22.10.2021 The Station, Cannock: Tubeway Days
Gary
Numan is arguably one of the most charismatic and one of the weirdest
performers simply because he has an awesome voice and writes great tunes but
where he starts to sing within any given song seems abrupt and out of sync but
let’s just settle for unconventional, which is an awesome thing to be.
Gary and the musicians he recorded with in his early career had the band name ‘Tubeway Army’ and eventually it became Gary Numan and Tubeway Army and then just Gary Numan, and while most of the musicians from the Tubeway Army days continued to record and work with him, I personally always felt that the music changed after the abandonment of that distinction ‘Tubeway Army’.
It could be argued that Numan always was the principle songwriter within that unit, when I listen to the first ‘Tubeway Army’ album by the same name and ‘Replicas’ released in 1979 as Gary Numan & Tubeway Army it has a distinct magic in it and an identifiable musical flavour.
Over
decades Gary Numan has released many amazing albums and tonight was clearly a
Gary Numan tribute evening and yet I felt that the musicians ‘playing’the
Tubeway Army really captured the essence of that identifiable musical flavour,
so to me this was also a celebration of that specific sound.
2021 is not 1979 and on stage you could see things like newer Novation synthesizers as well as an Access Virus and perhaps tonight the sounds used sounded the way they were intended to sound like back in the day. Even the sound of the Arp loaded into the synth via a DAW came without the hiss the Arp naturally had.
Tubeway Days who for obvious reasons played material from 1978/1979/1980 respectively were incredible and the gentleman that embodied Gary Numan did so perfectly, down to the all nuances of Numan’s voice, his movements and the guy was the spitting image of Numan, too. In short: Their performance blew me away.
Tracks like ‘Every Day I Die’ or ‘It must have been years’ sounded and ‘Praying to the aliens’ sounded phenomenal.
Awesome night out xx
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