Review of Gary Numan: Berserker

Introduction

Gary Numan features in this visual representation of his album ‘Berserker’ and entertains live twelve tracks from his career in eighties synthesizer and electronic music. With a lit stage, and percussion he uses his unique style of clothing, make-up and dance along with his music to intrigue his fans. During the DVD you can gain access to insights about each track and a background on it and where it ranked in the charts.

Video

Set in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1 this live concert focuses mainly on two factors the music and visuals of the show. The quality of the picture transfer is quite good, very clear and clean from grain or dropouts, despite a slight softness to the picture itself. The smoke on stage can be seen in detail and is clear on screen, there is a lot of bold dark color in the background and the glare from the various lights and colored bulbs stands out nicely.
Each track performed has a certain color scheme to it utilizing the colored lights on stage, sometimes lots of light activity and sometimes orange or blue tones. The stage set up is quite basic and dated; you can see this in the light rigs and background effects but never the less works well with the performance.
Gary wears ‘zombie’ looking white and dark blue makeup, a white belted jacket, trousers and shoes and has his sleeves rolled up. His performance isn’t exactly Michael Jackson but he walks around the stage un-energetically and bored looking sometimes! Now and again he produces a little clap, arm wave or shake. During ‘The Iceman Comes’ track the stage lights darken and filter blue around as Gary comes on stage wearing what I can describe as the tunic used in ‘Tron’ or the flopped TV series of the eighties ‘Automan’, it features a black body suit with neon light tubes around his limbs, pretty cool!

Audio

In this DVD you have the choice of Dolby Digital 5.1 or 2.0 stereo; I watched this in the more immersive audio track 5.1 obviously trying to enhance the performance. Synthesizers and electronic music is used atmospherically throughout and is also a big favorite of mine along the lines of other artists like Jean Michel Jarre, Mark Shreeve or Redshift. The spooky low vocals of Gary or his female backing singer are the only ingredient over the music. It is stated on the DVD that besides the electronic instruments and move into digital technology Gary likes to use the more ‘organic’ instruments as well, some of the simpler and primitive instruments can be seen for example; tambourine, wooden scraper and hexagon drum pads.
There is a constant amount of Sub rumble during the menu screen and the tracks starting from track one itself and can be a little overpowering at times, although on some tracks I felt it was controlled a lot better. The rear speakers were used to fill in the sound field around but nothing on the side of special effects.

Features

The menu screen explodes visually in front of you and shows a futuristic prism shape spinning in the centre of the screen, similar to Ra’s spaceship in the movie ‘Stargate’ and set over a cloudy backdrop and a grid display. Options are play all, audio setup, DVD credits and set list (which is equivalent to chapter selection) and music overlays the animated menu. The set list takes you directly to each segment of the DVD where the twelve tracks are situated and each separate menu page has overlaid music too.
During the tracks you can access a Dolby Digital Pro Logic insight from a DJ of some kind commenting on the track. A good idea in case you wanted to know a bit about what you are about to listen to.

Conclusion

My first thoughts of this DVD was of a positive view at least, it was like going to an enjoyable live concert performance of synthesizer and electronic music with some vocals. Even though I never followed Gary Numan but do know of his stuff, I did find it and him entertaining especially when he does his ‘goldfish blowing’ impressions during vocal breaks, which he had a habit of doing throughout but was quite funny and is probably a part of his stage character. There wasn’t enough going on though to get me really interested and was quite mind numbing watching the percussion not moving and Gary strolling back and forth across the stage unenergetically. A few laser lights or other light effects might have helped out!