Numan

At the tender age of 12 my peers tempted me away from the safe environments I was used to, and into the insane world of train-spotting......

No, really.

Bear with me.


Insecure skinny white spotty geeks unite, before, or as well as going all Dungeons and Dragons, or other far worse forms of self abuse.....

I once had whole photo-albums of diesel engines, stations, etc...... But while I don't now, sort of wish I'd held onto them for posterity.

Anyway, stretching the apron strings is all part of growing up. Away from home, away from your home town, exposed to illicit things, beer, tobacco, hash, speed, mindless vandalism, influential stories from your senior influences, lies, violence, whisky, bitter stories from old men who chose to return to trains in their dotage...... It soon becomes less and less about categorising and collating, and ticking off which engines you've actually seen, and more and more about rebellion and self discovery.

Someone should make a film. Maybe Mr Welsh....

Back on topic. On a red hot summer's day in 1979 at the end of platform 9 of York Station an older fellah had a radio on, while brandishing a camera, notepad, binoculars, and a pack of sandwiches and cigarettes.....on this radio played "You Can Ring My Bell" "Bright Eyes" "Pop Muzik" "Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick" and so on and so forth.... what a bloody good year to really start to listen to music! (I had already, but really this was pretty influential!)

"Are Friends Electric?" played, about four times, as we waited, and watched the trains come and go, drink coffee, Coke, and cough our way through the mildest cigs going...Silk Cut, Kim, More Menthol......and it stuck with me. I thought it was so utterly different from what I thought I liked.

In the immediate weeks after it inspired me to order a cassette from Woods Music Shop, on Wood Street, in Wakefield, my second chosen album..... My first being in 1976 when I bought "Mud's Greatest Hits" with a Christmas voucher for "Boots" (The Chemist...) (My first single was Monty Python's "I Like Chinese", also from Wood's, probably at the same time, but I was so bloody naive, I didn't even know there were such things as record shops that a 12 year old boy could go into and learn all this stuff.........

To cut a long story short, I bought everything in time that Tubeway Army and Gary Numan put out, until Strange Charm. I have no idea what happened after that, as I got side-tracked, and a bit bored. In hindsight I think I was actually on a tight budget and fell in love with a thousand and one other bands, from all the classic Doors/Joy Division/Bowie/Pink Floyd/Led Zep/Stones/Jam/etc etc onwards.....

Music shops became mecca, and my enthusiasm cost me, and benefitted me too no doubt. But I ended up ignoring my initial idol. I hardly listened to his stuff, except on very rarer occasions, and then the records got scratched, lost, left in someone else's house, or whatever when I moved.....

Thank Goodness for the internet!

The other tracks on YT are the obvious ones, until you start mining down to the nitty gritty.....when you can find all sorts of gubbins......

Got to go and listen to Savage, the new album ASAP...... not enough leaks as yet.....