Less than a year had passed before Gary was planning a 'comeback' tour (see next post) that would see him come out of the shortest retirement from live performing imaginable.
After the last notes of the 'Replicas' outro faded into the April night in North London in 1981, a sated Wembley crowd not only bade goodbye to Numan the stage artist but also to the second phase of the man's career (second if you count the punk era Tubeway Army as the first). Out went the leather boiler suits, to be replaced by the wardrobe of Edward G. Robinson. For Gary Numan, this meant 1930's gangster chic, for me it was the start of a series of fashion faux pas that would last a couple of years and haunt me for many more! I looked like a right dick in a trilby and grey double-breasted suit. I was about 4 foot 5 inches... think along the lines of the Anthill Mob!
Back then whilst I felt luke warm towards 'Dance', 'I, Assassin' was rather more accessible. 'We Take Mystery (To Bed)' was fantastic and songs such as 'This Is My House' and 'War Songs' had enough elements of his former albums to hold my interest. Looking back from today's vantage point this was the start of the career struggle that Numan had throughout the remainder of the 1980's. It was a problem for many bands that surfed in on the wave of 'New Wave'. It was a wave that when it broke it left many bands washed up on the shore, flailing for a new direction that would keep them in the charts. Unfortunately, come 1982/1983 the record buying public has moved on, embracing new music that to my ears is shallow, banal and disposable. Many of the bands that emerged in the late '70's threw in the towel in this period. Numan had a particularly arduous road to survival in the pop world. Never a darling of the music press and faced with an unofficial BBC boycott, Numan only had his fan base to fall back on and many of those, myself included, started to drift away in search of new musical avenues (only not of the banal kind!).
The Autumn of '82 saw Numan back on stage with a new band. Unfortunately I do not think so many of these shows exist as recordings today, just three or four from a 19 date tour. Maybe it is just me but I don't think that the set worked particularly well with older songs sitting rather uncomfortably next to the new material. In the same way that 'I, Assassin' material would sit awkwardly in a 2023 Numan. The tour did however set him up for the return to the UK stage the following year.
FLAC: https://we.tl/t-UAB7Lmly3D
Artwork: https://we.tl/t-JIGsU6jR4r
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