202. Gary Numan
Wembley Arena
7 May 2022
Some gigs are pure nostalgia and then there are gigs that feel like some kind of destiny fulfilled. This one was the latter. Gary Numan, forty years after standing on this same Wembley stage and announcing his retirement from live performance, returned to the scene of his own self-inflicted demise to prove, once and for all, that you can’t keep a good synth messiah down.
Originally, this was meant to be my best friend and me, two lifelong Numanoids finally closing a four-decade circuit at the Church of the Machine. But fate intervened and he had dropped out, in his place came my daughter. I wasn’t sure what she’d make of an hour and a half of dystopian robo-goth pageantry but held on to the hope that any Numan gig these days is a masterclass in building immense walls of soul-shattering sound and light. I need not have worried; she was obliterated by it, in a good way.
For many, this was a bit of a prodigal moment; forty years to the month since 1982’s farewell concerts. The house lights dimmed, the stage pulsed red, and out he strode black-clad, sculptural, unmistakable. Gary Numan, now a post-apocalyptic high priest rather than the skinny synth alien of old.
From the opening assault of “Intruder”, it was clear this was going to be no nostalgic greatest-hits victory lap. The sound hit like industrial thunder, huge, serrated waves of synth and guitar crashing over the crowd. The stage was a cathedral of light and smoke, with Numan twisting, convulsing, preaching like a man channelling gravity itself.
Then, in one of those strange cosmic alignments that only live music delivers, we found ourselves sitting directly in front of Gemma Numan and two of their daughters, fresh off the stage after performing backing vocals with their dad. It was slightly surreal.
The setlist was a hybrid of the newer material’s dark cinematic menace (“My Name Is Ruin,” “The Gift,”) fused seamlessly with the icy minimalism of the classics. “Metal” still sounded like the future, “Down in the Park” still made the hairs on your neck stand up, and “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” arrived like a dark portent.
The visuals were staggering, strobes slicing through fog, LED towers glowing like reactor cores, Numan silhouetted in light like the dark angel of emotion-circuitry. And through it all, his voice, still that singular, mournful instrument: part human, part mainframe, cutting through the chaos.
My daughter, who’d gone in cold, sat utterly entranced. Halfway through “The Fall” she turned to me, eyes wide, and simply mouthed: “Wow.” By the encore, “A Prayer for the Unborn”, she was on her feet, transformed. Walking out later, she declared, with absolute conviction, “That’s the best show I’ve ever seen.” It was hard to argue.
Numan didn’t just come home to Wembley, he conquered it again, forty years older but infinitely more powerful. What was once a farewell was now the return of a victor. He looked, sounded, and commanded the stage like a man utterly at peace with his place in music’s strange, synthetic cosmos.
It’s rare that an artist gets to rewrite their own mythology. Tonight, Gary Numan did just that and brought a whole new generation along for the ride.