Rather than merely slipping through the cracks, as tended to happen with Numan's later albums of the decade, I'm not sure this one ever quite made it up through the cracks in the first place. The man himself describes its recording as something of a nightmare amounting to an expensive sounding album reduced to rummaging down the back of the cushions for change. It failed to make much of a dent in either the charts or the lives of anyone who wasn't already tuned in, and so tends to have been generally forgotten even in the recent revival of Numan's fortunes.
Nevertheless it caught me at exactly the right time and place. I was near terminally jobless and accordingly skint, living in a dusty bedsit on a diet of tinned peas, beer, fags, and comic books. I bought records here and there, mostly from the bargain bin if they had anything - which they usually didn't - and this was a quid with only the inner sleeve. I listened to it on a crappy radiogram the bloke from the corner shop had been chucking out, and for better or worse it said a lot more to me about my life than did Morrissey calling for the hanging of a demographic so far beyond my own existence as to be irrelevant. In Praying to the Aliens, Numan reported:
It was a hard album to finish. The career problems created a dreadful atmosphere to write in because it felt like everything I was doing was for nothing... I knew I wanted a dark and dreamy sound for Strange Charm. However, I didn't quite know in which direction I wanted to take my songwriting. I was also running out of things to write about. There were quite a few arguments and the studio atmosphere was unusually tense and bad-tempered.
You can sort of tell, and the record sounds like the work of a man who had painted himself into a corner, which worked for me because this was also what I seemed to have done by that point.
Musically speaking, Numan has never concealed his influences and so we had the Japan album, the Trevor Horn album, the Robert Palmer album to make but three admittedly lazy comparisons. I never quite worked out where Strange Charm might fit in this respect unless it was the Attrition album, sharing a certain mood and sounds with Smiling, At the Hypogonder Club; but it works because said mood - numb desperation concealing emotional turmoil, panic, and general confusion - raises it far above any of the stuff that bothers me about being able to recognise a specific drum machine or anything someone else already did for a wider audience. It's the lyrics and the voice, if you want to call them lyrics, plaintive expressions of longing and regret stripped down to a chilling economy delivered with that voice which, regardless of routine criticisms that tend to miss the point, carries the intent with a sincerity that hurts
This is love.
This is pain disguised as a dream.
It's simple, nothing necessarily profound, and unlikely to convert anyone with tastes aligned to specific haircuts, but this helped me feel a little less like topping myself at the time, as do the other tracks on the record with the possible exception of The Need which seems incongruously jaunty alongside My Breathing, The Sleeproom, and the rest. Should Garrington himself be reading this, which I appreciate is extremely unlikely - dude, it was a long time ago, and you should feel good about this record.
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