You have to stay awake to stay away

Continuing my trip back through the 1981 album charts.

13/09/81 : Dance - Gary Numan

Our third solo visit with Mr Numan (who is, of course, older than Mr Oldman) along with one Tubeway Army visit and I've quite liked his stuff - I'll be surprised if this strays too far from the formula (and I'll be very surprised if it features anything you could actually dance to).

Yeah, this isn't gonna get the grannies on the dance floor - it's understated even by Gary's standards with all sorts of weird rhythms and sounds on there. It has a very Japan (the group, not the country) kinda sound to it - I didn't mind it, but it got a bit samey across the whole album for me (all 57 minutes of it). I think it's an interesting attempt, but not a complete success for me.

We're at #3 in the charts this week on his second week of an eight week run, with this being as high as it got. The rest of the top five were Meat Loaf, The Rolling Stones, Ultravox (a new entry which I'm sad to miss out on) and ELO and the next highest new entry was good old Shaky (#8).

Wikipedia tells us this is his third solo album but his first one that he brought other musicians (apart from Tubeway Army) in to help him with - and a few interesting names pop up including Mick Karn and Rob Dean who were the bassist and guitarist from Japan, Roger Taylor, Queen's drummer and Nash The Slash, a prog Canadian violinist who used to play wrapped in bandages. Critically, the views were mixed with most people seeming to enjoy what he'd done but quite a few of them not being entirely sure why he'd done it - a couple of years later, Numan himself said "if I was supposed to be a pop star doing music for the masses, it probably wasn't the right thing to do". Commercially, it only really did anything here but it did get to #85 in Australia and #167 in the US.

discogs.com tells us that there you'll need to spend a fiver to get a copy of this, which suggests it's liked by enough people out there - although the guy trying to get £110 for a perfectly normal copy is possibly stretching things somewhat. I think this is an interesting album (if not a complete success) and not all that surprising given what he's done in the many years since - but maybe he could have waited a few more albums before unleashing it on us.

20/09/81 - Perfectly bearable

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