Recording had actually started back in April 1979 at a tiny studio, Freerange, just off the Strand in London. According to Numan, "we kept some of this demo material, such as the weird viola part on the song 'Complex,' because we couldn't recreate it when we went to a bigger place, Marcus Music." Although he once again worked quickly in the studio, by the time he'd finished the album Numan was a fully-fledged pop star. "We were actually working in Marcus Music when 'Are "Friends" Electric?' and Replicas went to number one, so they were incredibly vibey sessions." However, if anything this success made Numan even more self-conscious about his songs. In one interview he revealed his shyness about singing his material in front of other people. "I've rarely ever sung the songs the way they're going to be before I go into the studio to do them," he confessed. "I've never sung them at home. I normally write the vocal line on the piano, playing the notes because I don't like singing. I write at my family's house where nobody can hear me getting it wrong as I'm writing it. So I do it very quietly and tend to play it on the piano because I don't like them to hear. It's funny but it's true. I've always been embarrassed by it."

On the sleeve of The Pleasure Principle, the reticent star credits his band for "turning basics into songs." The line-up still featured his old mate Paul Gardiner on bass, but Jess Lidyard had left to be replaced by Cedric Sharpley. Chris Payne joined on keyboards and viola, and the band was completed by the arrival of Billy Currie from Ultravox who had split up after the departure of their original vocalist, John Foxx. This band also completed a second John Peel radio session on 25 June which showed off the new tracks, "Airlane," "Films," "Conversation," and "Cars."

In recent years, The Pleasure Principle's analogue Moog sounds and '70's futurism have come back into fashion. The likes of Beck and Smashing Pumpkins, who have both covered Numan songs, are using the squelchy, filtered textures pioneered by the electronic acts at the end of the 1970's in their own music. Their promo videos and photo sessions have also paid a retro debt to the neon-tubed, man-in-black image of Numan. Furthermore, a wave of underground American synth-pop acts, including The Rentals, Six Finger Satellite and Pulsars, all sound like they've got a vinyl copy of The Pleasure Principle at the front of their record collections. One mane who rarely uses analogue and now fully embraces the possibilities of digital technology is Gary Numan, who doesn't share younger acts' enthusiasm for the old ways. "I think I've used them enough don't you? I may dig out the Moog again at some point, but I was regularly using analogues for the first ten years of my career." Before the inevitable backlash against yet another squiggly Mini-Moog keyboard line on a pop song/ hip hop track/techno anthem, artists continue to draw inspiration from the limits of these '70's instruments. The Pleasure Principle now belongs to an oddly attractive, easily defined pop scene - a world which neither us, or indeed Gary Numan himself, belong to anymore. Jaron Lanier writes in the technology magazine, Wired; "Pop style has stopped happening. Style used to be, in part, a record of the technological limitations of the media of each period. The sound of The Beatles was the sound of what you could do if you pushed a '60's-era recording studio absolutely as far as it could go. Artists long for limitations; excessive freedom casts us into a vacuum. That is why 'vintage' synthesizers are hotter right now than more flexible and powerful machines. Digital artists also face constraints in their tools, of course, but often these constraints are so distant, scattered and rapidly changing that they can't be pushed against in a sustained way."

Perhaps Gary Numan's puzzle-solving, open-ended work in the '80's, where he rotated analogue and digital synths, saxophone, viola, piano, fretless bass, female vocals, drum machines and live drums with no manifesto but just on the basis of what "sounded good" will one day be seen as purposeful plagiarism - a pop artists going into the digital age and attempting to solve an already familiar problem of too many choices, purely on the grounds of his own, very particular taste. He certainly doesn't make any judgments based on fashion or irony. There may be a few stylistic zones for future artists to explore amongst his seemingly random oddities - most of his '80's output - as the least self-consciously hip artists seem to be the ones who surprise us the most by suddenly reappearing.

- excerpted from the liner notes by Steve Malins