Although this was the official debut album by the band, Gary Numan had already written a lot of material originating back to a previous punk outfit, Mean Street, formed in 1977. These include many of the live tracks recorded by Tubeway Army at The Roxy and added as bonus tracks on this CD. The band's line-up changed several times in its first 12 months, with drummers Bob Simmonds and Barry Benn, and second guitarist Sean Burke coming in and out of the line-up, along with Numan's uncle Jess Lidyard who always stepped in if no-one else was available. The one constant was bassist Paul Gardiner, whom Gary regarded as his best friend and right hand man during the early years. Gardiner, Lidyard and Gary Webb (he changed his name to Numan just in time for the release of the Blue Album) played on Tubeway Army's first recorded songs "That's Too Bad" and "Oh! Didn't I Say" in Spaceward Studios, Cambridge on 16 October 1977. The demo secured them their contract with Beggars Banquet and was released (with the A-side remixed at The Manor studio by Mick Glossop) as their debut single on 10 February 1978. Further sessions on Numan's 20th birthday at Spaceward produced a whole album of punk songs, while Kenny Denton-produced work in April 1978 (as a four piece line-up) led to the second single, "Bombers" - a punkified, jagged take on David Bowie's Five Years which signaled early promise. Although "Bombers" didn't sell any better than the debut, it was already moving away from the infectiously simplistic "That's Too Bad" into more artful guitar music. "It's odd listening to that song now," says Jon Marsh of The Beloved, "because it sounds like something Wire might have written."

Numan was never committed to being a punk revolutionary, thrashing out discords and spitting at the front rows. The man with bottle-blond hair, black eyeliner and a nasal voice which sounded like David Bowie weeping, was dreaming of stardom. "I used punk purely as a means of getting a contract. I didn't see it as going anywhere. I don't think it has gone anywhere. I was excited by the thing as a whole, that all of a sudden there was something that was completely new - new fashion, new music. I hoped, when it got started that something really great would come out of it but it sort of got destroyed by its own ideas. The anti-hero thing could never happen because England has always had the heroes, it always will do - I think it's a very English thing to make heroes."

- excerpted from the liner notes by Steve Malins