Song #14: Gary Numan and Tubeway Army - "The Machman"

Song #14: Gary Numan and Tubeway Army - "The Machman" (1979)

Replicas

"Yellow newspapers tell the story of someone; "do you know this man?," tomorrow the cure."

As I mentioned in my writeup for Gary Numan and Tubeway Army's "Down in the Park" (number seventy-two in "The One-Hundred Songs of Steve Pulaski"), Gary Numan entered my life in a strange time, the summer before I went into my junior year in high school. At that time, my popularity was beginning to take off and I was experiencing social confidence and energy like I never had before. However, my nights were always spent alone, listening to music in my headphones in the wee hours of the morning, alone with my thoughts in the glow of my TV, the only sound coming into my ears was the music through my noise cancelling headphones and my mind was crowded with biting thoughts about school, college, and the future. Keep in mind, this was summer, so stress was at a minimum for me.

Fast-forward to the present, where I'm just two weeks away from starting college, and each night I find myself doing the same thing I described above. Although if I thought my mind was full that summer and the following summer, I could've never imagined I'd have as much on my mental plate as I did now. At least twice a week, I'll throw on Gary Numan, as he reminds me of myself in a basic sense, bearing a lot on his mind, struggling to find the words to help articulate his fears, and stating them in a heavily vague and metaphorical way in his songs.

His tune, accompanied by the unique and incredibly-advanced sounds of his short-lived band Tubeway Army, "The Machman" fools with its more upbeat-tempo than his darker songs like "Down in the Park," but if one pays attention to the lyrics, their structure, and their delivery, they find yet another brooding anthem in the career of Numan. "The Machman," from what I can decipher, concerns an ostracized, isolated young boy, who is abducted by a robot or a machine humanoid (what a "machman" is) in order to join him in his journey of restlessness in life. Numan's character then speaks of the "yellowed newspapers" (a line I love) that state the boy's missing person status as well as the suspect in question, but little do they know, that this "machman" isn't a harmful being, but someone who, through isolation and alienation (no pun intended) has helped a young boy see that he isn't alone, despite being two totally different species.

I wouldn't be surprised if that meaning is way off, but because of Numan's ambiguous and stylistic approaches to building verses, it's hard to feel like you've pinpointed any meaning in his songs. That's why we have the sound and the unforeseen instrumentation on his songs to turn towards, which provide us with sounds and mixing that seems just as alien as the concepts Numan speaks off. "The Machman" was initially going to be the Gary Numan song on "The One-Hundred Songs of Steve Pulaski" blog series that I had little conception of, an was due to be a short, direct blog-post. You can see how well that turned out.

Give "The Machman" a listen, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rWc0pATrhI