The cold musical sounds of isolation, loneliness, future shock, profound sadness and alienation, Gary Numan’s The Pleasure Principle sounds utterly prescient now.
Released in September 1979, only 5 months after Tubeway Army’s absolutely stonking Replicas, The Pleasure Principle was something of a sea change for Numan. Retaining only bassist Paul Gardiner, Numan put away his guitar and changed his approach to song writing, as the instruments changed so did the sensibilities.
There is a delicious irony inherent in the fact that on The Pleasure Principle, profoundly naff cover and all, hidden behind all those single-word industrial song titles (Airline, Metal, Complex, Engineers, Tracks) and girded by such synthetic music there is a lot of emotion walled-off and all but hidden from the world.
That it manages to convey all that AND be a listenable treat, that’s where this gets really clever.
Of course the single that dwarfs the album is ‘Cars’, which was very much the sound of the 80’s come 3 months early. I need 2 bars of it to be transported back to the realms of bouffy hair, neon and a gazillion ill-advised fashion statements. It is also a decidedly weird song to have hit the heights it did*, full of meaty synth sounds, futuristic percussion and gliding noises, it is a song about isolation and safety, remove and sanctuary. It is completely instrumental after 1:30 and has no ‘proper’ chorus at all.
In the context of The Pleasure Principle you can see why ‘Cars’ is hidden away at track 9, it is great but its popnessosity is a glide out of step with the rest of the LP.
Starting off with the instrumentalism of ‘Airlane’**, we find ourselves streaking towards the sci-fi future in a pointy silver machine – the rhythm section of Gardiner and drummer Cedric Sharpley giving the track a definite rock edge. We arrive at ‘Metal’, an android singing about wanting to be human, one of the ‘liquid engineers’. The issues of sentience, want and humanity is central to The Pleasure Principle and the whole concept of machine music about emotions.
The aching, umm, complex ‘Complex’ is up next and the viola that wraps itself around the tune is so emotive that I never find myself listening to the words at all, just skimming along on the mood. It is a plea to be left alone, untouched and may be the single best musical embodiment of Asperger’s syndrome in the 1537. It moves me every time.
Onwards into the future with the Ultravox gone Krautrock of ‘Films’, Numan’s voice eerie and somehow legion asking to shut it all down. I love the drumming on this track, really powerful. We arrive at ‘M.E’, which some days is my favourite bit of Numanology^, a tale of the last machine on Earth, all functions completed waiting to run out of power and die. Yup, The Pleasure Principle really is a laugh-a-minute.
Side 2 kicks off with the Bowie-esque ‘Tracks’, an odd identity/age swap thing with some gorgeous keyboards. Always derided as a Bowie clone in the press, I hear the influence of Low at times in Numan’s work but no more than that.
I am very partial to the off-kilter jerky ‘Conversation’, Numan’s cynical reflections on fame again shot through with disassociation and a lack of connection, ‘You’re just the viewer, so cold and distant / I’ve no intentions of saying “I love you”‘. It is all somehow humanized by violin, playing over a regimented beat.
The Pleasure Principle closes with ‘Engineers’, (‘All that we know is hate and machinery’) which I read as either an ultra-jaundiced take on parents, or more android shit again – I lean towards the latter. It’s a track I really like for its scurrying percussion and keyboard swagger and the very pleasing circularity of the title linking back to the LP’s first lyric about the liquid engineers.
I hope I haven’t made The Pleasure Principle sound like hard work, it really isn’t. The album glides along beautifully, delivering hooks and beats aplenty throughout. The use of a human rhythm section is I think the most crucial element to this, a way in for all of us non replicants.
Despite the title, nobody’s having any pleasure on this LP. Named after Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of personality, the pleasure principle is the drive of the Id to satisfy/gratify our immediate needs – hunger, sex, anger, thirst, vinyl purchases. And yet none of these needs are evinced here, the album is all about competing needs and modes of contact and distance, regrets and desires.
Maybe that’s all that we have left after our pleasure principle’s have been slaked and humanity has finally evolved into Numanity.
I am afraid the LP cover put me off buying this one for years, especially the back cover. I appreciate that I speak my mind here knowing the risk of being lynched by a horde of middle-aged Numanoids.
1064 Down.
PS: Interesting factoid I found out today, the two teenagers recruited into the Human League, Joanne Catherall and Susan Sulley, were hardcore Numanoids who dressed in black with red ties like Mr Numan.
PPS: Lovely interview this, what a nice humble man. From 4:00 onwards is best and I love the way he talks about Asperger’s at 6:41, absolutely fascinating:
*listen to it again, you get lulled by familiarity into not seeing just what an odd ditty it really is.
**stealing, inevitably in common with much else here, a trick or three from Kraftwerk, ‘Autobahn’ mostly.
^partly for the incredible opening chords that Basement Jaxx sampled for their mighty, mighty, mighty ‘Where’s Your Head At?’.
