Numan Revives a Future Past: Telekon Triumphs at the O2 Academy

⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4/5)

**GARY NUMAN PERFORMING AT GLASGOW’S O2 ACADEMY**
**PHOTOCREDIT: CALUM BUCHAN**

Gary Numan’s return to Glasgow’s O2 Academy on 11 November 2025 felt less like a standard tour stop and more like the reopening of a sealed chamber of musical history. The Telekon 45th Anniversary Tour is an unusual proposition in today’s nostalgia-saturated market: instead of exploiting the easy popularity of a classic album, Numan approaches Telekon with the seriousness of a curator restoring a lost work. What unfolds over the next ninety minutes is a performance that is both fiercely faithful to the past and startlingly alive in the present, witnessed by a crowd whose devotion borders on ritual.

From the moment the house lights drop, the atmosphere thickens. The stage glows in harsh red bars, a visual echo of Telekon’s sleeve design, and Numan walks into the cross-light with no introduction, no banter, and no attempt at sentimentality. He begins immediately with “This Wreckage,” his voice cutting through the mix with a clarity that surprises those who haven’t seen him in recent years. Age has added grit but not weakness; if anything, he sings with more character now, the cool detachment of old replaced with something heavier and more human. The sound is immense—modern, muscular, but still recognisably carved from the icy shapes of the early eighties.

He moves steadily through the Telekon material, not in album order but in a way that feels intentionally paced. “Remind Me to Smile” carries a wry bitterness that suits him perfectly; “Remember I Was Vapour” floats on ghostly synth textures; and “I Dream of Wires” becomes one of the evening’s defining moments, delicate and unsettling, performed with an almost monastic stillness. But it is “Like a B-Film” that truly electrifies the room. A deep cut Numan rarely plays, it is delivered with impeccable precision, as though he recognises how much it means to the die-hard fans who know every fragment of this album. The applause afterward is explosive, a release of decades of waiting.

Numan barely speaks, but he doesn’t need to. His presence does the talking. He moves with slow, punctuated gestures, sometimes striking sharp angles with his arms, sometimes folding inward as if the music is pulling him into its circuitry. The lighting is severe and minimal, framing him like a figure suspended in a neon cage. The band around him is tight, disciplined, and impressively attuned to the tones of the original record. They manage to replicate the brittle analogue textures without sounding like a museum piece.

As Telekon winds toward its climactic run—“The Joy Circuit,” “I Die: You Die,” and “We Are Glass”—the energy in the room peaks. Glasgow audiences are famously vocal, but tonight they are attentive in a way that feels almost reverent. These songs aren’t treated like old hits; they feel like hymns to a different kind of future, the one Numan predicted long before anyone thought synthesizers could carry emotional weight.

The encore defies expectation. Instead of leaning on radio staples like “Cars” or “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”, Numan dives into his early Tubeway Army catalogue, and the shift is thrilling. “Down in the Park” emerges dark and monolithic, a dystopian prayer with a sinister elegance. “My Shadow in Vain” jolts the room with punk-driven urgency. “Friends” snarls with metallic tension. And then “Listen to the Sirens,” his first single, closes the night in stark, urgent fashion, reminding the audience just how far his journey has travelled while still carrying the DNA of those earliest experiments.

The crowd roars their approval, not because they’ve heard the big hits… they haven’t but because they’ve been given something far rarer: a performance built on trust. Numan trusts his audience to want substance over spectacle, depth over familiarity, mystery over nostalgia. And in return, Glasgow gives him total commitment. Every song is met with passion, every silence with patient awe.

What makes the night unforgettable is how current Telekon feels. Its anxieties—surveillance, technology, alienation—belong as much to 2025 as to 1980. The music has aged not by softening but by sharpening, its relevance increasing in proportion to the world’s unease. Numan doesn’t update these songs; he simply reveals how little updating they need.

By the time he leaves the stage, having spoken no more than a few quiet thank-yous, it’s clear the audience has experienced something unusual: a legacy artist not coasting on his history, but actively deepening it. The performance is precise, honest, atmospheric, and deeply felt. It feels like a restoration of an album that shaped electronic music before electronic music knew what it could be.

Gary Numan’s Telekon anniversary show in Glasgow is, simply put, extraordinary. Not because it recreates the past, but because it refuses to treat the past as finished. This is the sound of a visionary revisiting his predictions and finding they still resonate—loudly, clearly, and with unnerving accuracy. A masterclass in integrity, devotion, and the strange beauty of machines and emotion colliding, forty-five years later.