"Down In The Park" finally explained in excruciating detail.
ENiGMA7479
Hello everyone. A while back I bought a copy of the
remastered Replicas by Gary Numan, which was released
by Beggar's Banquet records a couple years ago. I found
something very interesting in the accompanying booklet, but
I haven't posted it yet because I have forgotten to (and
haven't really had the interest in typing it all up 'til
now). But the post about MA being very similar to Replicas
has revived my interest. Here goes:
First off, the correct lyrics to Down In The Park, as
printed verbatim in the booklet:
DOWN IN THE PARK
-----------------
Down in the park
Where the machmen
Meet the machines
And play "kill-by-numbers"
Down in the park
With a freind called "five"
I was in a car crash
Or was it the war
But I've never been
Quite the same
Little white lies
Like "I was there"
Come to "Zom Zoms"
A place to eat
Like it was built
In one day
You can watch the humans
Trying to run
Oh look
There's a rape machine
I'd go outside
If he'd look the other way
You wouldn't believe
The things they do
Down in the park
Where the chant is
"Death, death, death"
Until the sun cries morning
Down in the park
With friends of mine
"We are not lovers
We are not
Romantics
We are here to serve you"
A different face
But the words never change
And now, the commentary:
-Taken from the booklet to the remastered Replicas.
-Passage written by Steve Malins/Gary Numan.
"'It's an extreme view of the future,' says Numan. 'It's not
necessarily the only one I have or the only view I think
there could be - it's just the most interesting to write
about. It's what I see around me, in particular the violent
side of human nature. Many of the songs are about the
degeneration of humanity, the isolation of the individual
and I put myself into them.'
"The man-in-black cover image originated in short stories
which Numan started writing in childhood. 'My characters
always used to look like him,' he said at the time, 'like I
do now. Only they were taller, always wore black, had very
white skin and they were very strong, very powerful, arrogant
and completely ruthless. In Replicas they became machines
with human skin, very clean, pure.'
"Numan originally spotted the name, Machman, when he was
reading a copy of the underground magazine Oz under his desk
at school. One particular line caught his attention... 'I am
a human being who has had intercourse with a machine. I am a
Machman.'
-Garth Murphy, Twilight Of The Machman, Oz 43, July 1972.
"John Gill investigated the Oz story in the NME, shortly
after the release of Replicas. 'In the magazine, Machman
refers to mankind's use of machines to upset the ecological
metabolism of the Earth. Numan had read the original article
and used the name to describe the predatory humanoids appearing in his "theme"
album.' The singer also drew heavily
from Philip K Dick, Oz, George Orwell, '70s movies such as
Westworld, Logan's Run and Soylent Green, and his own stories
to create, 'half men, half machines with a skin that was
human, but designed and genetically engineered.' Although
they were fantasy figures, the Machmen reflected a growing
fascination in the '70s and early '80s with the possibility
of technology being used in the human body. Ray Coleman
wrote, 'Gary's central theme in his song The Machman and
throughout the Replicas album was that humanity had reached
what he describes as 'cross-over point - the fact that people
now had arms that worked by impulses because doctors could
connect arms to a nervous system.' 'That's half man, half
machine,' agreed the 21-year-old performer, 'and that's the
vision I was writing about. They've already got artificial
hearts, hip joints, arms with fingers that move. I know of a
girl who wears one of those and she can grip cups and drink
it through being connected from her hand through her nervous
system.'
"Replicas is a fractured, atmospheric mixture of ideas which
he adapted from his own abandoned adolescent science fiction
novel. 'I was more interested in the scenes and characters
than the narrative and I couldn't work out an ending.' In his
autobiography, Praying To The Aliens, he describes the world
he created in rich, visual detail. 'Replicas is filled with
images of decay, seediness, drug addicts, fragile people and
the abandonment of morals. The bisexual allusions are partly
based on encounters I had with gay men, most of whom were
much older than me, who had attempted to persuade me to try
things. I was never interested in gay sex, never felt the
slightest bit tempted, but the seediness of those situations
left an impression which I used in Replicas.
