Living in Kilburn in 1993 I was a regular visitor to the West End of London. By this point, the famed Marquee Club had relocated from Wardour Street to Charing Cross Road. It was a habit of mine when passing the venue to nip in to check out who was coming up to play. The music press would only carry information a week in advance. On this occasion in Mid October I was surprised to see flyers for Numan in the foyer that were advertising a gig at the end of the month.
I picked up some flyers (wish I could locate them today!) but honestly didn’t give it much further thought. By ’93, such was my dissolution with Gary’s musical direction of the past couple of years that not even the prospect of seeing him in such an intimate setting in a legendary London venue was sufficient to get me through the door. In my defence , it later transpired that Gary had a similar opinion of his musical output on 1993 as I did!
Needless to say, having made this decision not to go, two weeks later I was kicking myself as news filtered back to me in the days after the gig that this really had been something different and a gig I should have made the effort to attend.
Gary it would appear had become reconciled with his own back catalogue. Material was played that night that had not seen the light of day for fifteen years and in some cases never* (* I could be wrong on this statement but can’t be arsed to check, but you get the point). With hindsight, this was a watershed gig. Whether fully knowing or not (and here I understand that Gemma had some persuasive input here) this new found relationship with old Tubeway Army material took him back to fundamentals, the essence of Gary Numan as an artist you could say. Going forward he would stop trying to pre-empt what the new record buying public wanted to hear, Prince covers, Brit-funk or whatever. Instead, he would take that original sound back to the fan-base.
With the ‘Radial Pair’ soundtrack and ‘Human’ already taking him back to experimental musical scoring his career was about to get an unexpected second wind!
If a revamp of the live set was the first step on the road to musical recovery and credibility, the release of ‘Sacrifice’ the following year was the crucial second step. Still, even then I bypassed this release. It was only when a friend of mine, Angela, sent me a cassette recording of the album that I got to hear it. She knew that whilst my interest in Numan had waned over a number of years ‘Sacrifice’ had enough of the elements that made me a fan in the first place to possibly draw me back in. She was right. It was evident from a first listen that the Numan camp had thought long and hard about how to drag our man’s faltering career out of the doldrums.
It wasn’t just the moody soundtrack quality of the material either. The visuals were back on track as well. The album artwork gave more than a superficial nod to more prosperous times. Black was back in vogue (always a positive for me) and the album cover with the high contrast imagery brought the ‘Telekon’ era strongly to mind.
As vital as ‘Sacrifice’ undoubtedly was careers rarely pivot on one album alone. 1995 also saw something of a musical seachange in terms of new music. Enter ‘Brit Pop’, a loosely associated scene that once again celebrated guitar bands. Not as seismic as punk but certainly something in the right direction and very welcome for all that. Many of the musicians in the ‘Brit Pop’ vanguard were of an age that meant that they would have grown up listening to acts like Numan. Consequently, they respected elements of punk and new wave that they incorporated into their own music. Bands like Elastica and Blur commanded many column inches every week in the then still powerful music press in the UK. To their credit they were very forthcoming about where they drew their own musical ideas from and the name Gary Numan was often mentioned. His name was appearing in the press for the first time in years, and remember first time around the music press were rarely supportive of him and his music. This press attention did him no harm at all. Neither did a compilation album called ‘Random’ that features many of the new bands covering Numan songs.
The momentum was sustained, helped by the emergence of summer festivals that brought Gary Numan to the ears of a new younger audience who would not otherwise our ‘80’s wonder kid.
Thanks to the original Dime Uploader (Harvey1).
Artwork: https://we.tl/t-CY4la6c8Dh
01. Intro
02. Machine And Soul
03. Outland
04. Me! I Disconnect From You
05. We Are So Fragile
06. Respect
07. Shame
08. Films
09. Down In The Park
10. My World Storm
11. The Machman
01. Noise Noise
02. Cars
03. It Must Have Been Years
04. That's Too Bad
05. Remind Me To Smile
06. I'm An Agent
07. Are 'Friends' Electric ?
08. Jo The Waiter
09. I Don't Believe
10. Bombers
11. We Are Glass
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