Cars

"Cars" is the debut solo single by English musician Gary Numan. It was released on 21 August 1979 and is from his debut studio album The Pleasure Principle. The song reached the top of the charts in several countries, and today is considered a new wave staple. The song was the first release credited solely to Gary Numan after he dropped the band name Tubeway Army, under which he had released four singles and two LPs, including the number one UK hit "Are 'Friends' Electric?", and its parent album Replicas. Musically, the new song was somewhat lighter and more pop-oriented than its predecessors, Numan later said that he had chart success in mind: "This was the first time I had written a song with the intention of 'maybe it could be a hit single'; I was writing this before 'Are "Friends" Electric?' happened." He has since described "Cars" as "a pretty average song". In the UK charts, it reached number 1 in 1979, and in 1980, it hit number 1 in Canada two weeks running on the RPM national singles chart (29 weeks in the top 100). It was his only single to chart there. It rose to #4 on the U.S. Cash Box Top 100 and #9 on the US Billboard Hot 100. Although Numan had a string of hits in the UK, "Cars" was his only song in the American pop charts. Composition "Cars" is based on two musical sections: a verse/instrumental break and a bridge. The recording features a conventional rock rhythm section of bass guitar and drums, but the rest of the instruments used are analogue synthesisers, principally the Minimoog (augmenting the song's recognisable bass riff) and the Polymoog keyboard, providing austere synthetic string lines over the bass riff. The bridge section also includes a tambourine part. Numan's vocal part is sung in an almost expressionless, synthesized style. There is no "chorus" as such. The song becomes instrumental from the 1:30-point until its conclusion.