The Fury LP cover
In 1980, Gary Numan was at the top to the New Romantic heap. He was easily my favorite artist when I got my first copy of The Pleasure Princicple LP in the summer of 1980. His brand of futuristic dystopian synth pop was being widly emulated on both sides of the Atlantic. By 1985 Numan was needing to reinvent himself.
By 1985 with many of his followers moving to synth pop, Numan was needing to reinvent himself. After seeing his fourtunes slowly fade with each release (about one a year since 1979’s Pleasure Principle) he reached back to funk as he did with Dance and I, Assassin. The Fury combined much of what I loved about Numan and combined it with the occasional soulful female backup vocals.
In the process of changing his sound, Gary went as far as to change his look into a Bowie/Ferry/James Bondish-like figure in a sporting white suit and almost no makeup. He looked as if he could be a regular pop star. The Fury was perhaps an attempt to sound like a normal pop star.
The end result often sounded cold and electronic, even the simulated soul of the backup singer sounded dispondent, but when it work it really worked. “Call Out the Dogs” and “Your Fascination” feature bombastic beats with a kind of dry funk acheived through a syncopated rhythem section.
The latter tract was nearly a hit and was played on many college radio stations and maybe once or twice on late night MTV. Around the same time Numan did have a dance hit with Bill Sharpe called “Change Your Mind”. It was funky and far more organic sounding than the material on The Fury. Limited distribution and promotion meant that The Fury failed to pick up on that monintumn in the United States – mostly because it was available only as a hard to find import.
The album had it’s share of mildly sucessful mid tempo tracks. “God Only Knows” and “Miracles” follow a similar tempate of a cool almost monotone vocal delivery. One of the few great ballads “God Only Knows” dosent reveal any new vocal range abilities from Numan, but do convey a kind of emotion seldom heard on recordings before.
Some of that emotion comes across in the form of the backup singers who can either be overbearing (“Creatures”) or highly complementary “Your Fascination” and “I Still Remember”.
The Fury is not the kind of album for the passive Gary Numan fan. It offers some insight to the coming slump he would enter that would last for the rest of the ’80s and through the ’90s. As Numan went from being an innovator, to follower to just off the radar, it became harder to come by his music in a time when localized tape trading might have supplied fans closer to his base with new material (off the grid of course). There was no local fanbase in Columbus, Ohio that I was aware of, so getting new Numan music meant buying an expensive import (as I did).
I still remember the mixed feelings I had about this album. Compounded by it’s $20 price tag, I felt I had taken a gamble and only partly won. This was the net feeling of a lot of Numan releases after 1982’s I, Assassin, but I stuck with Gary Numan through the dark years of the ’90s.
Still, The Fury was an interesting experiment that makes a great bookend to funky albums like I, Assassin. Its just too bad so few people got the chance to hear The Fury when it was new.
- More
