‘The Pleasure Principle: The First Recordings’: Even before the single ‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’ was released, Numan had recruited a permanent drummer and keyboard player and demoed an album’s worth of new material between April 9–12, 1979 at Freerange Studio in London’s Covent Garden.
This was supplemented by a second session, probably the following June, that yielded four further songs and two re-recordings. Following the hectic schedule of promoting ‘AFE?’, Numan recorded a new session for John Peel the day after the single hit #1 on the UK charts.
Rather than record as Tubeway Army, the session was credited to Gary Numan and the group name abandoned at the peak of its success. As before, rather than promote the current album, Numan chose to record four new songs.
While the album ‘Replicas’ hit #1, Numan was busy recording a follow up in Marcus Music Studio. From the surviving tapes there are six mixes marked as outtakes. The discs have been sequenced with the stronger, second Freerange demo preceding the first session, but all tracks are in the order of the tapes.