"'The stories were flawed but some of the basic ideas and
imagery, when converted into songs, worked quite well. I set
the stories in the not too distant future. Cities have become
isolated from each other, worlds within a world. The actual
city that the stories revolved around had given control
over to a machine created specifically to sort out the near
anarchy that life had become. The machine decided that the
cause of the problems was humans themselves, and so it set
about ridding the city of people, with only a select few
being aware of and involved in the scheme. The machine
realises it can't just kill everyone, it would be destroyed
by rebellion long before the job was completed, so it
develops a quota test. The quota test is a method of
assessing people's IQ's and anyone who falls below a given
level is supposedly taken away, re-educated and made a better
person. However, no one comes back, they are all killed. The
quota tests' level of acceptability is raised periodically,
so the machine systematically gets rid of all the weakest
people first and then moves on to eradicate everyone. By the
time the people fully grasped what was going on, they would
be too few to put up any meaningful resistance and the final
annihilation would be swiftly carried out. The tests were
administered by the Grey Men, the image of which I used on my
Dance (1981) and I, Assassin (1982) album sleeves.
"'The songs are filled with characters from the stories,
sometimes just used as songtitles, sometimes just as part of
a lyric. The Machmen are Terminator-type creatures, machines
with a cloned human skin that go to form a super police
force. The only way you can spot them is by the difference in
their eyes - they have a horizontal bar across the eye,
instead of a circular pupil, which you can see on the back of
the Replicas cover.
"'The "Friends" in Are 'Friends' Electric? are similar
machines but they provide services, as opposed to being the
law. You can call for a Friend to play chess with, or indulge
your most obscene sexual fantasies, or anything in between.
No one else will know because they all look the same. As
anonymous as a plain brown package. The governing machine has
imposed a curfew and no one is allowed out after dark. The
walls of all the city buildings are light-sensitive and glow
as soon as it reaches dusk, which means there are no dark
corners to hide in. In the stories I visualized some parts of
the metropolis in great detail.
"'I had certain parts of the streets and buildings where I
would write about things that happened. No one is allowed
guns but one of the characters in it has an old rifle, passed
down secretly from generation to generation. He's one of the
people who fights against the machines and he goes
underground to where the Crazies live. They aren't actually
crazy, they realise what is going on so hide where they can
and fight back as best they can. The machine puts out
propaganda against them to alarm other, more gullible
citizens.
"'The Crazies come out at night because, for one thing, they
don't pay any attention to the curfew. They scavenge for food
and equipment to maintain their survival. Much like the gladiators of Roman
times, the machine has created a
spectacle for the chosen few to keep them amused. It has
created specialised killing machines located in the main city
park. They're also light-sensitive and activate when it gets
dark. All captured Crazies and other law breakers are put
into the park, which is actually just a prison. Very few
people survive more than one night, no one survives two. The
machines are programmed to commit all sorts of atrocities -
rape, murder, torture - against anyone they can find. The
chosen few, however, the administrators and so on, are
allowed out at night and their favourite hangout is a club,
Zom Zoms, which overlooks the park. From this vantage point
they can watch the machines at play, purely as
entertainment.'"
There's also this little tidbit:
"A host of freaks and misfits identified with Replicas
violent sci-fi themes and hints of sexual deviance. The
imagination of one young man in Cleveland, Ohio, namely Brian
Warner was fired by the 'apocalyptic' imagery of Down In The
Park and as Marilyn Manson he recorded the track with
producer Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails."
For more information about Gary Numan's remastered
backcatalogue, take a look at Beggar's Banquet's Gary Numan
page at:
http://www.beggars.com/artists/numan/numanusa.html
And while you're at it, visit Gary Numan's official page at:
Thus ends our history lesson for today. Class dismissed.
Erik
©1998 The AMMM Psychologist (and resident HTML Narc)
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"Where do I put the hate?
To a pixellated screen.
I can't watch anymore."
-VAST
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Skeet
years!!! Thankyou sooo much!!
~Ben...
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