I can lock all my doors, it's the only way to live

Continuing my trip back through the 1979 album charts.

14/10/79 : The Pleasure Principle - Gary Numan

Our second visit with Mr Numan and last time I enjoyed it a lot more than I was expecting, so expectations are high for this when we're heading back to where it all began (kinda - more on this later).

Yeah, I liked this. "Cars" is the only track I recognised and it's a particularly fine track - so much so that he reused large portions of it on "Observer". I also particularly liked "M.E.", but it's all got that groovy synth sound from the future - which still sounds pretty futuristic now (or maybe that's just my sense of futuristic being stuck in the past). Mr Numan has always very much done his own thing and this is a pretty good example of it.

We're at #6 in the charts this week on his sixth week of an impressive 21 week run, with it having peaked at #1 in its first and third weeks - it also popped up for a week in '09, I assume for a 30th anniversary release. The top five this week were The Police, Blondie, Status Quo (a new entry), Eagles and Michael Jackson and the next highest new entry was Gillan (#19).

Wikipedia has way more on the album than I was expecting (120 milliPeppers) and it tells us it's his debut solo album, but it's very much in the same vein as Tubeway Army's Replicas which came out six months earlier. Apparently (and I was surprised to learn this) he used some synthesisers on the album with the Minimoog, Polymoog and ARP Odyssey all featuring. The title of the album comes from the Rene Magritte painting, which has somewhat adapted for the album cover with Mr Numan considering a glowing purple Perspex pyramid (as opposed to a stone in the original) to represent "technology". I work in technology - where's my glowing purple Perspex pyramid? Critically, the album was well received although there were some grumblings that it wasn't all that different from Replicas and commercially it did pretty well getting to #16 in the US - I'm surprised it didn't chart in Germany though because it feels like something they would have gone for.

discogs.com tells us you're gonna have to fork out more than usual if you want this, but £7.50 should still get a decent enough copy. You can also really splash out if you want a version autographed by the four main performers on the album - but it's going to set you back £250. I can't say I'll be rushing to revisit this, but I very much enjoyed this slice of historic futurism and am disappointed we don't all have glowing purple Perspex pyramids yet.

07/10/79 - Not good
21/10/79 - Could have been far worse

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