Slowcar to china
Night talk
A subway called ‘you’
Cry the clock said
She’s got claws
Crash
Boys like me
Stories
My brother’s time
You are, you are
Moral
Stormtrooper in drag
Face to face
Dance
Exhibition
I sing rain
DANCE has been remastered from the original analog studio tapes to ensure the CD is the best possible sonic transfer. The package reproduces all the original album images (including the poster and includes a newly discovered track from the sessions called, appropriatly, 'Dance'.

The official release date is16 November in the USA but it can be purchased on pre-release through Alma road mail order (see link on screen) from August
!n September 1981 Gary Numan released his most experimental album so far, the abstract, atmospheric Dance. Sessions had begun during Numan's build-up to his April '81 Farewell Shows at Wembley Arena, London but in deliberate contrast to the fat, full-blooded electronic boom of those performances (courtesy of twenty two on-stage analogue synthesizers and floor-shaking bass cabinets underneath the arena) the new LP was intimate-sounding and almost oriental in its quiet, minimalistic approach. It reached number 3 in the UK a few months after Numan's live Box Set, Living Ornaments '79 & '80 had missed the top slot by one place, which meant the 23-year-old had tucked five Top Five LPs into his utility belt only two years after his first chart appearance.

However Dance's off-beat direction was too weird for mainstream international markets and with only one single taken off it (She's Got Claws which peaked at number 6) the LP dropped rapidly down the chart in the UK, where it was awarded a Silver disc for over 60,000 sales. To some extent Dance illustrated Numan's willingness to trade in his fame for an alternative, less intrusive appeal inspired by his own musical heroes David Bowie, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, who'd all moved into more esoteric areas at various points in their careers. In 1979, fresh from reaching number 1 in the charts, he revealed his long-term agenda:
"In a sense, I've finished now, already. I've done what I've wanted to do. The ambition I have now is to make music that provokes people into thinking things they wouldn't have otherwise."

The ex-Tubeway Army frontman was acutely aware that The Human League, Soft Cell, Visage, Depeche Mode, Duran Duran and a reformed Ultravox were all breaking into the charts in 1981, grabbing big chunks of the solo star's audience and threatening to turn him into a has-been. His answer was to retire from live stage work and explore new musical areas - "What I'm doing is committing suicide before someone kills me," he said in 1980. "I want this part of my career over, finished."

Numan's brave attempt to develop a longer-lasting reputation as a pop artist depended on critical support but Dance softened rather than reversed the media's attitudes towards the singer. One of the best reviews ran in Smash Hits who awarded the album nine out of ten and described the music as "timeless". The NME argued that the album elevated Numan above many "pulp"-avant garde synthesizer contemporaries. In a fascinating review, Paul Morley wrote, "Dance does prove that when judged against his proper peers he can come out well . . . It's a thoughtful response to the new competition: Numan self-controlled and sophisticated. He can filter and exploit past noises as sensibly, even surprisingly, as anyone but he will never be an original. Dance is Numan's neatest, cleanest and most responsible homage to Brian Eno. The elements of Eno's meditative adjustments and slippy neology are used well, but Another Green World's breathtaking personality, intimacy, grace and irony are missing. No one of any worth will be influenced by Gary Numan." Dance's combination of sparse, acoustic-sounding electronics and unadorned drum machines resonates in trip hop, '90s ambient music and individual albums such as The Smashing Pumpkins's Adore and, arguably, R.E.M.'s Up.

Numan started work on Dance in late 1980, hiring Japan's fretless bass player Mick Karn for the new album. The electro pioneer was a big fan of Japan's Gentleman Take Polaroids LP, which he absorbed as a fresh influence on his own writing. He hung out with Japan's singer David Sylvian (although a proposed writing collaboration never came to fruition), invited the band's ex-guitarist Rob Dean to play on the Latin-styled Boys Like Me, used their publicist Connie Filapello as the Italian voice on the same song and recorded She's Got Claws as the first collaboration with Mick Karn. Numan encouraged the bassist to improvise the notes around a basic musical outline, an exciting departure for Karn because at the time Japan's music was very controlled and elegantly executed. The London-Cypriot musician told Zig Zag magazine:
"I've always wanted to record a song completely spontaneously without having heard it at all, just to see what would happen and I did that on this track. This was the first song I did with Gary and it was the first time I've played so spontaneously and it made me want to do the rest of the album. With the sax riff I was just waiting for that part of the song to come up and while I was waiting I was just playing around with the sax. Gary actually kept that take as the riff. He kept everything, even the tuning up at the beginning."

