Gary Numan - Metamorphosis of a Numanoid

He was one of the spiritual fathers of the new wave, synth-pop wing, British division. First hailed as one of the “sons of David Bowie ”, he later became the guiding star for an entire generation of rappers. In between, a wealth of tributes that run from Nine Inch Nails , through Marilyn Manson , all the way to Basement Jaxx and the Sugababes.

New wave , hip-hop, industrial, and even chart-friendly easy-pop: few musicians in the recent history of popular music can boast such a varied array of tributes. With a track record like that, plus a fair number of hits and chart-topping albums, it would have been easy to walk into the interview flexing his muscles. Instead, we find ourselves chatting with a likeable guy, aged but not overly so, more inclined to make light of himself than to claim credit for his own achievements. He'd rather dwell on the darkest periods of his thirty-year career than strike the poses of an aging rock star.

Gary Anthony James Webb welcomes us aboard the bus taking him around on his European tour, dressed in bermuda shorts and a strictly black t-shirt. Relaxed, smiling and approachable, yet with a look in his eyes like someone who has really been through hell. Besides getting him to tell us everything else, we try to understand why, in this interview that the “former” Numanoid grants exclusively to Onda Rock.

Gary, let's start from the end: can you tell us something about your latest album, “Jagged“? The sound is very dark, I'd say dark-industrial…

Finishing the album took a good five and a half years of work, on and off. We started at the end of 2000, and in the meantime I had two children. I wanted it to be dark, heavy and aggressive, and also more electronic than the previous one; I wanted it to have an industrial atmosphere, but also contain crystalline melodies. I didn't want polluted sounds and noise, but rather a fairly simple, old-fashioned record.

I find there's a certain continuity between this record, “Pure”, and “Hybrid”, at least in terms of atmosphere. The guitar-drum machine mix is much closer to Nine Inch Nails than to Tubeway Army. Why does Gary Numan's music sound so apocalyptic these days?

Because I like it. I don't like happy music, I don't listen to it. I don't like saccharine songs, with rhyming lyrics and choruses, I find them predictable and irritating.

You don't listen to pop music? Yet they've made pop versions of your old songs!

It happens a lot. Others use my music, but I don't hear it as pop, to me my music is more electronic. For instance, Basement Jaxx…

You're talking about "Where's Your Head At"! (a track built on a sample of "M.E.", ed.)

Yeah, but to me that's not pop music, that's dance! To me pop music is Westlife. What I really like is Marilyn Manson.

You and Kraftwerk, the only white musicians who managed to influence Black American music. I'm thinking of Afrika Bambaataa, but also of the many samples of yours used by hip-hop groups. I've always found this phenomenon curious, since you're starting from pretty distant moods. How do you explain it?

I had no idea. Until six or seven years ago I hadn't understood what was going on, then Afrika Bambaataa told me what it was like in Detroit back then: bonfires in the streets, cars torn apart, a heavy atmosphere, basically...

A kind of hip-hop rave...

Yeah, but with real firearms. Anyway, I was struck by the fact that he (Kevin Donovan, ed.) was using my stuff: it was very English music, and white. They were burly Black gangsters, while I wore make-up: fantastic! The credit is his, because, having such a broad musical taste, he managed to rework my music, which then reached a wider audience.

In recent times your contribution to the history of popular music has been widely recognised; yet there was a moment, in the Nineties, when literally everything from the 80s was forgotten. How did you experience that period?

For me, the early Nineties were a really shitty time. The music I was making kept getting worse. Things were already bad, and they kept getting worse: my career, which had started off pretty well, was in trouble. When I started making music, I loved composing, I wanted to be part of the music world; once I'd found success, especially in England, I started writing songs not out of love for music, but because I wanted my career to stay afloat, and the record label happy. That's the wrong reason to write songs, but I went along with it at least until 1992, when I put out a record so bad even I didn't like it. I was finished, I had no identity, and I didn't know what to sing about. Meanwhile, my private life was falling apart too: I didn't have a penny, I was up to my neck in debt.

How did you manage to pull yourself back up?

I met Gemma, my wife. She was amazing, she managed to make me understand what I'd lost without telling me what I had to do. I never thought I had a great voice.

Really?

