Strange Charm
| Strange Charm | ||||
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| Studio album by Gary Numan | ||||
| Released | November 1986 | |||
| Recorded | 1986 at Rock City Sound Studios, London | |||
| Genre | New wave, synthpop, dark wave, industrial | |||
| Length | 73:48 | |||
| Label | Numa | |||
| Producer | Gary Numan, The Wave Team, Ade Orange, Bill Sharpe, Nick Smith | |||
| Gary Numan chronology | ||||
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| Alternative cover | ||||
1999 UK reissue cover
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| Singles from Strange Charm | ||||
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| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |
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Strange Charm is the tenth studio album, and eighth under his own name, by musician Gary Numan, released in 1986 through by Numa Records. The album was not released in the United States until 1999 when it was issued in a digitally remastered form with five bonus tracks by Cleopatra Records. In the same year it was also reissued with bonus tracks in the United Kingdom by Eagle Records.
The album's title is derived from concepts of particle physics, specifically the strange quark and the charm quark.
Strange Charm was the last studio album released on his self-funded Numa Records label before he signed a contract with IRS Records (he would later release two more albums on Numa in the 1990s). Unlike most of his previous albums, Strange Charm is a fragmented release with no obvious theme on it, either musically or lyrically. Numan admitted that the album was disjointed, concerned more with atmosphere than theme. The majority of the album was produced by The Wave Team, who had produced most of Numan's previous offering, The Fury, and continued in a style similar to the previous album (with liberal use of saxophone and female backing-vocals). However, the album's stand-out tracks, "My Breathing" and "New Thing from London Town", were produced by Ade Orange and Bill Sharpe & Nick Smith, respectively, and offer a departure from the industrial sound of the rest of the album into quite different atmospheres. "New Thing from London Town" was a re-recorded version of the single released by Numan and Bill Sharpe (under the name Sharpe + Numan) a month before the release of Strange Charm. The Strange Charm version of the song retains the original music, but features new lyrics written and sung by Numan (the lyrics on the single version were written by Roger Odell). Elsewhere, the songs on Strange Charm range from radio-friendly pop ("The Sleeproom", "I Can't Stop") to slow-burning ballads "This is Love"), to fast-paced, energetic synth-rock (the title track).
By the time of Strange Charm's recording, Numan had found himself more and more alienated from the mainstream of British pop music, while most of the money he had made during the early part of his career had now been consumed by his costly self-funded record label. Numan later recollected that the studio atmosphere was tense:
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