Ever since the 1980s ended musicians have been revisiting this most revered and reviled of pop decades, from Kylie to Kanye, LaRoux to Lady Gaga. But before synthesizers and drum machines became synonymous with disco hedonism, the first wave of post-punk electronic musicians was all about monochrome minimalism, dystopian science fiction and Cold War paranoia. This was the era commemorated at sister events in Manchester and London, both headlined by Gary Numan (pictured in London), where thousands of black-clad fans gathered to party like it was 1981.
One of the first British musicians to explore this chilly machine-pop aesthetic was John Foxx, aka Dennis Leigh. His innovative late 1970s work with Ultravox and his subsequent solo albums sounded like musical J. G. Ballard novels, with their mechanised hymns to concrete roadways and urban alienation. Now a silver-haired 63-year-old, Foxx played in London with his new band, the Maths. Although jarringly industrial and surprisingly percussive, analogue archive classics including Underpass, No One’s Driving and Hiroshima Mon Amour still felt achingly romantic, with no trace of kitsch nostalgia.
In between the elder statesmen, this collective show also featured shorter sets by modern bands clearly influenced by 1980s synth-pop. Skinny young men with sharp suits and keyboards, the Brighton four-piece Mirrors played a lively half hour full of melodic hooks and bouncy beats, sounding like the missing link between Hot Chip and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Less appealing were the New York duo Motor, whose throbbing disco-punk racket seemed little more than a pale pastiche of Suicide, Nitzer Ebb and other electro-sleaze icons.
Numan remains best known for his chart-topping synth-pop hits from the early 1980s, but he has subsequently embraced more current alt-rock styles, as his guitar-heavy performance in London demonstrated. Although still impressively boyish and energetic, the 53-year-old spent too much of this 90-minute headlining set throwing theatrical rock-messiah poses while his youthful band pounded out grimy thrash-metal riffs.
In fairness, Numan does this doom- laden shtick as well as his American superstar acolytes Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails. But he misjudged the Troxy crowd, who stood patiently through these heavy-metal histrionics, only to go wild for evergreen electro- pop anthems including Down in the Park, Are ‘Friends’ Electric? and Cars. Ironically, Numan seems to be stuck in the late 1990s, one of those lost rock “phutures” that now sounds far more dated than the post-punk 1980s.