Dance

Dance is the fifth studio album, the third under his own name, by electronic music pioneer Gary Numan, released in 1981. It is his first release after announcing his retirement from touring in April 1981 (about which he would soon change his mind). The album reached #3 on the UK charts, breaking his chain of three consecutive #1 albums, despite still being a solid performance.
The title is highly ironic since none of the tracks is danceable.

The songs’ lyrics deal largely with tragic sexual relationships, examined in a manner similar to the often bleak and alienating relationships between people and technology that informed earlier songs such as “Down in the Park” and “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”. The opening track “Slowcar to China” is a nine-minute opus about a prostitute. “Night Talk” is about a man dealing with a lover who is a drug addict (aptly co-written with close friend and former bass-player, Paul Gardiner, himself a heroin addict). “Cry the Clock Said” is a nearly ten-minute ballad about a breakup, widely considered one of Numan’s most beautiful songs. The salsa-flavoured “She’s Got Claws” is about a predatory woman, written as an embittered response to an ex-girlfriend who sold the story of their relationship to the tabloids. The melancholic “Stories” describes an accidental café reunion between a woman and her son by a failed relationship.