Yeah, and I never learned to play guitar or keyboards well, and I wasn't at all sure of myself as a songwriter. I thought I'd just been lucky. Not talented, just lucky: I felt like I had to prove to people that I deserved the success I'd already had. I never got past that stage, and so, when my career was on the way down, I started wanting to record in the studio with good guitarists and keyboard players, and singers who could actually sing. That way, the space Gary Numan had on the records kept shrinking more and more; it was my wife who told me that even if I didn't like my own music, the fans did, and so by losing my style I'd lose them too. That led me, in 1994, to make an album, "Sacrifice", which I recorded at home with second-hand instruments, since I had neither money nor a record deal. I sang and played everything myself, and I had a great time.

The result was very heavy, and very industrial-rock: musically it was a complete change of direction, and I realised that was what I'd be doing from then on. It felt like being back at the start, when I had no career, and no record label. I'd resigned myself to finding a job, and I treated the record as a hobby. I had six hundred thousand pounds in debt; my furniture had been repossessed, my sofa had no cushions and I sat on a plank of wood. When I did interviews at home, people thought I was eccentric: it was really embarrassing!

Gary, do you still feel like an icon?

No. Definitely not here, maybe a little in England.

Do people recognise you when you walk down the street in London?

Yes, a lot of people. But this is a very difficult tour: we started in Holland, in Amsterdam, and that date went very well, there was a big crowd. Then we moved on to Germany, and there were far fewer people than last time, which was annoying: I used to be very successful there.

Why didn't you come to Italy in the Eighties? Ultravox came, and plenty of others…

I don't know, I just never did it. Back then, I didn't like touring. I had little confidence in myself, and I didn't like being on stage. I didn't like my voice, I didn't know what I was doing, I felt really bad. Plus, I couldn't dance.

It was cool that you stood still in front of the microphone!

I felt awful, really! The makeup, the stages full of neon lights, the frozen poses were all tricks to let the attention shift elsewhere, onto the show. And, in any case, as far away as possible from me and my shyness.

Are you happy to be touring Italy?

It had been sixteen years since I'd been to Europe. It's nice to be here, but nobody comes to the shows. Nobody! Just a hundred people or so. And the few who do come don't know anything at all about my new material, they ask for songs from '79, '80: they're not old fans, but fans from way back. They come to see me for my early songs. There's no logic between the music I'm making now and the people who show up at the concert. It's strange, because Nine Inch Nails and other famous bands covered my songs, but nobody seems to know who I am or what kind of music I make. That bothers me quite a bit.

A gap has opened up…

That makes me think this kind of tour isn't the right thing to do. I should be playing a festival: there you've got tens of thousands of people, and even if they're not there for me, at least they'd get to know who I am, my name, what I do. I need to be seen by as many people as possible, it's the only way I have to make myself known for what I play now. I'm even willing to open for someone. I'm right in the middle of this problem, and I need to figure out how to solve it, whether coming back here still makes any sense.

You've always paid a lot of attention to your image, often merging it inseparably with your music. Is there a specific idea behind all this?

Now I don't have such a personal image anymore, I have a more generic one. I simply dress in black… before, I thought it was very cool. Partly, it was also down to the lack of confidence I suffered from. It's like when you're a kid playing cowboys, and putting a hat on your head makes you feel more real; so when I wanted to be a pop star, the lights and the costume helped me feel like one: but inside, I didn't feel like that at all. Even on stage, I needed the makeup, because I'm very shy, very quiet if you see me in my actual life, offstage.

Just because you become a pop star doesn't mean you were born to be one: some people seem natural on stage, like Steven Tyler, and then there are people like me, who stand in a corner, silent. I was born to work in a bank, that's the truth…

In another interview you said you started out doing punk with Tubeway Army because at the time that was the only way to put out a record. Can you tell us about the punk scene and what was happening in England?

Honestly, I only really liked the Sex Pistols. If you notice, only the Sex Pistols' punk was fast, while other bands' was slower, closer to traditional rock. I didn't like the Ramones, and I especially didn't like the Clash. But, thanks to the punk phenomenon, a new label popped up every day along with the chance to put out a new record, since every label wanted a punk band. So, the three of us formed a band; we wrote a few songs and got a contract. We put out a couple of singles, just to keep them happy: but I always knew I didn't want to do punk, I wanted to do something else. I just didn't know yet that this "something else" was electronic music.

So, how did you discover electronic music?

