Gary Numan: 1,000: Live at the Electric Ballroom

(BMG)

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Out 7 November 2025

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Gary Numan marks his 1,000th gig with a live album full of blistering industrial goth metal that marks his renaissance and proves him to still be vital force. 

Gary Numan has had a long and interesting musical life. Starting out with punk band Tubeway Army, formed in punk’s peak of 1977, he quickly adopted synthesiser sounds and looked to move out of the emerging punk conformity. This led to his becoming the first synthpop star when Are Friends Electric reached number one in the UK charts.

My friends and I had followed this development as fans, from punk to futurist. I can still clearly remember the shock that greeted his announcement that the next album he released would not feature any guitars. For a successful artist, he was still at the cutting edge of making music. However, there is an old adage that states that pioneers get the bullets while settlers get the gold, and this proved true for Numan. His popularity soon waned and he was overtaken by the likes of Human League and Depeche Mode.

As an old fan, there was definitely a feeling that Numan had lost his way, releasing records that were both forgettable and regrettable, making jazz influenced records and recording with members of Queen. But this was not to be the end of the story. His influence never faded and the more industrial direction he was moving in while away from the spotlight coincided with patronage from the likes of Nine Inch Nails and led to an unlikely renaissance. Gary Numan found himself in vogue again.

It is a direction that suits him and he has had a run of excellent albums that have cemented his standing as both a legacy inspiration and a vital current artist.

This has been evident at his many concerts, Numan being someone who is seemingly never off the road. There is a good argument to be made that this is where Gary Numan is at his best, backed by what looks like the house band from a Mad Max style future, giving great silhouette against the fury of his light show. Live, his music is loud and brutal, a forcing together of humans and technology, proving the justification for his deification by the industrial scene. Even old material such as Cars and My Shadow In Vain are reborn from trebly futurist pop into beefed up metal monsters.

Any doubters out there can find this out for themselves on Numan’s new live album, 1,000: Live at the Electric Ballroom, a recording of his 1,000^th live show! Not bad for someone who decided never to tour again back in 1978.

1,000: Live at the Electric Ballroom kicks of with Splinter from 2013 album Splinter (Songs From A Broken Mind) , a suitably atmospheric opener full of tribal drums and wails. Numan must have one of the most distinctive and recognisable voices in modern music, with a melancholy, almost sinister edge to it that lends the songs a plaintive, lamenting feel.

It is a great opener, it is slow paced but powerful, its moody synths and pounding drums do well in setting the tone for the rest of the show. Next up is Cars, Numan’s first solo single and his most successful. Live, the synths are sharper, the drums are bigger and the sound is generally lifted several notches. Nevertheless, it does seem a bit of a throwback to a different era, the Numan we have today is not the tinny synth pioneer of old and, despite all the layers of sound that have been added, I think I prefer listening to the newer songs these days. Which is just as well, because most of this live album focuses on this, as next song Is This World Not Enough points out. Another slow powerhouse of a song, redolent of a gothic Bond theme at times, the Numan of today has no need to rehash old glories to prove he is as vital as he has ever been.

In A Dark Place adds further weight to this theory, a stop start piece of industrial electro-metal. The fact that this was a single back in 2006 shows that Numan had perhaps moved his focus from chart positions and shifted it to building a legacy and creating a run of singles the equal of any of his peers.

We are back to his Splinter album next with Here In The Black, full of LOUD synth stabs and whispered vocals. There is a hint of horror film menace to much of Numan’s material, and it is easy to see this soundtracking a tense psychological thriller and ramping the tension up dramatically.

The Chosen brings us further forward in time, but it is to the band’s credit that they manage to make songs chosen from decade’s worth of material sound like one homogenous whole. Numan has surrounded himself with a world class band that help him realise the epic scale of his vision.

Numan’s daughter Persia joins them for My Name Is Ruin, perhaps one of the best known songs of his recent phase, receiving much exposure on TV and radio at the time of its release. And it is easy to see why, it is dramatic and hard hitting but still manages to demonstrate Numan’s knack for making music that is both epic and earworm-catchy at the same time.

From here we are back to 1980 with I Die You Die, but apart from the fact that the keyboard riff is playing the same notes, you would be hard pressed to relate this to the version that made the top ten way back when. The Gary Numan of the 21^st Century rocks hard!

