The Greatest Songs Ever! Cars

The automobile typically serves a handful of well-worn purposes in rock & roll. If you’re not enjoying fun, fun, fun till Daddy takes the T-Bird away, you’re either coveting an Escalade or a Mercedes-Benz, drooling over some gleaming piece of greased lightning, exploring paradise by the dashboard light or dying young and gloriously round Dead Man’s Curve. What you’re definitely not doing is cowering in the driver’s seat, doors locked and windows rolled up, hiding from the terrors of the outside world in your own private survival capsule.

But that’s what happens in Gary Numan’s “Cars,” the bizarre, ice-cold worldwide hit that ushered in the robo-pop of the Reagan years. Englishman Numan — born Gary Anthony James Webb — took all the automobile’s connotations of sex and freedom and flipped them until the car represented fear and victimization: a mobile gated community. He fathered the electro-geek and — eyelinered and affectless in the song’s none-more-android video — the electro-goth. For junior ’droids who would grow up to be Moby, Trent Reznor, Marilyn Manson and Depeche Mode, this was the future. And Numan spread all these ideas without really knowing it. The inspiration for “Cars” came from an ugly incident when the 21-year-old Numan almost fell victim to road rage.

“I was driving around in London and somehow I managed to upset these two guys in a van,” he tells Blender. “I don’t know why. This was years before dyed hair was common, so maybe they just didn’t like the look of me. They stopped the van, got out and started kicking my car, banging the windows, trying to get me out and give me a good old hammering. So I locked all my doors and drove up onto the pavement, scattering pedestrians. The lyric is literally that story — how the car felt like a little tank for civilians, a place of safety.”

What took this story of technology and unreasoning violence into the Top 10 was its monster riff, an unremitting six-note pile driver. “Ironically,” Numan says, “I wrote it on a bass guitar. I’d bought one so I could learn to play it better, and the ‘Cars’ riff was literally the first thing I played on it. The whole song took probably 10 minutes to write from beginning to end.”

“Cars” became Numan’s only substantial U.S. hit, and he toured America as the robotic harbinger of electronic music. In some towns, crowds went wild for his show, but just a hundred miles away, entire cities refused to book him at all. “The stance was: This isn’t proper music, and we’re not going to play it,” he says. “But it was really exciting to divide people like that. Being No. 1 is great, but being influential is better.”

Numan’s clammy android persona wasn’t mere performance: “Some of it was contrived,” he says. “But later, I discovered I’ve got Asperger’s syndrome.” A mild form of autism, Asperger’s manifests itself in difficulties communicating and interacting socially. A sufferer might, for instance, want to lock himself away from the world and hide in his car.

“I developed the persona partly to cope with it,” Numan says. “I needed to pretend to be a pop star or a frontman because in my heart, I wasn’t. I didn’t know how to be. I had to be mechanical about everything. When I was due to go on TV, I’d practice all the moves in front of a mirror, to reproduce them exactly. I was as unnatural at this as you could possibly be.”