It was an accident. One time we went into the studio to record, and the band before us had left a synthesizer in a corner. It was a mini-Moog: I'd never seen one before. It sat there for three days, and eventually I wanted to try it out; I didn't know how to set it, I just switched it on and heard this incredibly powerful sound. Our album was made entirely of guitars, and I replaced their sound with the synthesizer's. When I presented my record label with a semi-electronic album, they simply told me: "No". However, they had no more money: they'd invested everything they had in us, so they had to put it out regardless. If they'd had more money, the album would never have been released. Afterwards, I discovered all the bands doing electronic music, like Human League.

Synth-pop landed in England thanks to people like you, Ultravox, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, Human League. Tell us a bit about that scene: bands making experimental music found success, a very different situation from today's...

It was one of the very few music scenes the public embraced before the music press did. By the time of my first interview, I'd already been at the top of the charts for three weeks: they didn't want to interview me, because critics didn't like electronic music; they said it was rubbish made by machines, that real music was music played for real. They didn't understand what was happening. It was a fantastic period. We more or less all knew each other, and on my first tour OMD were the support act. It all happened very quickly, from one day to the next concert tickets were selling out within hours, everyone wanted to meet me...

Do you have any idea how this could have happened?

I think what happened had nothing to do with the music, or with talent. Two big things happened: at the start, I had a completely unknown band signed to a very small label, but that label was distributed by Warner Brothers. Someone at Warner decided to release my fourth single, "Are 'Friends' Electric", which was also my second electronic single, since before that we played punk. And that same person at Warner Brothers also decided to make it a picture disc. Twenty thousand copies were pressed, and only three thousand sold. You have to wonder who decided to press twenty thousand copies of an unknown band: that's a very bold decision to make, an enormous risk. Picture discs are very expensive to press, let alone for an unknown band with no hit behind them, playing a completely different genre. That was a huge opportunity: people bought the record not for the music on it, they didn't even listen to it, but because it was a collector's item. They bought it, but didn't play it. They didn't even know who I was!

What did it look like?

On one side there was me from the waist up, on the other a big eye... back then, there was a TV programme called "Top of the Pops", do you know it? It's not that important anymore, but back then, if you went on "Top of the Pops", you were automatically famous, if you go on it now you're nobody (the programme closed down a few months ago, ed.). With that single selling twenty thousand copies, we were at number 78: low, but better than nothing. On "Top of the Pops" there was a segment called "Bubbling under", where they'd talk about a single outside the top forty; that time, thanks to the picture disc, it was me. So, from being unknown, with no chart position, I ended up on "Top of the Pops"!

After that, we jumped straight to number one. Here's how it happened: it had nothing to do with the music at all! We went on "Top of the Pops" because... listen, it was either me with Tubeway Army, or Simple Minds, I think I was at number 78 and they were at 79, we were more or less neck and neck, and someone at "Top of the Pops" thought Tubeway Army was a more interesting name than Simple Minds. I believe Simple Minds broke through a year later.

Just because of the name?

So: a picture disc, which had nothing to do with the music; the name Tubeway Army, which had nothing to do with the music; nobody had even heard the song, the one that went on Top of the Pops. I never thought I was talented.

Just luck?

Absolutely!

You must have thought: "At least I got the name of my band right"!

When I wrote "Are 'Friends' Electric", it was actually two songs put together. I had a song idea that went: "Da da da da da" and I had no idea what to do with it, and I had another one that went: "Dadadadada"; one evening I tried to finish the first one, without success; so I started playing the second one, and I realised they worked well together! So I finished both ideas, merging them. That's why it's five minutes long. It's certainly not a great way to write songs. What's more, at first the melody was different (he sings a straightforward melody, ed.), until one time playing it on the keyboard I hit a wrong note, and I realised the wrong note sounded better than the original one (he mimes playing the keyboard, the mistake and the moment of realisation; laughter, ed.).

Bottom line: I couldn't write songs, I couldn't play, picture disc - i.e. a stroke of luck, "Top of the Pops" - another stroke of luck, and I'm famous! How can you get big-headed when something like that happens to you? I just felt lucky; not talented, just lucky.

We think several things you've written are great!

I believe a lot of songs that are now considered classics were actually written by chance, more or less in the same way. If I'd been a skilled keyboard player – and I've never taken a single piano lesson in my life – I probably would never have written a song like "Are 'Friends' Electric".

If you had to recommend three of your albums to a listener who's never heard Gary Numan before, which would you choose?

"Replicas", "Telekon" and "Pure".

(Thanks to Roberto Medri)

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