Good musicians are commonplace, good songwriters less so, but pioneers - people whose sheer imagination changes the sounds and textures of pop music forever - are rare indeed.
Gary Numan will never be cool again, if he ever was, and will probably not trouble the charts again. But his work of the late seventies and early eighties - the doomy, glacial, singularly European electronica - had a seismic impact which still echoes today, in the stacatto synths of Timbaland, the mechanistic angst of Nine Inch Nails, the gleefully synthetic Goldfrapp.
None of which changes the fact that Numan dances like my Dad does when drunk at weddings. Rock stars are often uncomfortable on stage - just think of shufflers like Gaz Coombes - but music as dramatic as Numan's demands something more. Numan delivers, with a performance of intensely embarrassing wriggling and hammy "ROCK STAR" poses filched from Dave Gahan. None of it bothers an intensely partisan crowd, who would probably cheer if Numan came onstage with Orville jammed on his wrist.
But then, music as original and vivid as this commands loyalty. A lot of Numan's recent work has seemed tired on CD, offering up shatteringly loud guitars in the absence of rhythmic or melodic subtlety. But tonight the skeletal lullaby "A Prayer For The Unborn" creeps over the skin like a maddening rash, while the monolithic "My Jesus" has a visceral impact that wouldn't sound out of place on Nine Inch Nail's pulverising "Broken" album.
Sadly, the price of Numan's kind of genius is that he will always be defined by that convulsive moment when he first became famous, with dislocated, spooked synth pop like tonight's brilliant "Films". Still, it's a small price to pay when you have songs as, well, pivotal as "Cars" up your sleeve. Rudimentary, repetitive and manically infectious, it formed the blueprint for bedroom superstars from Mike Skinner to Liam Howlett.
And then there's "Are 'Friends' Electric", the song that single-handedly seized synths from disco's clutches and put them in the service of bug-eyed, unnerving art rock. Tonight it sounds as extraordinary as it ever did, almost delirious with its own potential, synths as raw and punk as anything by the Sex Pistols. It makes the stunted ambitions of most meat and two veg guitar bands seem all the more pathetic and if you don't like it a pulse is also probably absent from your being, frankly.
Pop has always needed its oddballs, and Numan is one of the oddest. The revolution has been synthesised.
