It’s the first night of the tour and Gary Numan is getting his excuses in early. “Yesterday’s final rehearsal was something of a disaster so tonight in Dublin we will be winging it somewhat,” he wrote on Facebook, having already told fans that his long-serving guitar was broken and had to be replaced.
True enough, tonight's show is bookended by a couple of shaky moments – there’s a bit of a wobble during opener My Name Is Ruin which the veteran singer is able to chuckle about with his bandmates, though it does little to dull the song’s thunderous power.
Then right at the end, after introducing Jo The Waiter – an acoustic track from his very first album with Tubeway Army – by saying “I’m going to sing this song because if I don’t my wife won’t have sex with me,” he manages to forget the words.
With plenty of encouragement from the partisan crowd and a little help from a stage hand with a torch, he rummages through a ring binder for the lyrics and manages to finish the song – giggling all the way through. Let’s hope he’s forgiven by the time he gets home...
By this point, though, the show is a home run. Billed as ‘Celebrating 40 Years of Music’, Numan had promised a career-spanning set and he delivers on that, with tracks from lesser-known albums like 1985’s The Fury slotting in between the sleek synth-pop classics of his new wave heyday and favourites from his heavier, more industrial-flavoured later work.
It’s notable, too, how the latter has coloured the former – and so early tracks like Cars, Metal, Down In The Park and Are ‘Friends’ Electric? are beefed up with enough guitar crunch and pummelling drums that they slot neatly in between newer numbers like My Name Is Ruin, It Will End Here (from 2018’s The Fallen EP) and brand new track Intruder.
What ties them all together, of course, is Numan’s unique voice – still remarkable, easily a match for the power of his four-piece band and still able to humanise the most austere soundscapes.
More than that, the 61-year-old is a thoroughly captivating presence: fit, lithe and bouncing around the stage like a man less than half his age while flashing smiles to his bandmates and vamping to an ecstatic crowd.
Some of the moves border on hammy, but you have to remember that Numan was a superstar at the age of 21 - this is what he does. After all these years, he’s back at the top of his game.
