Gary Numan

May, 1979. It’s an ordinary Thursday evening, which means it’s time for Top of the Pops. Amidst a zeitgeist of punk and disco, the show suddenly appears to be interrupted by a transmission from the future. A luminous synth riff echoes out, a beat drives on and upsteps an otherworldly figure - part robot, part alien - to deliver an enigmatic lyric depicting some kind of android existence in a dystopian future. It’s Gary Numan fronting Tubeway Army for their breakthrough hit ‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’.