Down in the Park (5:40)

“Down in the Park” is a 1979 single written and recorded by Gary Numan with his band Tubeway Army. The first cut from the album Replicas, it was not a hit when released but has long been a critical and fan favourite and for many years was described by Numan as his best composition.

Like the Replicas album as a whole, “Down in the Park” marked a major shift from Tubeway Army’s previous output. The band’s early releases, the 1978 singles “That’s Too Bad” and “Bombers” plus the self-titled debut album, contained elements of punk, hard rock, heavy metal and New Wave but were exclusively guitar driven with only occasional use of primitive synthesizer effects. “Down in the Park”, on the other hand, was Numan’s first composition on keyboards and his first release to feature the predominantly electronic sound that became his trademark. Musically, it pared down still further the guitar power chord and bass root note style arrangements he had used previously, reducing the harmony to bare unisons of layered bass guitar, Fender Rhodes electric piano, and Minimoog synthesizer. The semitone key changes (A to Bb) and chromatic melodic riffs between the song’s verses are somewhat unusual in the context of traditional Western music theory but are not unusual in rock music.