Released in September 1980, Telekon was Gary Numan's third successive number one album in the UK. Following the stark, symmetrical style of The Pleasure Principle, the new album was densely atmospheric and opulent-sounding, incorporating a wide range of sythesisers, as well as viola, violin and Satie-like piano. Alongside the well established Mini-Moog and Poly-Moog, classically-trained keyboardist Dennis Haines, recalls how the old ARP Pro-Soloist was explored on Telekon. "Gary found one particular sound on it which was very moody, more an emotional sound as opposed to electronic. It was very weepy, a sugary sweet sound and he decided he wanted to put a bit more emotion into the music so he used it in quite a few different ways on the album."

Numan also experimented with acoustic percussion sounds, drum machines and re-introduced the guitar, stretching himself and his band (still Cedric Sharpley, Paul Gardiner and Chris Payne, but now fattened by Rrussell Bell on guitar and violin, who joined in time for 1979 British tour, and Billy Currie's replacement Dennis Haines) with some of the most imaginative arrangements of his career. Sounds' John Gill, an articulate but vociferous critic conceded, "Telekon sees Numan fleshing out his sound, perhaps a little belatedly. Back in the mix unusual things are beginning to happen, new levels of interest, new layers of sound, both formal and free." As the American magazine, Rolling Stone put it - "this is beautiful music."

The results were melancholy but strangely soothing, a very mature record for a 22-year-old, who was already obsessed with age and the transience of fame. "Telekon is extremely dark and introspective in places," he explains, "and the whole album has a very doomy, almost oppressive feel to it. This was my first new album after the success, so, rather than fantasising about life as a pop star, I now wrote about it from a position of real knowledge. The reality that I found myself in was a thousand times worse than I had ever imagined. I felt battered. Scarred inside and out, I was struggling to keep it all together. The album is a clear example of a young man whose dream had turned swiftly into a nightmare, trying to make sense of it all."

The album's first single, We Are Glass (although neither it, or the follow-up I Die; You Die were included on the original UK vinyl record in a value-for-money move) was released in May 1980, peaking at number five. The chorus' handclaps were familiar from Cars but the new song featured an uplifting, infectiously catchy keyboard line, swinging percussion and jagged rhythm guitars. Lyrically, it set the tone for the forthcoming album. "I'd written the song about how I felt in the wake of my success," he reveals in his autobiography, Praying To The Aliens. "Fragmented, transparent, hard, brittle, cold, sharp and just about ready to break into a thousand pieces. I re-introduced a heavy, choppy guitar riff because I was interested in blending different sounds and instruments together. Synthesisers had become accepted very quickly and within a year of Are "Friends" Electric? it seemed as though everyone had one. After all the song and dance about them it was no longer valid to stand next to a keyboard and say, Look at me, I'm different because I use a synthesiser."

In August, Numan released the beautifully anthemic I Die; You Die, which reached number six in the UK charts. A very pretty, circular melody is scratched with guitars, ear-piercing electronic sounds like an unoiled gate opening at the end of the record and a vindictive lyric, directed at the media. He also unveiled his new boilersuited look, which would become as famous as the blond android and all-black Cars-image of the previous year. "On the cover of I Die; You Die and the next album, Telekon, I wore a leather jumpsuit that I'd found in a shop in Kensington called Reflections. I came up with the idea of the parallel red belts from a roadwork sign in Germany and I also incorporated the design into the cover artwork and tour T-shirts. The final touch was a streak of red dye in my hair." A domestic household item completed the album cover. "On the Telekon sleeve I'm holding a silver object which looks vaguely like a weapon of sone kind. It's actually a tube from my mum's Hoover, the ends were airbrushed so you couldn't tell it was hollow," he laughs.

The idea changed dramatically, with the songwriter replacing a fantasised telekenitic nightmare with his own imploding emotions. Although there was clearly a link between the distorting, egotistic power of fame, "where I could make things happen just by thinking" and the Scanner-like character he first had in mind, the lyrics on Telekon are overtly personal. "The entire album is full of confusion, disappointment and paranoia. It makes repeated references to leaving, to being used," he says.

During the recordings at Rock City Numan had decided to retire from live shows after his world tour. In fact he bowed out in spring 1981 with lavish shows at Wembley Arena (released on CD for the first time in 1997) and pulled

- This Wreckage

- The Aircrash Bureau

- Telekon

- Remind Me To Smile

- Sleep By Windows

- We Are Glass

- I'm An Agent

- I Dream of Wires

- Remember I Was Vapour

- Please Push No More

- The Joy Circuit

- I Die: You Die

- A Game Called Echo

- Photograph

- Down In the Park (Piano Version)

At this point of retreat he'd sold over 10 million records and had toured extensively in Britain, Europe, Japan, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Although the critics underated him, he still picked up an impressive list of awards. In 1979 he was the winner of the Melody Maker's readers poll Brightest Hope category, The Best Male Singer in the Daily Mirror's British Rock And Pop Awards; in 1980 he won the Best British Male Artist in London's Capital Radio Music Awards; in 1981 he was named Male Singer Of The Year in Smash Hits' readers poll, with Sting second and David Bowie third. Scrutinised at every turn and with a naturally thin-skinned nature which took criticism extremely badly, Numan was well on his way to a nervous breakdown. Melody Maker rock journalist Jon Savage already saw the danger signs when he interviewed Numan during his first British tour. "The journalist looks at the fragile, incredibly determined youth and wonders. He's impressed by Numan's candour, humour, directness and willingness to communicate, and respects the sweep of his vision and his nerve in carrying it out. He thinks later, that Numan might still be seeing only part of the overall picture and that, although young, fast, bright and learning on his feet, the pressure of his chosen position is going to give him severe problems." "I regret being so dramatic about giving up touring, but I'm not sure if I would still be around if I hadn't done it," admits Numan.

