Gary Numan – Dance – 1981
I like Dance. I’m one of the few. It’s such a departure from the previous albums, where they were cold and distant, Dance is minimalist, melancholic and lamenting. Employing more jazzy rhythms than rock, the first side opens and closes with 9+ minute meditations on prostitution and breakups, respectively.
From what I can tell these songs, or many of them, are built on drum loops even though Cedric Sharpley and Roger Taylor (Yes, THAT Roger Taylor) are credit as drums and percussion. A year after this album Queen would release Hot Space and I know that Taylor was instrumental in pushing the band toward synth drums and keyboards, was he influenced by Numan? Perhaps.
Dance is the record that sparked the downward tumble from the charts for Gary. Well, it had to happen sometime, yes? Here’s the thing. What most people never realize about Mr. Webb. (Gary’s real surname). He was born in 1958. When the first Tubeway Army record was released he was all of 20. When Dance was released he was 23. Between those 4 years he had already released three seminal New Wave records, unknowingly changed music, and sold millions of albums.
Not too shabby.
All before he was 23.
Listening to Dance with the understanding that the composer/singer is the same age as most people when they get out of college (or just slightly older by a year) it now comes across as a much more mature work and a bold turn away from what was expected of him and what popularized him.
It should have been applauded.
This is a headset record, a moody son of a bitch (at least the first side) and a very rich and rewarding experience. I have to say it’s awfully brave to put not one but two long opuses on the first side. Usually those tracks are relegated to the second side after you’ve captured the audience’s attention. Gary Numan outshines his earlier self simply by doing what he wants to do.
Dance is more Tangerine Dream than Kraftwerk and that’s just fine with me.
The songs on side two are a little more in keeping with the Numan of old. “Crash” could have slid off The Pleasure Principle and, I believe, had it and “She’s Got Claws” and “You Are, You Are” opened this album people would have been quicker to embrace it and quicker to embrace the moodier aspects of the rest of it.
The only real letdown is “Boys Like Me” which continues the jazzy motifs of Cry and Slowcar. I imagine that I could do without the song mainly because those other two take up almost 20 minutes of the record and by the time we get to Boys I’ve got the idea and it’s too familiar, too redundant. Other times it works splendidly as on “My Brother’s Time”, a dirge that appears to be a lamentation on libidinous indifference.
Dance doesn’t suck. I think the title isn’t referring to the act of dancing but, rather, courtship. And failed ones, at that. On that scale it succeeds.
Grade: B-
ASide: She’s Got Claws
BlindSide: Slowcar to China, Cry the Clock Said, Crash, My Brother’s Time, You Are You Are, Moral
DownSide: Boys Like Me
