Opus Diaboli Review: Gary Numan
Gary Numan: The Junction, Cambridge December .
Gary Numan’s career began with a launch in 1979 that can only be described as meteoric, with two number one albums, Replicas and The Pleasure Principle, and the hit single Are Friends Electric in the same year. His use of make-up and elaborate stage shows hinted at Bowie, but Numan’s synthesiser rock sound was brutally mechanical, and the lyrics, inspired by William Burroughs and JG Ballard, painted an emotionally cold dystopian vision of technology and alienation. It didn’t sit well with the 1970s vibe of punk anger, or with the pop frippery of the 1980s New Romantics fad.
Numan entered a hinterland, experimenting with dance music and jazz-funk until the 1990s when he came back with a hard-edged and industrial sound that was truer to his earlier music. Sacrifice and Exile – dark and brooding albums, with lyrics delivering an angry, heretical attack on the god of Judeo-Christianity, re-made his reputation for a new generation.
A full 30 years after the launch of the Pleasure Principle, Gary Numan was at The Junction, Cambridge, still able to hold an audience, but more comfortable with his craft, less in need of proving himself. He is not now disdainful of coming out of ‘character’ to talk to the audience or dedicate a set of songs to his dead friend and Tubeway Army collaborator Paul Gardiner. The insanely huge light shows, electric cars and radio-controlled robots that filled Wembley have gone in favour of stripped-down show for small venues that focuses on the music.
Numan was never one to produce rich, complex music on albums only to offer up a thin facsimile live, and it took up to four synthesiser players to deliver the pure, fat synth sound of the slightly over-produced Pleasure Principle on stage. While faithful to album cuts, the remixes of these tracks for live performance have benefited from the dark industrial sound of his later work and have given them an edge.
The second section of the concert focused on the newer material, and with the stage stripped of two of the synthesisers, the mood animated and became more like a real gig than a recital. It was gratifying to see that Numan, after 30 years can still deliver a powerful performance, and, looking around at the other grizzled heads bobbing at the front of the stage, still command a dedicated and loyal following.
One quick word about the support band Dirty Harry. A confident, competent band delivering a tight hard pop-rock sound. Had they been around in 1979, when Pleasure Principle was launched, they would have stood a chance of having a shot at the charts. But in today’s download-driven market, where there are no charts to speak of, no singles to be released, and no network television programmes such as Top of the Pops or the Tube, how ever do good, hard working bands get a break and make themselves heard above the background noise?
Tags: Dirty Harry, Gary Numan, Pleasure Principle
