3. Nine Inch Nails

THE O2 ARENA

15 JULY 2009

Trent Reznor rolls out tonight like a brooding messiah of the machine age, armed with a setlist carved straight out of Pretty Hate Machine and The Downward Spiral, but this wasn’t your usual dystopian pageant. No flaming crucifixes, no banks of smouldering CRTs vomiting static and anguish. Just Reznor, stark as a warehouse floor, flanked by enough blinding white lights to trigger epilepsy.

The whole thing looked less like a concert and more like a Blade Runner interrogation. By the third track, I was squinting through the blinking strobes, half-wondering if someone had forgotten to feed the meter. Would not have been surprised if a roadie came round rattling a tin for change.

Musically it was impeccable. Visually, it was about as stimulating as a tax seminar. There was a vacuum where the spectacle should have been, a strange hollowness that is usually reserved for minimalist furniture showrooms.

But just as I was mentally composing a shopping list and considering whether I’d left the oven on, Reznor started mumbling something about a musical hero, and out of nowhere the synth stabs of Metal tore through the gloom like a DeLorean through a fog bank and striding onstage came the man himself: Gary bloody Numan.

Let me clarify something, I’ve worshipped at the Church of Numan since I was thirteen. I own every album, every misfire, every promo, even that phase where he looked like a goth accountant. I’ve defended Machine + Soul to strangers, but I was too young to see him live before he had given up touring to become a stunt pilot; you know, in the way that is the natural next thing for all fading synth pop musicians to do.

But what a payoff. Numan, pale and severe as ever, slithered through “Metal” and “Cars” like he’d never left 1980, his voice was still that haunted robotic harmony, his presence still radiating ice from under the tundra layers of synth frost. However, the arena didn’t so much cheer as collectively ascend.

For a few blinding minutes, the two titans of electro-angst stood side by side, drenching us in serrated synths and rhythmic thunder, baptising us all in a torrent of retro-futurist glory. It was raw, it was righteous, and something inside me shifted.

Who needs pyrotechnics when you’ve got a flesh-and-wires hymn to alienation, delivered by the high priests of controlled emotional collapse?