Look, we could pontificate about this release till the cows come home, and let’s face it, lest there’s a sudden culling of bovines everywhere, I damned suspect we might do. How important is Gary Numan and the Tubeway Army? Very. Very very important. Way ahead of their time in a time before time and the same is naturally true of that charming old miserablist, John Peel – both of whom feature here, courtesy of Cooking Vinyl’s brand spanking new Maida Vale division, an imprint that promises to dig deep into various vaults for interesting radio sessions and concert performances. And somewhere along the bedrock, they found this.
Gary Numan: The Complete Peel Sessions features 16 old tracks providing a timely (or not so timely given that everyone else has got rich off the back of them) reminder of how influential the former Whirling Dervish was or is. Or both. The Nine Inch Nails said they loved him, the Foo Fighters loved him, Queens of the Stone Age, Basement Jaxx, Afrika Bambaataa – they all loved him. Even that guy who wrote that song for the Sugababes loved him. There was that song ‘Cars’. And then there was that other one. Neither of which prepares you for the incredibly fresh and portentous stuff you have here – all of which sound like they could have been ripped from Myspace or a peer-to-peer networking application of your choice as recently as last week. Crunchy guitars, screaming analogue bleeps and bloops, a tendency to stand in awe of new technological advances and a crazy, crazy vocal. It’s dark, it’s depressing, it’s deeply disturbed and has a contemporary edge that even an IPod would be proud of.
Not for completists: for everyone!