Shnootz - Reaction Video (Tubeway Army - Are 'Friends' Electric?) 

One of the most important songs of its time, its that simple

This is THE breakthrough synth song in UK music. This is what paved the way for OMD, DM, Ultravox, etc to be mainstream acts.

LOVE Numan!! This song is fabulous live!!

What I always feel about Numan and this song in particular is that musicians tend to tease - give you a bit but hold back on the sound. They give teases of a sound you might want to hear all through a song but pull away from it with a chorus, or run away from it with a verse. With Numan, he quits the crap and gives you a sound you want the whole way. There's not one moment you're waiting for a certain sound to return. It's all glorious.

This catapulted electronic pop in the UK , hugely popular track , I loved it ❤

It's easy to forget how weird, strange and exciting hearing this was as a 12 year old. The sounds, that voice, his look! The human League, OMD, Ultravox et al, all looked on with bemusement and a touch of jealousy as this guy they had never heard of stormed up the charts after seemingly having stumbled over a synth and stole their thunder. Even Bowie snubbed him. While I don't think it's a revolutionary as "I Feel Love"(which still sounds like it's been beamed from the future) it certainly woke a broader public up to electronic sounds. The UK charts were still full of disco and post-punk/new wave, with a smattering of cheesy pop. This stuck out like a sore thumb. The hook is that giant synth riff, not a chorus. And you go it, the "friends" are sex robots (Are could be Our) and he has fallen in love with it but of course it's a machine so it can't reciprocate. I think there are meanings relating to his actual relationships in the lyrics too. Classic.

A timeless classic.

The pub jukebox had never heard anything like this.

Hans is right without numan depeche etc would not have existed and this is still so freaking ahead of its time even now. 👽

I didn't realise that this was two song ideas rolled into one. I like the way the different musical sections have been knitted together. Seems to have been intelligently thought through and I like the way it progresses and resolves. It's rewarding to listen to a well constructed song. This seems very ambitious. I don't think so much effort and ambition seems to go into the contemporary music I hear today.

Hard now to appreciate that this was revolutionary. Radio Luxembourg (which was the main pop station in Western Europe) refused to acknowledge the existence of this song until it got to number 1.

Phillip K Dick influenced sci-fi era Gary Numan Friends brand sex-bot

This song owes a debt to Kraftwerk, but Numan had an ability to create unforgettable hooks which brought him enormous success on the pop charts, and took this genre of music more into the mainstream.

Numan has stated that the song was initially two different ones that were combined, the lyrics coming from the short stories he had written about what he thought London would be like in the early 2010’s. He suggested that machines (“friends") would come to the door, to supply services of various kinds, but that the neighbours never knew what they really were, since they looked human. The one in the song is a prostitute, hence the inverted commas. The BBC programme Top Of The Pops offered Numan an appearance in their ‘bubbling under’ spot because they thought the name ‘Tubeway Army’ sounded more interesting, than ‘Simple Minds’, and it was this fortuitous chance that broke Numan (and electronic New Wave in general) to the UK audience It may be apocryphal but the verse “So now I’m alone, And I can think for myself, About little deals and S.U’s, And things I just don’t understand, Like a white lie that night, Or a sly touch at times, I don’t think I meant anything to you” is SUPPOSED to reference the breakup with his girlfriend Su (a member of Beggars Banquet publicity team)

Hard to fathom that a 20 year old came up with this!

It's about replicants the one he left in the hallway is a robotic prostitute as in friend?

Are Friends Electric? Gary’s 1st number 1 and the song that made him an overnight star was in actual fact 2 songs that he couldn’t finish which he merged together. It’s actually about robot prostitutes. Gary once said when asked about the songs success, “it hasn’t got anything that would make a hit record. There’s no chorus, you can’t dance to it, it’s too long and it’s about robot prostitutes”.

I bet JG has a few friends that run on batteries.

Damn dude, do you sleep? It's like 5am your time lol

This was a big hit in the UK, and decades later was used as a sample for a UK Girl Group, The Sugababes, whose track "Freak Like Me" . Their producer Richard X had a bootleg using a sample of the keyboards , it was an underground hit, but the singer he used didn't give her permission to use her vocals, so offered it the Sugababes. (Corrected info gleaned from Wikipedia)