixton Academy 2017
Live 2018
Live 2019
A couple other bits before this next post.
A very late Happy Birthday to Gary Numan. Been a fan since age sixteen and look forward to the new material.
The latest Making Music update was a bit concerning and all I can really say is I know a lot of people, myself included, are happy to wait as long as it takes. Gary Numan has put material knowing it to be subpar before (Machine + Soul) so I can understand why he’d not want to repeat the same mistakes again. Not that the material I’ve heard so far is that bad but I think what matters most is the artist being satisfied with their own work before it goes out into the world.
The timing for this track couldn’t be better could it? In the midst of a global pandemic, with my country’s government woefully out of step with the rest of the world in halting the coronavirus’s progress, let’s have a quick look at our obsession with crisis.
Since at least 2016 there’s been a mounting feeling of things reaching a breaking point of some cataclysmic breakage in the world order. Some of this can be chalked down to the usual suspects, newspapers and media sites need to shift copies and clicks and few things sell as well as a good tragedy.
But it feels like as people we’ve become more dissembled, more unfeeling and unsympathetic over the last decade or so best exemplified by two of the more infamous world leaders currently playing on the world stage. Boris Johnson and Donald Trump’s post-truth regimes posited themselves as the populist candidates against ‘the establishment’ and won big at the polls for their efforts.
It’s pretty perverse to say so but in light of the coronavirus pandemic their narratives are fraying a little. Johnson has moved to block scientists who opposed Brexit from receiving peerages and stuffed his offices with proponents of alternative facts and eugenicists, and proposed a nonsensical ‘herd immunity’ approach to the pandemic. Trump on the other hand provided one his most infamous and telling quotes from his tenure yet; “I don’t take responsibility”. Both leaders have defined their premierships thus far by pushing the envelope, testing the limits of the political framework whether it’s proroguing parliament under questionable circumstances or forcing a government shutdown over the latest budget. Both play the parts of political strongmen, governments at war with themselves. To see the bluster and braggadocio fall limp before a genuine crisis as the consequences of decades of inequality make themselves known is about the only positive one can get from this pandemic. To steal a quote from Chris O’Leary, “It’s life in the early 2000s, when even the villains lack stature”.
Back to the news though. William Burroughs regarded The Word as a virus and in his essay ‘Feedback from Watergate to the Garden of Eden’ he shows how to utilise this virus using the cutup method to destabilise and destroy an individual’s composure:
“Viruses make themselves real. It's a way viruses have. We now have three tape recorders. So we will make a simple word virus. Let us suppose that our target is a rival politician. On tape recorder 1 we will record speeches and conversation carefully editing in stammers mispronouncing, inept phrases... the worst number 1 can assemble. Now on tape recorder 2 we will make so a love tape by bugging his bed room. We can potentiate this tape by splicing it in with a sexual object that is inadmissible or inaccessible or both, say the senator's teen age daughter. On tape recorder 3 we will record hateful disapproving voices and splice the three recordings together at very short intervals and play them back to the senator and his constituents.
This cutting and playback can be very complex, involving speech scramblers and batteries of tape recorders but the basic principal is simply splicing sex tape and disapproval tapes in together. Once the association lines are established they are activated every time the senator's speech centres are activated which is all the time; heaven help that sorry bastard if anything happened to his big mouth.”
There’s something of Burroughs’s ideas of using cutups to create torture and psychic displacement in meme culture and shitposting, which occasionally surfaces in some comically bemused articles. Regardless, the technique has in fact been fully embraced by almost all news outlets already.
Take a look at your local shop’s newspaper section. There’ll likely be a CRISIS HEADLINE IN BIG BOLD LETTERS near the centre of the page, covering either a new crisis or the latest episode of an ongoing one. If it’s the latter there may be an accompanying logo in the corner like a television channel watermark. Then you’ll see adverts for freebies, discounts and deals for holidays, phones or Nectar points.
The cluster of stories and items all disparate in nature are akin to a collage painting. Indeed, when Brian Gysin was pioneering the cutup technique he had aimed to achieve this with the written word, believing the form to be fifty years behind painting.
Burroughs used a similar method to curse London’s first espresso bar in 1972, irked by the city’s rising rental rates and looking for a target. Drawing upon his experiences with Scientology and the occult, Burroughs would take photographs of The Moka Bar and record the surrounding ambient noise and play it back days later at the site to pull the bar out of it’s time position. The process apparently worked; The Moka Bar closed for good that October.
And in 1978, a twenty-year-old ex-punk going under the pseudonym Valerian was recording his debut LP and rifled through Burroughs’s Dead Fingers Talk and Naked Lunch for phrases to use as springboards to collect his own disparate thoughts. The next record ‘Replicas’ would crystallise this technique into a dystopian nightmare and hit number one joined by a single about a robotic prostitute. Mankind has built a supercomputer to improve their quality of life and it naturally realises the ideal solution is to do away with it’s creators, the outcome of many a Troughton-Pertwee Doctor Who episode.
Fast forward to 1997. Gary Numan writes almost the entirety of Exile based on the premise of God superimposing Heaven and Hell upon Earth simultaneously, like an author displacing a nearby espresso bar. Mankind’s fate is taken out of their own hands and we become the playthings of a higher power.
Fast forward again to 2017, Gary Numan is recording his twentieth (or so) album and returns to the manmade future. The machines have rocked, the world’s come apart, all that remains is a scorched earth.
“Every time I read the latest scientific report, it’s worse: things are going to happen sooner rather than later, it’s getting faster… People say, ‘It’s a natural cycle.’ Is it fuck! “ - Interview with Classic Pop, 2019.
It begins with sheer power, music briefly becoming a force of nature for all of the first twenty seconds. Some faux-Moog countermelodies creep in soon after and threaten to calm the track down but before that happens a manic goth disco beat kicks in. When the fledgeling Valerian pressed a key on a rented Moog in Spaceworld Cambridge one can easily imagine this is what he heard.
One of the more aptly-titled tracks from Savage, ‘When The World Comes Apart’ features several trademarks of Gary’s modern sound. You have a powerful pre-chorus with a lot of bottom end, the track then reboots come the chorus with some extra percussion loops unique to this track on the album, a kind of typewriter beat runs at a faster tempo over the relatively steady main beat.
Lyrically, Numan changes the wording of the final chorus from “when my breath is the wind / where will you be” to “when my breath is the wind / I will find you”. What this achieves is it allows the track to retain its anthemic nature while giving a sense of progression.
With the title there’s also a brief callback to ‘Magic’s lyric “I’ll be there for you / when the world comes apart”. One of the most danceable tracks on the album, it makes Savage’s exclusion from the Billboard dance and electronic chart all the more peculiar.
‘When The World Comes Apart’ was released as the second single in edited form and did not chart.
Top: '170811-F-XJ834-039' by U.S. Department Of Defence. "U.S. Air Force firefighters battle a controlled fuel burn during exercise Patriot Warrior at Sparta / Fort McCoy Airport, Wisconsin, August 11, 2017."
Middle: William S. Burroughs, 1985. Photograph by Gottfried Heinwein. Pictures are public domain.
Bottom: Outtake from the Savage photoshoot.
