How eerily apt that Gary Numan and band should breeze into town on the blown-out back end of Storm Ophelia, as the Sussex sky turned a sulphurous yellow and the birds fell silent, like some sort of post-apocalyptic eclipse. As if purposely co-ordinated with the arresting desert-wasteland visuals that accompany Numan’s latest offering, for a fleetingly sublime, parallel-world moment, dusty gusts swirled ominously not only in the images on the big screen behind the Dome stage, but also on the streets outside. Life imitating art. The perfect backdrop. However, let’s not overstretch the metaphor, for while Numan is indisputably king of his dominion on stage, his powers probably fall short of calling the shots with the weather.

A beguiling figure he cuts on that stage too. Clad – along with all four fellow band members – in the timeless, placeless, formless desert garb that we see him in on the new album cover and in the first single’s video, he is part survivalist and part sanatorium patient, alluding to both the ‘broken world’ of the latest album’s title and the ‘broken mind’ of its predecessor. Numan is dipping back into his neuroses and this time it’s climate change that’s keeping him awake at night. The subject is behind Numan’s ongoing, but thus far unfinished, attempt to write a futuristic novel which has instead found an interim, alternative voice in the latest album, Savage (Songs From A Broken World). The live show unfolds song by song – the new expertly mixed in with the old – with no audience interaction until several songs in, perhaps to mimic full immersion in the first few crucial chapters of a book. It’s an approach that works though. In an unremitting assault on the senses, we see a gyrating and hand-wringing Numan against a disturbing, teeth-grinding score of metallic attrition and electronic glitching. It’s not quite nails down a chalkboard, but it’s close, and it’s good.

The set was a single, seamless narrative, all bar one or two brief, verbal interjections. When discussing his self-diagnosed Asperger’s syndrome in interviews, Gary has often referenced a discomfort with small talk and this extends to his live performances. If you come seeking Gary Webb, the creator of this enduring and alluring fiction, you’ll inevitably leave feeling short-changed: it’s clearly curtain up, mask on, in character, for Numan. The only chink in that chainmail was when his middle daughter, Persia, aged just 11, joined him on stage to perform some mightily impressive backing vocals, as if from a mosque’s minaret, for current single ‘My Name Is Ruin’. Momentarily, the familiar Numan guard dropped as he proudly embraced his girl – new to performing before such large crowds – before she skipped off, literally, and more typically of someone of her young years.

Strikingly, Numan’s material – and live act – is as strong as ever. In fact, a Numan novice would be hard-pushed to tell old tracks from new, as consistent as he and his work undeniably is. He may be in his 60th year on this planet but he’s still pulling off the lap dance writhing, the messianic posturing and the conducting of some sort of celestial orchestra without even the vaguest whiff of having outstayed his welcome.

‘Cars’ and Tubeway Army classic, ‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric’? made an inevitable, and clearly appreciated appearance. Yet it was in the cacophonous, nerve-jangling, doom-laden, industrial new stuff that we saw a still-relevant, still-significant artist of considerable, if not literal, stature (Numan is of diminutive physical proportions in actuality!) This felt like an arena-scale show, complete with flashy, in both senses, lighting and visuals, condensed for a smaller space. The compression served only to heighten the desolate edginess of the Numan shtick, though. “I am easily forgotten. There is always someone better than the past” sang Gary, from ‘Bed Of Thorns’ off the latest album. But he’s wrong. That someone is him. Still.

Kelly Westlake

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