Two years before Japan split-up, Numan and Karn fell out at various points during the album's recording. However, the liquid-sounding fretless basslines of tracks such as Slowcar To China, Boys Like Me and A Subway Called ‘You’ are still inspiring, opposite : poster from original UK pressing especially as they were recorded before the instrument became over-used in the 1980s.
Numan's inventive use of drum machines and acoustic percussion is also central to Dance's style. The singer's enthusiasm for Brian Eno's early solo work seeps through but Numan was a bigger fan of '70s Krautrock act Cluster, whose child-like, electronic melodies and very stark rhythm machines influenced Another Green World. In his book Krautrocksampler, ex-Teardrop Explodes leader Julian Cope enthuses about Cluster's "Clangers-on-a-toy-planet sound" and their use of drum-machines, "that most groups would not even consider as working". Both descriptions could also apply to several Dance backing tracks. Inevitably, Kraftwerk were also an influence on the LP, specifically the 10-minute Cry, The Clock Said, which shares an affinity with Mitternacht off of the second side of their 1974 Autobahn LP. In addition to primitive percussion technology, the Englishman employs acoustic sounds, handclaps and real drums (including contributions from Queen's Roger Taylor) to vary the feel and tempos of the new songs. Numan also strings together lines of abstracted mumbles and disconnected slurs into vocal rhythms, an approach which was a twist on Kraftwerk's ideology, if not their execution. In the late '70s Ralf Hutter told Sounds: "We use language as a musical instrument. It's like when we sing. People say it's too low, we cannot understand the singer. But we are not singers in the sense of Rod Stewart, we use our voices as another musical instrument. Language is just another pattern of rhythm, it is one part of our unified sound."

Meanwhile Numan's characteristically theatrical dress-sense switched from the "man-in-black" of previous albums to a '30s gangster image ripped from the pages of a Raymond Chandler novel. "I just got fed up with looking like an extra from Star Wars!" he quipped.
The new fedora covered a thinning hairline, corrected a few months later by a transplant which he instantly owned up to and years later gorily described in his autobiography Praying To The Aliens. Inevitably some of the press poked fun at him and one sympathetic writer, Record Mirror's Tim Lott, commented on the star's tendency to set blurt out the truth a little too freely: "What Gary doesn't understand yet - and what makes him terribly likeable and outrageously vulnerable - is that image is not only pictures but words. Image encompasses personal information. Learn to lie, boy."
Such humdrum practicalities aside, the '30s presentation was an appropriate style for the millionaire recluse, who partly stole the look from another of his eccentric heroes, the American aviator Howard Hughes. Numan's supremely ambitious Round-The-World flight at the end of 1981 attempted to re-create some of the romance, adventure and glamour of Hughes' era but as a nostalgic flashback it was doomed to failure. The image also brought to life one of the characters from Tubeway Army's Replicas LP. "The new look was actually on the cover of the Replicas album back in 1979," wrote Numan in Praying To The Aliens. "There is a Grey Man outside the window, dressed in a trilby and long grey overcoat. I loved the ambience of the old Sinatra and Bogart films and I thought the 1930's were, visually, a really cool era." The Daily Mirror drew a comparison between the Dance image and Frank Sinatra's physical appearance in 1958 - coincidentally the year Numan was born - and published comparative pictures of the two singers. Furthermore, Melody Maker's Karl Dallas had noted Numan's on-stage plagiarism of the crooner's swagger at the Wembley Arena shows earlier in the year: "The way he strolls around with the studied casualness of a Frank Sinatra, and hearing the massed sub-teen girls behind me squeal with delight brought back memories of an attitude to the artist-as-demigod which I thought had died with Beatlemania. I doubt if there was a dry pair of knickers in the house."
According to Numan the film noir atmosphere of the LP - later echoed by Alex Proyas' stylish-looking neo-Gothic movie Dark City which includes Numan on the soundtrack - is "mostly rooted in an imaginary 1930s. For years I'd had these pictures in my mind. Newspapers rustling through wet, empty streets, everything slightly vague and ghostlike, mostly grey, little colour. The style of the architecture was American, with fire escapes and old street lamps but it wasn't necessarily in the past, more timeless. There were no cars and the buildings were always empty and derelict, apart from a few half-guessed at perversions in upstairs apartments." The cut-up imagery of William Burroughs's work inspired elements of this dream-like world, with the American author inventing "the best narcotics agent in the business" as an "anonymous, grey and spectral" figure in 1959's published version of Naked Lunch.
"Burroughs would describe a particularly desolate street in a city," the singer explains in Ray Coleman's Gary Numan: The Authorised Biography. "and he'd conjure it up perfectly for my mind to work on. Away I went, it would be a perfect setting for a song. I'd just write a song into the situation he'd created. I'd see a street with a particular building in it, then invent something that happened on the top floor of that building."
The young star was also influenced by JG Ballard's images of desolation, rooted in the writer's childhood in Shanghai. "I would guess that a large part of the furniture of my fiction was provided ready-made from that landscape," explained Ballard. "All those barren hotels and deserted beaches, empty apartment blocks . . . the whole reality of a kind of stage set from which the cast has exited, leaving one with very little idea of what the actual play is about. All of that comes from the landscape of wartime Shanghai." Ballard's story The Drought was typical of his nightmarish urban landscapes: "The Drought is my image of what the future is going to be. I see the future as very lunar, very arid, very static, sudden tremors and harsh black and white shadows, bursts of sensation like signals reaching a cathode ray tube from a crashing airliner or from a distant galaxy. It seems to me that we are re-creating around us something of the physiology of a very lunar
world, rather cold, affectless, lacking in feeling, but perhaps expressing feeling in a different way, which is what I'm trying to get at in books like The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash!" The alien moods imagined by Ballard break into Dance through Numan's fragile, ambient electronics and the exotic strangeness of a treated violin played by the white-suited, bandaged Nash The Slash.

