It’s cold outside
And the paint’s peeling off of my walls
There’s a man outside
In a long coat, grey hat, smoking a cigarette
Now the light fades out
And I wonder what I’m doing in a room like this
There’s a knock on the door
And just for a second, I thought I remembered you…
Yeah I get it, we all have future-anxiety. Hell, I think I have three PhD’s in it and I’m about to defend my fourth dissertation in 21st-Century What-if’ism in Post-Pre-Earth Falling Into The Sun Metaphysical Ennui. Or something.
OK but all that said, it begs to question: what if the most terrifying thing about the future isn’t that machines will eventually destroy humanity, but that they’ll render the entire concept of being human completely irrelevant?
In our AI age, this disturbing vision attacks directly and cuts deep, especially when foretold nearly 50 years ago by Gary Numan and Tubeway Army. With the release of their landmark 1979 album Replicas, they helped usher synthesizer-driven music into the popular consciousness while constructing one of music’s most unsettling dystopian nightmares.
Imagine a decaying futuristic society populated by Machmen, androids wearing cloned human skin, operating under the auspices of the unknown Grey Men. Surveillance and control are everywhere, humanity has become increasingly expendable, and there’s even a place called the Park where machines terrorize human beings for the entertainment of spectators.
A place for fun!
Are ‘Friends’ Electric?, the #1 UK single from Replicas, encapsulates the profound existential horror of this universe.
The song places us inside the fractured consciousness of an isolated individual, alone in a deteriorating room while a mysterious man watches from outside his window. There’s a visitor, one of the titular “friends.” An android prostitute. Even intimacy has become another convenient product in this brave new world.
What’s really unsettling here isn’t the artificial prostitute, or even the ominous stranger lurking outside. Heck in this day and age, that’s practically a Tuesday.
No, what chills you here is the narrator’s almost complete acceptance of everything.
Quite frankly, he doesn’t seem particularly shocked by the circumstances of his daily existence. This is simply how the world works. The way things are supposed to be. All the while though, there’s this aching sense of longing for something, or someone, he can no longer clearly remember.
Maybe a person, or a relationship. Perhaps some former life. Or even himself.
Are ‘Friends’ Electric? is a paradigm of alienation. Numan’s icy, mechanical vocals drift through ominous synthesizer textures, while Paul Gardiner’s bass and Jess Lidyard’s drums provide a strangely human pulse beneath the electronic machinery.
But rather than following a familiar verse-chorus structure, Are ‘Friends’ Electric? moves through contrasting passages and fragments that never quite coalesce into the satisfying resolution to our fragile ears. It’s as if the music itself has misplaced some essential component of its own identity. Which perhaps is the point.
The music underscores the ideas that memories fade, thoughts fragment and dissipate, and our emotions surface and vanish without explanation. The narrator struggles to recall something deeply important, but without any meaningful resolution.
There is longing in his voice, but he lacks the emotional or cognitive framework to guide him back to shore.
Therein lies the real horror of the song: discovering that your memories, relationships, emotions, and ultimately your very sense of self are no longer reliable. Your individuality is an inconvenient flaw in a society determined to eradicate it.
The most disturbing aspect of Are ‘Friends’ Electric? is that nobody seems particularly concerned about any of this. Least of all the narrator.
And we’re not even running from scary monsters anymore. We’ve been convinced that there’s nothing left worth running from anymore. Meanwhile the world is falling apart, the essence of humanity is being dismantled, and the oppressive machines and their shadowy overlords are simply going about their business.
DAMN this song called it forty-seven years ago.
You know I hate to ask
But are ‘friends’ electric?
Only… mine’s broke down
And now I’ve no-one to love…
