Word: numan
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...time, it laid down rules and set new marks for others to follow. Bowie kept the cutting edge keen. There are few punks or New Wavers or art rockers or New Dancers dancing to New Music who do not owe him an abiding debt. Everyone from Gary Numan to Talking Heads and Human League and Culture Club ought to make a deep bow in his direction. If the success of his new album and the galvanic concert tour are any indication, then Bowie is setting the direction once again...
...Gary Numan and Mi Sex derive most of their ideas from the third Ultravox album, Systems of Romance, recorded in Germany with Conny Plank, a legendary producer of German electronic bands. On Systems of Romance, Ultravox abruptly departed from its first-record flirtations with Eno and the tempestuous attempts at punk mentality on the second release, Ha! Ha! Ha! The band took the Great Leap Forward, both in terms of control and content, shifting from mondo-meltdown rockers to cool and cerebral nouveau disco. The main interest moved to, the machines themselves. Push a button and watch the lights blink...
...with Island Records, and after a final U.S. tour, the band exorcised vocalist John Foxx amidst ruffled feathers and misunderstandings. The word than spread that Foxx was working on a totally electronic record, and that he would produce it for his new independent label. By that point, however, Gary Numan had the near world eating out of his metal palm; it was all too easy to imagine Foxx copying his own imposter, and slapping together a buch of machine mumbo-jumbo with titles like "Submarining with the Aliens" and "The Aliens Meet the Happy Hollisters...
...note phrase is repeated on two different scales at breakneck pace. Echoes and imitations emerge from behind the phrase's hidden contours. Amidst this turmoil, Foxx delivers the verses, in mechanized fashion with metallic overtones, and screams the chorus from a world away. "Underpass" beats recent Gary Numan products like "Complex" and "Cars" in every conceivable way. For one thing, Foxx's song has a wonderful sense of dynamics. Numan's work, on the other hand, remains as flat on an audiophile's dream system as it does on a car radio. Foxx's lyrics go far beyond the Gary...
Today, Ultravox languishes under the guidance of Midge Ure, imported from Thin Lizzy. John Foxx, though, was thrown out at just the right time. Numan has made him an honorary godfather figure, and Foxx plays the role well. Just when most of us thought he had gone the way of all of the honest idealists trapped in a music business they didn't create, Foxx redesigned himself for the 1980s and triumphed...