A Prayer For The Unborn is perhaps one of Numan’s tenderest songs but here is still a song that has huge physical presence, as a delicate keyboard riff struggles to keep on top of waves of noise and colossal percussion.

Are Friends Electric is up next, the song that kicked the door open and ushered in the possibilities of synth pop and ignited the 80s. Again it has been beefed up, but it almost resists this process, retaining much of its early charm. It is no easy task to sound ethereal and substantially solid at the same time, but Numan and his band manage it. Despite the 21^st century metallic sheen applied to it, it is still an anthem of wan alienation.

Resurrection takes us away from such radio friendly ideas, opening with threatening and discordant keyboard stabs before settling into a slow, heavy almost dirgey instrumental, washing the taste of a pop hit out of our minds. It is easy to see why Nine Inch Nails have looked to Numan for inspiration, it also shows that that this is a very much a two way street. The song is little more than an intro to Down In The Park, which is still a huge favourite with the fans if the roar of applause is anything to go by. This is a song that still suits Numan’s more modern oeuvre in two ways; firstly, it always had that hint of menace and fear to it and secondly, it suits being given a more epic and upfront feel.

Haunted encapsulates the more modern sound, coming across as an industrial AC/DC. The band are tight and can stop, start and turn on the spot, again adding to the intensity of the live Numan experience. Remind Me To Smile takes us back to 1980 once again and, while the band still have their dials set to 11, it is Numan’s vocal line that dates it, not the music. It is an era I am not overly familiar with, but the live version here makes me want to look back at Telekon, now an astonishing 45 years old.

Numan and his band have no problem combining the old and the new, and next track The Gift takes us forward over 40 years without the experience sounding jarring. The sparser nature of the beginning allows us to see how the songs here are constructed; layers of chugging guitars are added to an electronic pulse while a bass holds things down. Gradually, arena sized drums appear in the mix and huge quantities of keyboards are then put down and we have moved from a sound that can almost be described as gentle to an electronic rock colossus.

It must have been enormously impressive to see all this built right in front of your very eyes and surely Gary Numan is one of the best live artists in the world today. There seemed to be a lot of people who were unaware of this when he played Glastonbury earlier this year, as social media was full of astonished comments from people who have obviously not followed his career and turned on BBC footage expecting to see a comforting trip back to the 80s and were instead confronted with huge slabs of industrial noise and an artist who has continued to evolve and is incredibly again at the top of his game with no need to hit the nostalgia circuit.

Halo emphasises this, as clashing electro-beats fight with crushingly heavy guitars. Gary Numan has no need to rest on old glories, he is more than capable of creating new ones.

That said, he then heads off in an unexpected run of songs that date back to 70s. If Numan wanted his 1000^th show to be a celebration of his whole back catalogue he has succeeded, this live album takes in the whole length and breadth of his substantial and impressive body of work.

Metal is a firm fan favourite and a prime contender for a revamp; it’s synthesiser octave jumps remain intact and are actually sung back at the band by the crowd. I remember this being such a futuristic sound back in 1979 when it was first released and it is good to see that it has survived into 2025.

From here we go even further back in time with the surprise inclusion of Tubeway Army’s My Shadow In Vain and even That’s Too Bad, which predates Numan’s discovery of synthesisers and is the biggest surprise inclusion on the album.

Between these two songs, there is a rare piece of communicating with then audience and even some laughter from Numan as he admits that he “did fuck up Metal”. It is a nice unguarded moment and one that introduces the human element back into a gig where it has perhaps been purposefully missing.

That’s Too Bad is greeted like an old friend by the audience and remains remarkably faithful to the original, back when the band still had both feet firmly in the punk camp.

The 100^th live gig finishes with Exile, bringing this up to date a little and the gig has been intense, subtle, heavy and emotional by turns.

It is hugely impressive that Gary Numan is still making music that is inspired, forward looking and still influential in a time when all his peers seem to be taking the easy road and playing their hits at the roster of nostalgia festivals and one off events.

He has made it this far due to his own doggedness, his deep love of making music and his refusal to rest on his laurels. I can not think of one other artist from the people who followed him who can also make that claim, and for that he deserves admiration and respect. The fact that the music he is making still sounds so vital and still kicks up a storm is simply unprecedented.

With 1,000 gigs in his rear view mirror, Gary Numan is still the future made flesh.

Words by Banjo, you can find his Louder Than War archive here