However, while the cracks started to show in his personality and increasingly emotional career decisions, it was a fantastic time creatively. The accelerated, day-to-day input of new experiences at a time when electronic music was also going through a major revolution inspired Numan and the ideas came quickly and easily. While he's the last person to claim to be an inkie-devouring "expert" on pop music, he certainly listened to a lot of different artists from mid-79 to late 1980. He checked out Devo in America, met Yellow Magic Orchestra in Japan and Jon Savage recalls Numan listening to numerous Krautrock acts, including Kraftwerk, Neu and Can, when he followed him round on tour for a magazine article. In the space of a few months Numan also encouraged Ultravox to reform and raved about the English pop band, Japan, resolving to work with various members on his next album.

Numan also fitted in well with Japan the country, where he posed as an android for a large department store's advertising campaign and filled his shopping bags with new musical gadgets and clothes. After a couple of visits, the world of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukio Mishima, the proto-fascistic, homosexual writer who surrounded himself with gay samurai and committed ritualistic suicide in 1970, seemed to quietly influence him. David Bowie had a portrait of Mishima above the bed of his Berlin flat in the late '70s but Numan walked away from Japan with a new wardrobe - partly featured in the video to I Die; You Die - , a renewed interest in martial arts, a developing taste for minimalistic atmospheres which formed the basis of 1981's Dance album, a Japanese girlfriend and a determination to ritualistically disembowal his pop star creation with all the pomp and ceremony of a farewell concert. He may have been sketchy on the details but in pop music such quick, manic enthusiasm can evoke a new atmosphere around an artist and he decided to sing his farewell message in Japanese on the "self-portrait" song, This Wreckage. "The Japanese lyrics on the song said, I Leave You," he explains. "A Japanese girl, who I went out with briefly, spelled out the characters for me. I was already sure that I was finished with touring so it was a disguised way of saying goodbye to the fans, long before I announced it for real."

As for the rest of the album, the title track, a "particularly dark" almagamation of Bowie's Aladdin Sane and Numan's own android-exotica, is followed by the funkier Remind Me To Smile, a song which shows off Numan's ability to write a big pop chorus - unfortunately he released the dour This Wreckage as a single instead, stalling at number 20 in December 1980. Meanwhile, the dreamy, lullabying electronics of Sleep By Windows are complemented by a surreal lyric, vaguely about the fans camped outside but filtered through Howard Hughes-ian paranoia. According to the singer, The Aircrash Bureau "is a supernatural horror story about a pilot who was killed during the D-Day invasion of World War Two. He comes back to warn people before they fly if their aeroplane is about to have an accident." It's one of the album's highlights, featuring a soaring synthesiser melody, slurred vocals and some sweet piano runs, apparently encouraged by Numan's band. Rrussell Bell remembers, "Gary had an old upright piano at home where he wrote all the tunes. The sustain pedal was gone so it only half sustains and it's a tone flat. When he came to the studio he tried to get a similar sound to that, which he succeeded admirably in doing, even if the studio had a brilliant Steinway. It all ended up sounding honky-tonk. In a couple of the Telekon tracks we snuck in some nicer sounding "pretty piano."

I'm An Agent launched the old vinyl second side with gritty guitars and another big keyboard line. "I thought of the track, I'm An Agent when I woke up one morning in a flat I had in Ealing," Numan recalls. "I was dreaming it and woke up singing the line, We are clean, don't ask, I'm an agent", ran to the telephone and sang it down the line to a friend, as I didn't have a tape recorder and I didn't want to forget it." I Dream Of Wires, which Robert Palmer covered for his 1980 Looking For Clues album, is "pure science fiction. Philip K Dick's masterpiece Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? was the starting point for it. The song outlines the thoughts of the last electrician on earth, who is looking back nostalgically at better days, when he was known as The Sparkle."

Remember I Was Vapour, a song previewed on the 1979 UK tour, was "written specifically for the fans, reminding them I am human and that all the things that hurt them, will hurt me. All the things they need, I need." Please Push No More is one of Numan's shifting time-frame tracks, "about quitting touring but it's written as though the final moment has just happened. I was trying to imagine how it would feel the moment after I'd played my last song." Not suprisingly it was one of the melodramatic highlights at the Wembley Farewell Shows a few months later, while the cleverly structured closing track, The Joy Circuit was perfect for the nights' dramatic lighting effects, shifting between edgy violins and minimal piano. Also included on this CD is a cover of the Eric Satie instrumental Trois Gymnopedies, and two songs which the Frenchman clearly influenced, Photograph (actually an out-take from the Pleasure Principle sessions) and a solo piano version of Down In The Park.

- Steve Malins

The Beggars Banquet Gary Numan catalogue is being made available on Real Audio courtesy of Joey Lindstrom at World Wide Webb, so you can get a lo-fi idea of what the albums sound like (if you don't already know!)

Numan Biography