192. Gary Numan
Royal Albert Hall
20 November 2018
When I last saw Gary Numan, at Brixton Academy during the Savage tour in 2017, it was like a great storm made of sound and light: dark, brutal, industrial, and utterly thrilling. Numan reborn as the desert prophet of the post-apocalypse, his Moogs weaponised for the end of days. That gig was fury and spectacle. This one, at the Royal Albert Hall, was filled with anticipation: Numan backed by a full orchestra; it demanded attendance by both primary gig-buddies, as this was going to be something very different, possibly even epic. And it was.
Backed by the orchestra, he transformed his dystopian vision into something grander, richer, even operatic. The man once accused of being a soulless android now stood in the most ornate concert hall in Britain, surrounded by five thousand devotees and a small army of strings, horns, and timpani, like a conductor of chaos.
From the moment he emerged, part desert mystic, part sci-fi messiah, the room was his. The orchestra struck up “Ghost Nation” and the air thickened. What had been powerful at Brixton now felt cinematic; all that metallic ferocity refracted through orchestral elegance. The strings didn’t tame the beast; they made it colossal.
The setlist bridged past and present with the kind of confidence that only comes from forty years of survival. “Metal” and “Down in the Park” slotted seamlessly alongside “My Name Is Ruin” and “My Breathing”, each reimagined with symphonic scale. “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” was reanimated as a hymn; five thousand voices roaring the question back to him, decades on, as if finally answering it. If Brixton had been the sound of resurrection, the Royal Albert Hall was the coronation.
Numan’s voice, weathered, warmer, more human than ever, carried over the orchestra like a siren. His movements, once awkward, now had a strange, feline grace. He prowled, bowed, and beamed, visibly moved by the occasion. At one point he stopped, overwhelmed, to tell the crowd, “This… this is the best night of my life.” The room agreed.
The band, bolstered by the orchestra, delivered a sound that was biblical in scale. The percussion rumbled through the hall’s Victorian bones; the strings swelled with menace and melancholy; and Numan, framed in light, stood at the centre of it all with a pride that glowed out of him.
The encore: “A Prayer for the Unborn,” “Intruder,” and a devastating “The End of Things”, became a perfect end to this symphonic odyssey. For Miles and me, though, the moment of quiet ecstasy came when Numan launched into “This Wreckage.” It’s a song he almost never plays live; a cold, mechanised lament from Telekon. However, hearing it unfold here, those frozen, synthetic violin lines now reborn with a real string section, was spellbinding. The sound was glacial and soaring: a song about isolation transformed into an empyrean hymn.
When the last note rang out, the applause was relentless and the admiration boundless. A year earlier at Brixton, Numan had sounded like a man cannonading his way from a wasteland. Tonight, he strode through it like a king, and we could all say: “We were there”.