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Review: Gary Numan, Bristol Beacon – ‘Remains one of electronic music’s most restless innovators’
There are few artists who can walk onstage with a 45 year old album behind them and make it feel like the world is still catching up.
This show is no nostalgia trip, but a celebration; a monument of sound. And tonight, it’s a family affair.
Raven Numan opened the night with a set that felt quietly commanding. Her sound sits somewhere between dark-pop and brooding industrial. Stepping onstage through the smoke and lights the Beacon was filled with moody electronics and understated emotional weight.
is needed now More than ever
Numan’s daughter Raven, in the support slot, set the tone for the night with a moody, synth-driven set
Her performance less like an opening act and more like a prologue, it set the night’s emotional tone. At times the accompanying band felt more like a token than a necessity: she could easily have stepped away from them and taken all of the spotlight.
The pre-produced tracks were filled with haunting piano, dark atmospheres, synths and drum machine. You can hear the DNA. When Raven performed her cover of Nine Inch Nails’ In The Twilight it felt beautifully full circle given her father’s influence on Trent Reznor.
Gary Numan’s arrival was greeted like that of a cult hero returning to his citadel. Chants of “Nuuuman” rang out like a celebratory second half substitution when your team is 5-0 up.
With red lights crossing the stage in a nod to the original album artwork, he opened the sold out show as he did the album, with This Wreckage. It’s immediately apparent that this track now has the muscular, post-industrial sound he’s refined across his more recent albums.
It was the first sign of how the entire album would be transformed live.
Gary Numan is celebrating the 45th anniversary of his second album Telekon, which went straight in at the top of the charts when it was released in 1980
Performing Telekon 45 years after its release could easily have turned into a museum piece.
But clinical synth lines are now wrapped in distortion and low-end rumble, the Beacon’s weighty soundsystem and tuned acoustics adding to its heft. Is it a reimagining or a destination reached through the passage of time and technology?
Yet in the midst of the updated intensity, the melancholy of early-Numan songwriting remained intact. It’s still the sound of dystopia, but in high definition. The Kraftwerk influences now evolved into sounds they maybe could never have imagined.
Songs that once existed in stark, analog minimalism now came alive with layers of atmospheric grit, Numan’s voice carrying more depth than it did in 1980 but losing none of its distinctive alien vulnerability.
The show was more forward-looking than nostalgic, proving Numan one of electronica’s great innovators
Remind Me To Smile was followed by Remember I Was Vapour. After the opening chimes of I Dream Of Wires a sea of Numanoids raise their hands to clap along. The sweeping lights and eerie synths give feelings of a science fiction anthem rediscovered.
Numan himself was in constant motion, prowling the stage with a conviction that elevated even the quieter moments into gothic theatre. He’s physically and musically a pioneer who refuses to stand still.
Like A B-Film, never included on the original album but discovered by Gary’s label, was included tonight. Numan remarks he doesn’t remember writing it, but Beggars Banquet were keen for an unreleased gem when they found it. It’s delivered in such a way that it feels it was there all along.
A Game Called Echo and Photograph are the next strays from the original release: bonus tracks from the 1998 reissue, they give an insight into how the album may have been crafted had it not been restricted by the limitations of the original formats.
Numan also treated the audience to some leftfield and off-album rarities
We Are Glass, one of the released singles, raises a chorus of cheers as Gary lifts a guitar from the rack and joins the anthemic synth hooks with distorted riffs.
The encore sees Numan dig deep into the earliest of his repertoire. Four songs from the days of Tubeway Army, My Shadow In Vain, Friends and Listen To The Sirens, and the final song of the night Down In The Park.
As the Numanoids cheer their final cheers and the Close Encounters-esque lightshow fades, it feels like his spacecraft is returning him to whichever planet he first visited us from.
This show was more than an anniversary performance—it was a reminder that Gary Numan remains one of electronic music’s most restless innovators.
Telekon at 45 sounded neither retro nor refurbished; it sounded alive. Telekon’s icy introspection and machine-driven paranoia sounded not only preserved but expanded, reinterpreted through the lens of Numan’s modern industrial aesthetic.
All images: Shawn Mullins
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