Meanwhile, Numan used his imagined metropolis as a filter for his own personal experiences - in particular a kiss-and-tell relationship which had turned very bitter. As Numan's biographer Ray Coleman, wrote, "while the general sound of the album was less neurotic than his previous work, the lyrics were more hard-edged and personal." When his girlfriend tried to sell her story to the newspapers, the performer's sense of betrayal is vented through much of Dance, varying between misogynist name-calling to moments where Numan soothes himself with gentle synthesizer music and is able to let go of the experience. While the 1930's surroundings offer an exaggerated backdrop for these emotions, in reality the singer's relationship with Debbie Doran was partly acted out in London's underworld of the 1980s. Numan: "She certainly hung out with some shady people. Her friends looked like modern-day gangsters. We'd go to a club and these heavy-looking people in sharp suits all knew her. They were scary people and I wasn't thinking straight at all."

Dance's twilight atmosphere is also informed by Numan's favourite Lou Reed album Berlin, which was once described by the rock critic Lester Bangs as "a gargantuan slab of maggoty rancour that may well be the most depressed album ever made." The decadent atmosphere of Reed's music can be detected in semi-hallucinogenic images of sleaze and debauchery which drift through many of Dance's songs, especially A Subway Called ‘You’ and the bonus track, Stormtrooper In Drag.
In summer '81 the latter was released as a single under the name Paul Gardiner (it reached number 49), as it was a co-write between Numan and the Tubeway Army bassist, whose second single was a posthumously released version of Velvet Underground's Venus In Furs. Plans for further work together were halted by Gardiner's heroin addiction, which prevented him from functioning as a musician by the end of '81. It's no coincidence that both Stormtrooper In Drag and another co-write Night Talk are shot through with a sense of world-weary pathos, as Numan offers an impressionistic portrayal of his friend's mental and physical state. The singer recalls in Praying To The Aliens, "Paul came into the studio one day and started to play and then he just keeled over, cracking his head quite badly on the side of the console. I thought he was unconscious but he was asleep, and when we tried to wake him we couldn't. We couldn't move him either, so tightly had he wedged himself into the side of the console. He woke up hours later and thought the track was still running. I was very worried about him. He had always been a bit flaky but this was different. This was quite scary." Tragically, less than three years after the Dance sessions, the young musician was dead from a heroin overdose.
Given such extremes and two years in the spotlight, it's hardly surprising that Dance expresses the intensity of someone who is living at the height of their emotions. "The album was haunting and full of sadness," he explains in Praying To The Aliens. "It had much of how I felt in the aftermath of Wembley running through it." Although Cry, The Clock Said suggests that an era has passed and that Numan is in the process of forgetting his past life in order to move on to something new, Crash is more cynical - fame and his stable relationship have been exposed as frauds, deepening the artist's natural sense of uncertainty and doubt. He adopts a resigned tone for My Brother's Time, justifying the belief of Record Mirror's Daniela Soave that Dance shows him to be the "Leonard Cohen of synth music ". However, the story of a prostitute (with obvious references to the woman who sold him out to the press) is also touched with compassion - "if the innocent are saved then what happens to her / What's done is done and everything's different somehow" - and warmth, as Numan repeats the imagery of "dance" as a motif for closeness and intimacy. You Are You Are's name-calling is more defiant, while the Turkish-flavoured Stories is an older song, describing a cafe scene where a mother and son are accidentally re-united. The ironically titled Moral (a re-write of Metal from The Pleasure Principle) ends the album in inconclusive, chaotic stabs of violin, feedback-drenched guitars and sarcastic humour.

Nevertheless, the dark-side of Dance is tempered by some beautiful arrangements, and lullabying analogue electronics. This release also includes the previously unreleased title-track, a simple but pretty song which slides neatly into the album's vision, alongside bizarre B-sides Exhibition and the quirkily humourous Face To Face.

Steve Malins
Steve Malins is the co-author of Gary Numan's autobiography, "Praying To The Aliens". link back to GARY NUMAN page