Dance Dance Dance

Having written about how much I like Gary Numan's early, punk-inspired work, I've become increasingly obsessed with 1981's laidback, jazz-funk outing, Dance (pictured). It features Japan's Mick Karn on bass, two of the first four tracks are nearly 10 minutes long, it only really gets going at the start of side two - with She's Got Claws and Crash - and if you're after any obvious singles, you're best off looking to the the following year's I, Assassin album, and numbers Music for Chameleons, We Take Mystery (To Bed) and White Boys and Heroes.

After Replicas, The Pleasure Principle (both 1979) and Telekon (1980), Dance - the last thing you're likely to do to this album - represented something of a sidestep, artistically and financially. In his 1997 autobiography, Praying to the Aliens, Numan notes that he'd made something like £4.5m by this point. 'Although experimental and atmospheric, commercially speaking, Dance was the wrong album to release at a time when I badly needed to pick momentum,' he says.

The book, written with Steve Malins, recalls in a naive tone Numan's fascination with flying, and other fan-boy activities, alongside long-remembered run-ins and petty feuds. Maybe there's something in the musician's claims of having mild Asperger's. There's quite a lot about the songs' lyrical content but very little on the music itself, though there are some great, double-take lines.

'I think I saw a UFO once on my way home from one of those Dance sessions,' Numan says. And, later: 'The subject matter of the [album's] new songs was full of reflections on the previous two years, but one or two in particular were inspired by a relationship which turned very bitter. In 1980 I had gone out with a particular girl for a few months. She gave me three different names while I was with her, so to this day I'm still not sure what her real name was...'

Three career-reviving pop collaborations

1. Tina Turner and British Electric Foundation

The one-time Anna Mae Bullock had already recorded on her own before she left abusive husband Ike in the mid-1970s, but it was an electro cover of The Temptations' Ball of Confusion produced by Heaven 17 offshoot BEF that confirmed her solo career. The track appeared on 1982 album Music of Quality and Distinction - Volume One, and BEF's Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh were drafted in to produce a soulful cover of Al Green's Let's Stay Together, which heralded Turner's reinvention as a rock diva. (The BEF album also includes a great version of Suspicious Minds with Gary Glitter, but don't expect any miracles.)

2. Tom Jones and the Art of Noise

When success deserted the Welsh star through the late '70s and early '80s, salvation came from an unlikely source: Dadaist synth supergroup the Art of Noise. By 1987, the group's mainstays - producer Trevor Horn and co-conspirator Paul Morley - had left, and the remaining bandmembers, programmer JJ Jeczalik and arranger Anne Dudley, were making their way covering the Peter Gunn and Dragnet themes. Taking the guitar and horn breaks from those tracks, the band collaborated with Jones on a cover of Prince's Kiss, which remains a highlight of the performer's live show.

3. Dusty Springfield and Pet Shop Boys

Another '60s star, the British soul icon had a quiet 1980s until Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, recently successful with singles West End Girls, Love Comes Quickly and Opportunities, asked Springfield to duet on track What Have I Done to Deserve This?, written with American Allee Willis (who also wrote the theme to Friends). Pet Shop Boys went on to write and record tracks In Private and Nothing Has Been Proved (from the film Scandal) for Springfield's 1990 album Reputation, which the duo have hinted they had more to do with than the credits allow. Pet Shop Boys recorded a great album, Results, with another gay icon, Liza Minnelli, and have also written for Tina Turner, Shirley Bassey, Kylie Minogue and Girls Aloud.

and some that didn't work out, for Gary Numan and...

When the hits fell away for the synth-pop pioneer in the early 1980s, he joined forces with his former backing band to record Love Needs No Disguise as Dramatis. He made a more dramatic decision to team up with Bill Sharpe (pictured) of jazz-funkers Shakatak but singles Change Your Mind and No More Lies had little more effect on the charts. More bizarre was a desperate pairing with Hugh Nicholson for the nonetheless tuneful singles Radio Heart and London Times, plus the woeful Like a Refugee (I Won't Cry). This year, Numan appeared on Battles track My Machines and seems happy working with Ade Fenton, who's produced Numan's new album, Dead Son Rising.

Related: three essential '80s albums

Tubeway Army: the best of Gary Numan

Fans of British electropioneer Gary Numan routinely point to Numan's 1980 Telekon album, which features tracks We Are Glass, I Die: You Die and Remind Me to Smile, as their favourite - Trent Reznor is said to have listened to it every day during the recording of Pretty Hate Machine. Another popular choice is The Pleasure Principle (1979) - it produced Cars, his biggest hit, and M.E., the backing to Basement Jaxx's Where's Your Head At?

Then there are the proceeding albums, from jazz-inflected Dance (1981) to 1984's bleak Berserker, when he dyed his hair blue and covered his face in white make-up. However, my favourite work of Numan's must be the three albums he made as Tubeway Army.

In the late 1970s, Gary Numan, né Webb, was determined to crack the music scene: with his uncle Jess on drums and bass player Paul Gardiner, the trio recorded an album of overtly punk material that secured them a record deal with the Beggars Banquet label. Singles That's Too Bad and Bombers give some idea of Numan's nascent songwriting skill, while other numbers were later released as The Plan, in 1984. (Crime of Passion is an odd inclusion, with its repeated close: 'If you were the only girl in the world and I was the only boy.')

Several tracks, including My Shadow in Vain, Something's in the House and Steel and You were reworked for the trio's eponymous first album proper in 1978. The story goes that Numan found a Minimoog in the studio where they were recording and decided to fiddle around with it, chancing upon the synth sound that would carry him through an incredibly prolific period musically. (For context, David Bowie had just released his Berlin albums, Low and Heroes, while Kraftwerk's The Man-Machine came out in the same year.)

Tubeway Army formed a showcase for Numan's sci-fi obsession: Listen to the Sirens takes its opening line from the title of Philip K Dick's Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, while William S Burroughs' influence is tangible throughout. Jo the Waiter features junkies and overt lyrics ('Jo the waiter held me close, behind the door marked gentlemen') while Every Day I Die is a paean to masturbation ('I unstick pages and read').

Numan developed the sci-fi theme for Replicas (1979), on which he honed his synth sound and, erm, distinctive vocals. At school, we used to pore over the record sleeve, with its black strip in the eye on the back cover (pictured). The album was inspired by ideas Numan had for a novel he intended to write, captured in song titles The Machman, Praying to the Aliens and I Nearly Married a Human.

It gave rise to some of his best-known tracks: Me! I Disconnect from You, Down in the Park (referenced on the cover, pictured top) and Are 'Friends' Electric?, which formed the basis for Sugababes' mash-up Freak Like Me. (A couple of stand-out numbers only appeared later: We Have a Technical and Do You Need the Service? Great fun, it's a song I link with another oddity, Stormtrooper in Drag, remarkably covered by St Etienne.)

Numan went on further to explore alienation in his lyrics, notably for Cars, something he attributes in part to suffering from a mild form of Asperger's. As the 1980s progressed and into the '90s, poor songwriting was coupled with a lack of commercial success for the artist. Once mocked, he seems to have been diverted from his own vision to making music to please his new, largely industrial, fanbase, on such albums as Exile (1997) and Pure (2000).

Related: in praise of Thomas Dolby's The Golden Age of Wireless.