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What ends up completing the reissue and rerelease of Gary Numan's earliest albums for Beggars Banquet makes for yet another piece in one of the most curious puzzles of popular music. Numan's claim of influence on a horde of later musicians might once have seemed laughable, his late eighties and early nineties efforts not merely treading water but practically horrifying. His Prince covers alone were pathetic, and doubly bad considering how Prince himself was an open fan. But come 2003 and his place is perfectly secure, finding not only an outlet for his industrial/metal hybrids of recent times but able to show how everyone was listening to his earliest work more closely than most would admit. That Basement Jaxx could create "Where's Your Head At?" (and get a commercial hookup out of it) from Numan's "M.E." while soon thereafter the Sugababes rode a mashup of "Are 'Friends' Electric?" with Adina Howard to a chart topping appearance in the UK is enough to show how what Numan did isn't to be easily ignored or set aside.
The secret wasn't really the hooks or Numan's sci-fi fascinations, though both were essential. At base it was all about rhythm, and the fact that someone openly fascinated with the spare electronic beats from numerous Krautrock sources could combine that with his own glam/punk roots. If Kraftwerk received the appellation 'so stiff it's funky,' Numan actually aimed even more for the dancefloor, a frozen-in-space robot that yet popped and moved (and there's no doubt the electro and incipient hip-hop crowd was all over his music, even without Afrika Bambataa's liner note praise). Both I, Assassin and Warriors are testament to his often unremarked but core obsession, albums at once products of their time and trying to transcend them. There's little surprise why, too—by that time Numan had nothing left to prove, with hits under his belt, a fair fortune amassed (later lost then built back up, but such is fame) and enough critical hatred to probably make him laugh rather than cry all the way to the bank. Perhaps even more intriguingly, unlike his erstwhile idol David Bowie at the same time—who aimed for the mainstream, got it and then found himself turned into an all-around entertainer for years—Numan then dealt with the obsessions of the eighties in his own way, less interested in make-everyone-happy confections than his own abrupt focus.
The key was clear on his previous album Dance, which was the true dramatic break from three or four minute, tightly-wound efforts to extended meditations, textures and bass work openly borrowed from the brilliant group Japan (Numan went so far as to recruit bassist Mick Karn for the album) and a refocus of image from unusual spaceman to androgynous film noir. I, Assassin continued the general approach in more ways than one—Numan in trenchcoat and hat under a lamppost on the front cover, Pino Palladino taking over the fretless bass work from Karn—but also provided a touch more of the immediacy of Numan's earliest work. It's a careful balance that just works, and if "Music For Chameleons" and "White Boys and Heroes" aren't as lodged in the memory as the likes of "Are 'Friends' Electric?" and "Cars," their melodies are no less slippery, their beats often more creative and supple. Where Palladino's kind of approach rapidly became a yupfunk cliché soon after, here his clipped efforts, offset by synth moans and crawls and Chris Slade and John Webb's crisp, varied percussion (check the break from muffled industrial beats to the punchy main arrangement on the title track), suggest something more alien and unnerving than simply trying to set the mood in a blue neon light bar with more shoulder pads than brain cells. Numan's ear for something moodily beautiful hasn't deserted him either—both "A Dream in Siam," a clear continuation from Dance's Asian-inspired motifs, and "This is My House" are laced with sinuous, just chilly enough keyboards against his mournful vocals. And if "The 1930's Rust" was a suave finger-snapping lounge song—though Numan's touch for invention is evident, even making the harmonica sound weirdly lost and forlorn—"War Songs" is the real surprise. Its introductory compressed guitar descent/ascent, brutally minimized just like what beats there are, completely predicts U2's supposedly experimental "Numb" a decade in advance. The usual slew of bonus tracks complements the reasonable essay and excellent sound—"Noise Noise," with one of the meanest and most heavily treated guitar lines ever, will be the one for the fanatics, having become a live standby in recent years. Meanwhile, "Bridge? What Bridge?" shows Numan has a sense of humor, even if he really should avoid trying to improvise his singing (while his band should suffer no illusions that they're a hip-hop crew).
Warriors is another matter, sometimes all too obviously a bridge between the mysterious evocations of Dance and I, Assassin and the next-to-come Berzerker, his first album away from Beggars and also the first sign of the career collapse that rendered the rest of the eighties as an unfulfilled promise for Numan while his future disciples started making their own initial noises. Numan's propensity for image-shifting—one of his better-learned lessons from Bowie—tripped him up here, as his leather-bound post-Mad Max/Road Warrior drag just made him look like an extra in one of those many films knockoffs. The music sometimes sounds like it should be on the soundtrack to them as well, which isn't really a compliment—Numan's vision of the future, however borrowed and reworked to provide lyrical and sometimes musical grist, at its best found its own synthesis and place. Even odder was the fact that while Numan had returned to working with his core backing band after a hiatus of three years, but rather than either taking spirit from the past or finding a dramatic new twist for the future, things remain a bit uninspired all around. Some of the songs actually do achieve a better balance pretty well—while the title track needs a bit of a boost in the mix (even after remastering it's still pretty muffled, an often frustrating problem throughout the album that Numan as co-mixer nevertheless regarded as essential), the chorus finds inspirational heft while the guitar soloing is a nicely snaky, mysterious thing. At its dreamiest, the drones and spare rhythms of songs like "The Iceman Comes" and "Love Is Like Clock Law" are wondrous, even while Dick Morrissey's sax breaks, though of their time and place, don't intrude or ruin the flow. But then there's the full-on dullardness of "This Prison Moon"—one of his best titles ruined by one of his worst songs, the hints of darkness ruined by a go-nowhere AOR/funk arrangement. Other songs like "My Centurion" and, lovely introduction aside, "Sister Surprise" are equally trash, and all too clearly show how Berzerker was going to eventually turn out, and in all cases it's Numan's abandoning of his obsessive experimenting with rhythm that's at fault, a desire to fit in rather than stand out. That the last song on the original album was called "The Rhythm of the Evening" was perhaps all too telling in retrospect. As with I, Assassin, there are bonus tracks a-plenty, and there's not really much to say about them beyond their presence (including the single version of "Sister Surprise" is a step too far).
With these discs Numan's up-down-up again career is now as buffed up, remastered, polished and available again as it'll get, and even if this is one and a half good albums rather than two, they're still worth the investigating. If the early eighties is the new focus of revival musically, there's always room for one of its most underrated avatars.
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