It was on February 16, 1980 that I first saw the future. His name was Gary Numan.
He was
Saturday Night Live’s musical guest that evening. I remember that he didn’t seem real. He was, in fact, a new kind of man, a living android who’d travelled back in time from some not-too-terribly-distant dystopia to warn us about the dangers that lay ahead. The bizarre lyrics to “Praying to the Aliens” flashed on my television screen, and I was hooked. Soon “Cars” was being played everywhere. I saw the video for it on
The Midnight Special and
Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert. I bought
The Pleasure Principle, borrowed my mother's eyeliner, and began life anew as a Numanoid.
Critics reviled him, of course. Even his idol, David Bowie (one of my idols, too, lord knows), treated him, I am sorry to say, rather shabbily. But I didn’t care. I’d seen and heard the future, and that was all that mattered. When
Telekon arrived in September 1980, I could scarcely wait to get home and play the album.
I had the US Atco edition, so I didn’t realize that the track sequence was different from the UK vinyl version. Atco removed “Sleep by Windows,” replacing that number with Numan’s then-recent single “I Die: You Die.” Otherwise, the songs were the same. I was mesmerized, from the ominous synthesized opening of “This Wreckage” to the ironically euphoric conclusion of “The Joy Circuit,” which constitutes one of the most exhilarating instrumental passages in Numan’s entire career. In retrospect, however, I think the front and back covers should have been reversed; the back cover, with Gazza in his black-and-red boilersuit, gripping some sort of tube--a vacuum cleaner attachment?--while fog swirls around him, is vastly superior to the front cover’s shot of Numan’s glowing noggin floating in space, which always reminds me of the scowling stone head from
Zardoz.
Telekon brought (studio-wise, at any rate) Numan’s “machine” period to an end, though that era is memorably documented live on the 79/80/81
Living Ornaments trilogy. As I look back at the record four decades later, I see that it serves as a bridge between his electrifying future shock and the experimental, Eno-esque experimentation explored so beautifully on 1981’s
Dance. Such introspective tracks as “The Aircrash Bureau,” “I Dream of Wires,” and “Please Push No More” foreshadow the melodious avant-gardism of
Dance’s “Slowcar to China,” “Cry, the Clock Said,” and “My Brother’s Time.” Numan’s song titles alone filled me with wonder before I ever heard them!
UK reviewers savaged the album, with one critic (whose name mercifully escapes me) actually calling Numan “dangerously insidious,” a typically hysterical bit of British journalism. The most perceptive words came from, of all places,
Rolling Stone’s Don Shewey, who observed that, although “scarcely out of his adolescent years, Gary Numan is already, in terms of attitude, the Samuel Beckett of British New Wave.”
Gazza went through a particularly bad patch as the decade deepened, long before his mid-Nineties rebirth and critical reappraisal. I enjoy his new music, though I confess I’m not as interested in his industrial-sounding compositions and his Evil-God-in-Charge-of-the-Universe lyrics. (The Beckettian “And what if God’s dead / We must have done something wrong” suits me just fine, and always brings a smile to my face.) But time and again I return to the Beggars Banquet years (or at least to the 78-82 period). Those records
still sound like the future to me. I’m not fanatically attentive to today’s New Musicians, but my guess is that there’s no new Numan out there, no one who looks and sounds like that shocking future, no one who can open doors by thinking, or even get to sleep by dialing “O.”
