Crucial Track for April 27, 2025

"Films" by Gary Numan

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What was the first album you ever bought? Pick your favorite song off that album.

Well, I honestly do not remember the first album I bought. I had some supervised purchases with my parents over several years, which included some good and bad choices, mostly from the Columbia Record and Tape club.

But the first time I bought music of my own volition with money I had in my pocket, I could not have been more than about 12 or 13 years old. I was in the local Ben Franklin drugstore and found a 7" 45 RPM single of Gary Numan's Cars from The Pleasure Principle LP. The flip side was I Die: You Die, which was not released on an album. Atlantic had reissued it as an Oldie, so I bought it because I liked and remembered Cars from Top 40 radio.

At the time, I didn't have my own turntable or cassette player. My brother and I shared a portable record player in a rec room space, and I think that is how I listened to it when it was new.

Doing research while writing, I learned that I Die: You Die itself was only released as a single. Then I spent even more time confirming that my memory was correct. I did find the single as I remembered it on Discogs and eBay.

The actual full album of The Pleasure Principle did not come into my possession until the 1990s, when a colleague at the record store told me that he, too, was a Gary Numan fan. He shared his copy with me, which I immediately dubbed to cassette. Subsequently, it was the first Gary Numan album I purchased digitally.

I saw Gary live much later at the Fine Line Music Cafe in Minneapolis. It is still one of my favorite concerts.

Now, after all of that, my favorite track from The Pleasure Principle is Films. We know Gary Numan for synth-pop, but we forget that he used human musicians. Films has the synth you expect, but the bass line and drums drive the song, and it has been one of my personal favorite tracks for many years.