more james freud

 

From the Age, 27 July 1999 p. 25. 

The really interesting thing about this is the way that the Age journalist here is so uneasily snide about pop from 14-15 years earlier as an Age journalist now would never (?) be. Also, the Kylie jibe is unexpected, it's kind of the way they used to talk about Nick Cave in the early 1980s before they decided he was the most extraordinarily brilliant being of the 20th-21st century. 

The thing with putting band names in italics is also odd but whatever, they were obviously working shit out, or not. 

That Gary Numan album he mentions was so legendary, until people actually heard some of the tracks (if I recall correctly some of them were released on the reissue of Breaking Silence). Whew! By the way I literally despise Gary Numan. Throw him on the XTC pile, though I never loved GN the way I loved XTC forty years ago.  

empire state numan

Once again facebook has to work harder to capture my essence,* as I would not cross the road to see Gary Numan, a performer who I have precisely no time for. I like the Human League (inc their fab new album) and electronic music of the late 70s-early 80s like John Foxx and the M2 bands, but GN always - even in 1980 - struck me as a tryhard cardboard cut out.
I am reminded of a discussion we had on Sunday about how kids today are adopting 80s fashions (and probably have been for some time) and once again I was compelled to remind myself that stuff looked ridiculous then - we (the people I then thought as 'we') all thought it was ridiculous, the haircuts and the overblown alienation guff which GN so excelled at. All I'm saying is, there was a lot of crap around in the 80s and many of us knew it. GN was farcical and ridiculous then, he was if not a one-hit wonder a very brief flash in the pan, and that video of his (was it for Cars?) where a long line of GNs parade down a keyboard seemed immensely, powerfully pathetic and weak in 1980, and now just looks preposterous.
And so I'm not going to go to his show, no.
* I'm pretty sure I've already given them a hand with this, by trying to eliminate this ad from my page and then answering the kwik kwiz about why I didn't want to know about Gary Numan recreating his 30 year old bad album, just like I did when that ludicrous Peter Hook show was in town and f-b kept bombarding me with guff about it.

(A few days later: although I don't want to see him trash whatever legacy he has in person for money - at least not in that sense - I did pick up his book about the Hacienda at Broady Plaza for five bucks, which seemed like a score. I'm looking forward to reading it).