A tank you can lock from the inside
A bass synthesiser draws a line as cold as a motorway at night, and Gary Numan’s voice sits on it without warmth, repeating a comfort that sounds like a rule.
Cars was recorded in 1979 at Marcus Music in London for The Pleasure Principle, which Numan produced himself, and released in August under his own name after the Tubeway Army records. There is no guitar. Polymoog and Minimoog carry the harmony, a drum machine and a kit share the pulse, and the vocal is almost conversational, a man explaining a preference. The preference came from a specific afternoon. Stuck in London traffic, he was set upon by two men who got out of the car ahead, kicked his, tried to get him out. He drove onto the pavement, scattered pedestrians, and got away. Afterwards the car was no longer transport. It was armour. The single went to No. 1 in Britain and made the American top ten the following year, a machine-song that people sang as if it were a love song, which it is not.
He has told the story without dressing it up as theory. In Mojo, in 2008, he described the men at the window, the swerve, the pedestrians, and the sentence that followed: he began to see the car as the tank of modern society. The lyric is that sentence set to a riff he already had. Here in my car I feel safest of all. Listeners later mapped the track onto his Asperger’s, the difficulty of other people, the shell. He has allowed the mapping and kept the origin narrower. It was an attack, then a picture. The picture happened to fit a life.
A couple of blokes started peering in the window and for whatever reason took a dislike to me, so I had to take evasive action. I swerved up the pavement, scattering pedestrians everywhere. After that, I began to see the car as the tank of modern society.
(Gary Numan, Mojo, 2008)
On stage the song is a rectangle of light and a man who does not pretend to be a frontman in the old sense. He stands, the riff does the greeting, and the audience supplies the warmth the record withholds. That bargain has lasted. The track has been used to sell actual cars, which is a misreading he has lived with, the line about safety pulled out of a song about fear. The arrangement does not date in the way guitar rock of 1979 dates. It was already future tense. When he returned to it in later decades, harder, with guitars finally allowed in, the riff still did not need them.
What remains is the honesty of a small phobia made huge. Numan did not write an anthem of the open road. He wrote a locked door with a tune. The synths are the metal. The vocal is the person inside, receiving the world only as signal, stable for days if the doors stay shut. It is a lonely comfort, and it is offered without shame. A great many people, stuck in their own traffic, heard their own tank and sang along, grateful that someone had admitted the wish to be sealed in, and moving, and left alone.
