Telegram & Gazette (Massachusetts) December 8, 2017 Friday ’80s music icon rocks Paradise, ’70s film star lauded at Coolidge Corner HIGHLIGHT: Pop Culture Notebook: Gary Numan's triumphant return; Adrienne Barbeau honored for her body of work. Pictures will be sent When Numan burst onto the music scene in the late ’70s, the UK artist looked like the replicant love child of David Bowie and one of the interchangeable guys in Kraftwerk. Today, Numan looks like Robert Smith’s slimmer, better looking brother. Meshing the new wave of his past (four tracks from “The Pleasure Principle” and two track from “Replicas,” as well as one from 1980’s “Telekon”) with the nightmare of the future (six tracks from “Savage,” three tracks from “Splinter: Songs From a Broken Mind”), Numan played a hellish and hypnotic, 90-minute show that included a 15-song main set and two encores. Dressed like a warrior of the wasteland with an industrial-strength band that played like they were auditioning for Nine Inch Nails but looked like extras from “The Road Warrior,” Numan erupted on stage with the fierce, unflinching opener, “Ghost Nation” (from his latest) and never let up. A manic bundle of energy onstage, Numan contorted his frame and flailed his limbs (and, at times, even looked like he was about to shed his skin), as his body got bombared by the barrage of unrelenting beats. Singing with his face usually buried behind clasped, microphone-squeezing hands, Numan — with spiky jet-black hair, pasty completion and evenly applied black massacre — lashed out and lamented humanity’s ungodly demise due to our collective sheer arrogance and vast shortsightedness. Sandwiched in-between a prickly pair from “Savage” (“Bed of Thorns” and “Pray for the Pain You Serve”), the alt-rock classic “Down in the Park” was sheer perfection. Numan was so electric that he didn’t realize the sound system carrying his vocals blew out during “Love Hurt Bleed” that he continued to sing with the same manic energy, despite his words momentarily falling on deaf ears. The one-two punch of his latest single, “My Name Is Ruin” followed by his breakthrough U.S. single, “Cars” was one of the evening’s undisputed highlights in an evening filled with undisputed highlights. The massive barrage of pulse-pounding beats were wonderfully accented by frenetic bursts of old-school strobe lights and changing colors that transformed the stage into the nightmarish world of the not too distant future where the sun has been snuffed out, oceans have dried up and once safe havens have been turned into barren deserts. Worth the price of admission on its own, the first encore featured “M.E.” off “The Pleasure Principle” and “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” from “Replicas,” while the second encore served up a killer “I Die: You Die.” After the show, Numan told me that his “Savage” tour might have the legs to continue into 2018 in bigger venues, which, believes me, it certainly does. I suggested to Numan that he should call his old friend Trent Reznor about a Nine Inch Nails/Gary Numan double-bill not unlike Reznor did with David Bowie in the ‘90s, which featured the two artists in the middle of their respective main sets, trading off verses. That would be so cool. Adrienne Barbeau honored with ‘After Midnite’ award Adrienne Barbeau was not only honored with the Coolidge Corner Theatre’s second “Coolidge After Midnite” Award Saturday night in Boston for her stellar body of B-movie work, she watched a screening of her debut feature film “The Fog,” did a 40-minute Q&A and even graciously posed for photographs and signed autographs for fans (both for free) until nearly 4 a.m. Barbeau, who played late-night radio DJ-turned-heroine Stevie Wayne in “The Fog,” was asked about her track record for playing strong, female characters in her films. “I had an Armenian grandmother and an Armenian mother and a bunch of Armenian aunts and that has something to do with it. My family survived the genocide. My grandmother came over and I guess we’re all strong women,” Barbeau said. “I would be hard pressed to play a real victim. It doesn’t sit well with me.” Barbeau recalled the first time she read the script for “The Fog.” “It was the height of the women’s movement, the equal rights amendment. We just got Roe vs. Wade and I was coming off a series (“Maude”) that was really very socially significant. And this was my first feature and I read it and it wasn’t “The China Syndrome” … It was a ghost story,” Barbeau sighed. “I’m not a fan of the horror genre. I don’t like to be scared. I don’t like to go see them. I love to do them but you’re not going to find me in the audience. I’ve never even seen ‘Psycho.’” Despite her disdain for horror, Barbeau agreed to “The Fog,” as well as “The Swamp Thing” and George A. Romero’s “Creepshow.” Originally, Barbeau said she didn’t want to do “Creepshow,” but her then husband, John Carpenter (who directed Barbeau in both “The Fog” and “Escape from New York”) and good friend Tom Atkins (who was also in “The Fog”) convinced her not to pass up on an opportunity to work with Romero, the legendary director of “Night of the Living Dead.” “Creepshow” turned out to be one of her favorite projects to date. “I had a great time making it,” she said. “I love George more than anything in the world. I love Pittsburgh (where it was shot),” Barbeau said. “I stayed away from the set when E.G. Marshall was doing his stuff. I’ve worked with snakes and tarantulas and bees and you name it, but I’m not going to work with cockroaches.” But, there was one project she turned down, which, she acknowledged, would have made her autograph lines definitely longer at horror conventions, and that was Rob Zombie’s “The Devil’s Rejects.” “I read, maybe, like the first 20 or 30 pages and I called the agency and said, ‘I can’t do this. This is just so vile,’” Barbeau recalled. “About a year later, I was at a horror convention and there was Bill Moseley signing autographs and he had a line around the block. I said, ‘Bill, what did you do?’ The one I turned down, “The Devil’s Rejects.” I still wouldn’t have done it. I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.” Gary Numan performing Tuesday at the Paradise Rock Club, Boston. Adrienne Barbeau talking about her career as a horror movie icon Saturday at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, Brookline. [T&G Staff Photos/Craig S. Semon]