ES7129 seven-inch features Gary Numan
‘I’M AN AGENT’
The two tracks on our latest seven-inch are taken from Gary Numan’s hugely influential and phenomenally successful ’Telekon’ album, which topped the UK charts in September 1980. Numan says the weighty and intense ’I’m An Agent’ was always his favourite track on the album and talks about the idea for it coming to him in a dream.
“I woke up with it in my head,” he explains. “I rang up my mum and dad’s house and sang it onto their answerphone, so I would be able to remember how it went.”
Featuring Denis Haines on keyboards, Chris Payne on viola, and the blips, grunts and sighs of a Roland CompuRhythm, ‘I’m An Agent’ builds from an effervescent drone into an expansive howl. Numan plays an ARP Pro-Soloist, a Minimoog and a Polymoog on the track, plus a distorted guitar, and the lyrics explore his increasing disenchantment – “Lovers on corners / Clean my sheets / Your only chance is to break the state”.
“One of the things I love about the song is how it came about,” he notes. “The fact I dreamed it and I was then able to quickly throw it onto my parents’ answering machine still means a lot to me. I assumed it was unlikely that it would ever come to anything… but somehow it did.”
Listening to it now, Numan says he’s particularly fond of the intro – “The way it starts with that rumble” – and how the track then develops and sort of grows into itself.
“It just screams in, right from the beginning,” he offers with a broad grin. “I love the guitar sound. I was really pleased with it at the time and I’ve stayed pleased with it ever since.”
‘REMIND ME TO SMILE’
The flip-side of our seven-inch is ‘Remind Me To Smile’, one of the most subtle tracks on ‘Telekon’. Over the gentle click of a Star Instruments’ Synare drum synthesiser, a ‘Fame’-like clipped rhythm guitar played by Rrussell Bell, and the sweep of others’ hands over multiple synths, Gary Numan nails the heart of the album’s disaffection with a cynical, pissed-off sneer.
“‘Remind Me To Smile’ is all about my disillusionment with being famous,” he says. “It was based on the fact I was often told to smile, but my whole look was based on how I didn’t like smiling. I still don’t. I’m terrible at it.”
That anti-image image became a highly potent one, of course, endlessly picked over by the more hostile music critics. Back then, whenever Numan was on a television show or at a magazine photo shoot, somebody would be telling him to cheer up.
“And I’d always think to myself, ‘I don’t want to… and I’m not particularly happy anyway’,” he recalls. “The rudeness and entitlement of some people was incredible. I had my own problems and all of that is in these lyrics.”
The opening line of the track, “We’ll take a taxi to the show”, is delivered with a sardonic grimace, smothered in that bleak, turn-of-the-decade ennui, like an alien outsider rewriting Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’. By the time ‘Telekon’ came out, Numan’s life had been upended – he was burdened by fame, stalked by fans, and estranged from the ordinary life he’d once known. Everything had changed so much and so quickly.
“When you’ve achieved all your dreams and they’re not what you thought they would be, then you suddenly need a whole new set of reasons to get up in the morning,” he says.
