[Apologies for the tardiness of this review but other things have been happening too. Ed]
I totally just saw Gary Numan! As a wee Goth in the year 2000, Gary Numan was King. Inspired by the tragedy of his wife’s miscarriage, he had come out with PURE; the biggest, baddest, bitterest and most beautiful industrial rock album I had ever heard; one that’s a million miles away from MACHINE & SOUL, METAL RHYTHM and even REPLICAS. I was having a great time being completely miserable.
And tonight, nine years on, Gary Numan is not the shy robot of a teenager that unloaded Are Friends Electric? and Cars, nor is he the questionable dance icon that annoyed most of his fans (I quite like it) from 1982 to 1994 - instead the Numan of the new century is a freakin’ rock star.
The moment he hits the stage (lit beautifully with dark red lines that recall the artwork for the classic TELEKON) the venue is smothered in crushing, grinding distortion and wailing, piercing synths. Awesome. Goths mope (in a good way), oldies dance, people cheer, corsets loosen, I rock, and Numan even cracks a smile. It was nice.
Drawing his material predominantly from his last two albums (JAGGED and PURE) and highlights from his two most celebrated and influential classics (REPLICAS and THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE) Numan offers a powerful and well balanced set of huge, pulsing anthems.
Ditching the three-note synth-pop of his past, the Numan of today creates an atmospheric and ambitious mix of creeping, cruel verses; dark tones; subtle melodic touches and impassioned, soaring choruses – if you’d thought Numan was capable of a set as emotive and uncompromising as this in 1992 you’d be Rasputin.
Numan stays relatively quiet throughout the night, just the occasional ‘thanks’, but he reminds us of exactly how relevant he is through a double header of Metal (from his first solo album) and Blind (from his fifteenth…), which demonstrate both his innovation and his mastery of electronic music. Numan is not an old man playing a young man’s game, he’s proving that he can bring as much of a bite to the style he helped create as any of his competition.
Surprisingly, global super-hit Cars is received as ‘just another song’, people cheer and people sing, but it doesn’t stand out, such is the quality of his recent material that his most famous single sits quite modestly alongside it all.
On a night full of hits, rare treats, live favourites and highlights like Down in the Park, Films, Rip and Are Friends Electric? – he closes with a gorgeous encore of Prayer for the Unborn (which was bleaker than Italian Neo-Realism). I’d been taught (by the office soul man) that only Marvin Gaye could write a song so personal – but I’d been taught wrong, this left me breathless. Yowzer.
Now I’ve long since realised that Goth music is generally a bit silly, and I learnt the hard way how bad I look in make up, but no one else working in the genre brings as much heart and grit to the industrial template as Gary Numan. He’s not a joke anymore, he’s not a pop star anymore – instead he’s a credible recording artist who’s managed to get more mileage out of that old car than anyone could ever have predicted.
I leave a very happy frowner.
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