151. Gary Numan
Electric Brixton
2 October 2016
This isn’t a gig review. Not really. If you want to know what a Gary Numan show is like, just scatter your gaze across these pages, you’ll find ten others just like it. The lights. The noise. The low-slung swagger of an icon who made machines sound epic. You know the drill.
But this night… this one was different. Special. Not for what happened onstage, but for what happened before it.
It began, as these things often do, with a quiet excitement and a couple of Negronis too early in the day. Me and my two best friends, familiar travelling companions in this long and joyful pilgrimage of gigs, were back at it again. We found a little tapas place off Effra Road, the kind of place that feels like a secret. Laughs. Life talk. The easy rhythm of friendship.
Then me and my oldest friend peeled off to the venue because I had bought him and I VIP meet and greet passes. Suddenly, we weren’t just part of the crowd, we were inside the inner circle, backstage-pass badges slung round our necks, ushered through the corridors of Electric Brixton like we belonged. And there he was.
Gary Numan. Sat at a simple table in a quiet room. No theatrics, no lights, no thunder. Just a man and a smile. And in that moment, the years fell away. The LP covers, the posters, the cassette rewinds. All the nights we’d spent with his music filling the room, soundtracking our growing up, our figuring out, our finding out who we were.
He greeted us with warmth and a handshake, generous and easy, like someone you hadn’t seen in a while but somehow always knew. He signed the records we’d carried like old relics. He posed for a photo, smiling with sincerity. I was starstruck, of course. But more than that, I was moved. This was someone who had soundtracked entire parts of my life, moments of joy, of introspection, of becoming. And now here he was, in the flesh, talking to me like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.
And then, just when we thought it couldn’t get more surreal, we were invited to stay for soundcheck. Four songs. Played for a room of maybe five people. It wasn’t a performance. It was something else. I watched him sing two feet away, like we were in his living room. And then, with a wave and a quiet goodbye, he was gone.
We stepped outside into the fading Brixton light like two people waking up from a moment. We met our other friend at a bar nearby and for a while, neither of us could really speak. Not out of shock or awe, but because we were still somewhere else entirely. Still standing in that room. Still hearing the echoes of a voice that had travelled with us for decades, now finally reaching us in person. It wasn’t a show. It was something else. A memory carved deep.