Gary Numan
O2 Apollo, Manchester
29th November 2025

On the penultimate date of his Telekon 45th anniversary tour, Gary Numan emerges unchained from a past that castigated him as nothing more than a machine with the occasional hit. Here, the electronic pioneer bursts open with enough confidence and wisdom to confront that past, and revel in a flux of rarities that only four decades has a way of welcoming into the present moment. 

Those lines don’t lie.

Horizontal lines intersecting vertical lines. Four. Red. They create cubes through beams of bright light. They fill space as well as empty it. They are the lines of Telekon. A threshold only Gary Numan has braved to thrash. Forty five years after his initial visitation, the vision of what was experienced still holds up just as strong. The vision doesn’t lie. Nor does Numan.

And, why would he? What would be the bloody point of lying?

Tonight at Manchester’s Apollo Theatre, the heart is splintered into a million pieces. Most likely more. Numan’s brother unexpectedly died earlier in the week, making the 45th anniversary of these songs ,THOSE songs, particularly vital. Aired in their entirety, a nerve is struck, a fanbase assembles before being ambushed. The audience carries Numan on a wave of adoration and dedicated support that has survived decades of unparalleled highs and career-crushing lows.

Yet now, what feels like an aeon later, those songs shoot through the room like supercharged surges of electronic power. They rock. They explode.

Tonight’s Telekon is a very different Telekon from the one we encountered years ago. A different account. A digression from the one from 45 years ago, but ultimately one that returns to the same site, eager to excavate the ruins of what lay before. Gary Numan is no longer a cyborg character from a dystopian tangent of history: one of sleeping by windows, dreams made of wires, joy circuits, being reminded to smile, remembering the shape in the vapour was once a rickety frame of flesh and bone. He is a man. A father. A husband. A brother. A mortal.

This sense of distance, this attractive, aloof objectivity from the Telekon odyssey, enables Numan to sink himself into the album in ways that only such an extensive period of time can retrospectively offer. From the brooding swagger of This Wreckage to the anthemic chorale of I Die, You Die and the moody, squelching of Listen To The Sirens, in all it’s dizzying, techno rush; there’s an air of palpable celebration and unstoppable ferocity burning up in the latter song’s icy, eerie exterior. A warmth. A loyalty. A love.

Numan, more animated than most who see his work as forever frozen in the shadow of Cars or Tubeway Army’s Are ‘Friends’ Electric? would believe, realises this fully. The audience, meanwhile, reciprocate this visibly ambitious, accomplished and overwhelming outpouring of rage and beauty and fragility from a man moved to tears by tides of applause that could dislodge Kilimanjaro with the ease of handing a box of Kleenex to a pathetic, doe-eyed dolt.

Down In The Park remains one of Numan’s greatest songs. Perhaps the greatest. The sound of boulevards illuminated by a series of streetlights in the hazy noir of timeless romance. A purposeful, meandering movement synchronising to the shimmering piano notes that could loop for an eternity and never tire of their hypnotism. Some twilight. Some sweetness. Life as we know it starts and ends here. The park. Without prejudice. We cannot help but be extras in every passing frame of Numan’s eccentric b-film – actors, agents, existential auteurs.

Hindsight done right harnesses the threads of history and bends them to the will of the artist. The author can make sense of mistakes. Laugh at them. Take control. Done erroneously, there is nothing apart from holes in the ground.

Everything has come true. We really are made of glass.

~

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All images by Andrew Twambley

All words by Ryan Walker