10. Gary Numan

THE TROXY

2 APRIL 2011

If you want to trace the spark, the precise moment this whole retro futurist emotional landslide kicked off; it was that Nine Inch Nails gig, and the sudden, blinking-into-the-spotlight emergence of Gary bloody Numan. The room shifted. Reality bent slightly. I will wax lyrical to anyone who will listen about what Numan meant to me. But here’s the thing: it was never just about the music. It was about us. Me and my oldest mate. The friendship that somehow survived school, adulthood, and was now well into the wasteland of our forties.

Flash back to the mid-eighties: there I was, jumping on my bike, bombing five miles down the Sussex coast to my mate’s house in the next town, cutting across the pebbly moonscape that separated our two towns, “Tidemills”, which now sounds suspiciously mythical but was our very real teenage wasteland.

We would spend hours, hitting repeat on Replicas, Warriors, and Dance played over Sankyo combo hi-fis like they were holy texts. But did we ever see the man himself? Of course not. That was a pipe dream for us kids. By the time we were old enough to actually go to a gig, Numan had decided he’d rather become a stunt pilot or something equally unhelpful.

Fast forward a few decades. That Nine Inch Nails gig snaps something loose. Suddenly I’m fourteen again, all hair gel and repressed emotion, texting my mate out of the blue with one clear mission: we’re going to see Gary Numan. Together. At the Troxy. Like it always should’ve been.

Cut to pre-show drinks, where my pal tells me, half-laughing, half-serious, that if Numan plays “Down in the Park”, he’ll lose what’s left of his adult composure. Cue the house lights dropping, strobes flaring, and “Down in the Park” slamming into our faces like a jet-black synth-wave. I look over and there he is, eyes wide, mouth open, every molecule of teenage joy hitting him like a freight train.

And the show? Numan doesn’t just play the hits, he obliterates them. Colossal walls of synth slam into us like sonic meteors, a blast of visuals from synchronised digital screens warping time and space around us. “Are Friends Electric?” turns into a football chant, like it’s the national anthem of synth.

And then, the encore, “Prayer for the Unborn”. Just when we thought we were emotionally maxed out, he brings up a digitised ultrasound image of his daughter on the screen, that pulses out of the dry ice, carried on the waves of the synthesised siren-pulses, a piercingly tender note in an ocean of sound. It’s a haunting, stunning visual that still hasn’t left my mind all these years later.

Somehow, this gig lit a fire. It turned a spark from a moment at a Nine Inch Nails gig into a full-blown blaze, a reunion with my oldest friend, a renewed love for live music, and a reminder that teenage anthems can still hit hard, decades later. No, it wasn’t just a gig, it was a resurrection, redemption, and retrograde closure wrapped in synths and strobes. Teenage ghosts were exorcised, a friendship rebooted, and Gary Numan? Still the machine-man messiah we always knew he was.