Gary Numan - Inside the Black Heart of the Machine
Brighton, Concorde 2. Tuesday, June 24, 2025.
On England’s southern shore, the wind tastes of salt and prophecy. The queue curls outside the venue from early afternoon, heavy with the sense that what’s about to happen isn’t just a gig. The Numanoids are there, faithful as pilgrims of a shadowy cult: boots, eyeliner, black coats worn thin by too many nights and too many miles. Some carry the scars of forty years of shows, others weren’t even born when Are ‘Friends’ Electric? first shattered radios worldwide. Yet they all vibrate on the same frequency: waiting for the man who is also machine, and the machine that is legend.
Nine o’clock sharp. Lights drop. A deep pulse shakes the room like a metallic heart. And there he is: Gary Numan, bent over the mic, hair spiked like a survivor of some radioactive apocalypse. He mutters he can’t see, that he feels sick, that it’s the first time without makeup. But the excuses dissolve in the roar of the crowd. The Chosen ignites, and the ritual begins.
The sound is a wall pressing against your throat: razor-sharp synths, riffs drawn by laser, drums pounding like a factory in revolt. The band moves like a small army of cyber-Egyptian priests: choreographed gestures, blank stares, ritual signs that turn the stage into an altar. Numan doesn’t just sing—he conjures. Pure becomes an anthem of survival, Cars a mythological bridge to a past that refuses to die, while My Name Is Ruin, with Persia, burns the crowd like a warrior mantra.
The family joins the rite: Raven with ethereal delicacy, Persia with rage and fire. This is no longer a concert but a dynasty revealed, a post-human bloodline singing the dawn of another world.
Then the plunge into the abyss. A Prayer For The Unborn tears at your gut, Are ‘Friends’ Electric? turns into a tribal chant of android souls, I Die: You Die explodes in furious release. Gary sweats, staggers, but keeps dancing as if the stage itself were about to combust.
And when it feels over, he returns. Films. Here In The Black. A step backward, a leap into the dark. Then silence. Smoke dissolving into digital night.
Sick, barefaced, half-blind. And still immense. This isn’t nostalgia, it isn’t revival: it’s an experience, an electronic black mass that lingers beneath the skin for days. If this was just a warm-up, Glastonbury will be the apocalypse. Gary Numan hasn’t come back—he never left.
Setlist:
Halo / The Chosen / Metal / In A Dark Place / Pure / Cars / Haunted / Everything Comes Down To This / Nothing’s What It Seems (with Raven Numan) / My Name Is Ruin (with Persia Numan) / A Prayer For The Unborn / Are ‘Friends’ Electric? / Down In The Park / Ghost Nation / I Die: You Die
Encore: Films / Here In The Black
Band: Gary Numan – voice, keyboards, guitar / Steve Harris – guitar / Tim Slade – bass / David Brooks – synth and programming / Jimmy Lucido – drums / Raven Numan – voice / Persia Numan – voice
All photos by Cris Watkins