I guess there aren’t going to be any spoiler alerts seeing as it’s billed as Gary Numan plays ‘The Pleasure Principle’ and ‘Replicas’ and with no support bands the Tramshed is full to bursting a solid hour before Numan is due onstage. It’s not often a venue is this full on a school night although it’s a long time since anyone in here was in school judging by the looks of it.

First things first possibly the worst merch I’ve ever seen with just a triangle with Gary Numan across the top and dates on the back for £30 a pop anyway, gutted I wanted a Numan shirt. Negatives aside I’ve been really looking forward to this for a while after snoozing on the acoustic tickets last year. I wouldn’t be making that mistake again and as the band ambled on stage the sound was nice n loud and spot on – No gremlins in the machine as we were treated to ninety minutes of synth/rock-heavy Numan and two albums from the peak of his powers.

I must admit I do love how he’s found the balance of guitars on what were synth-only records (or mostly synth, especially the Pleasure Principle album. Memories came flooding back and its still hard to compute how old these records are but this is a format I really like and most importantly it really works. Old classics were elevated to something special and Numan looks and sounds fantastic.

Of the early set tunes ‘Me I Disconnect From You’ and ‘Praying To The Alians’ sounded awesome. The energy from this band is terrific ‘You Are In My Vision’ sounded energised and snotty but it was ‘Airlane’ followed by the magnificent ‘Complex’ that stole the show for me and tagging ‘Down In The Park’ and ‘Machmen’ thereafter took me back decades.

Sure the encore is next-level fanboy stuff and hearing ‘Cars’ pipe out through the synth is still a magnificent intro but the bass and drum punch is what drives the song on and this electric shortened version was a joy leaving just ‘Are Friends Electric’ to sign off a wonderfully entertaining night. He can keep doing these album sets it’ll never disappoint but I do think he’s kept himself relevant and contemporary and the set he turned in at Rebellion a few years back was magnificent and another reason why I’ll always support Gary Numan. Maybe next time play somewhere bigger and at least give us some breathing space.

Author: Dom Daley