(R)evolution

Gary Numan (R)evolution (2020)
I've always had a lot of time for the Numan and never really bought into the idea that he ever truly fell off, so to speak. Some of his greatest albums, at least to my ears, were those which seemingly went more or less direct to the bargain bin, Berserker and Strange Charm for example. The late eighties were a bit fucking rough for me personally, and it was significant that I couldn't actually afford to buy new records for a couple of those years, which is how I came upon Strange Charm - which really got me through that rough patch. It's sad to realise that the man who recorded it now regards it as a bit of a dud, and even more depressing to read that the one occasion of This is Love getting airplay was followed by Steve Wright taking the piss out of it for being saaaaaaad.

I've always loathed Steve Wright, the unfunny fucker.

Anyway, this is a showbiz autobiography reading, as they tend to do, very much like a showbiz autobiography with the cadence of something dictated; which doesn't really matter because Numan is an interesting guy and he avoids the pitfalls which usually render this sort of thing unreadable. I'm not sure how this relates to Praying to the Aliens, the previous and now out of print account, but it doesn't feel as though anything has been left out. Numan recalls his initial rise and subsequent - and eventually temporary - fall from grace in fascinating and self-deprecating detail without mistaking record sales for artistic achievement. He's aware that the media thought he was weird, and remains thankfully unapologetic, even disinclined to portray himself in a necessarily flattering light. Above all, the aspects of this account which I hadn't anticipated are the amiable tone and the sense of humour. He doesn't really tell jokes, but he's naturally funny, and the narrative begins to feel a little like something that happened to a character played by Tony Hancock or perhaps even Robin Askwith after a few chapters - it's something in how Numan's enduring, perhaps naive optimism contrasts so dramatically with the string of custard pies which life seems to have flung in his face to a regular schedule, and not even in terms of anything so prosaic as record sales. I'm talking punchlines, like the Florida gig where an overhead waste pipe somehow broke and showered the sound desk with actual shite. It's a mercy that our man has been able to laugh at this kind of thing because the book is packed with it and to the point of reading like Davy Jones drawing the exploits of some comedically unlucky character in the pages of Viz. I expected mostly boasting, self-importance, and a million written variations on those tracks - of which there was one on each album for a while - about how the press hates Gary Numan but that's fine because Gary Numan doesn't care even though this is yet another song about how much he doesn't care; but this is a warm, genuinely thoughtful, and frequently funny book. As rock star autobiographies go, it doesn't quite top Steve Jones' Lonely Boy, but it comes surprisingly close.