Gary Numan: The Rise and The Fall

Gary Numan has been a musician and recording artist for over 30 years; a reductive history would prefer only to document the first three as his most successful. His sales figures during his early 80s heyday, which, according to Numan, run into the "shitloads", would attest to that, but it was a period that he has good cause to want to leave behind. 

His first three albums, if you include Tubeway Army's Replicas, were UK #1s. Cars and Are Friends Electric? charted at #1 too, and they are singles that continue to define him, a fact he still struggles to embrace (he says that those songs "create a shadow... you have to work hard to come out from under your own shadow for people to be aware of what else you do"). In the space of two years, he had attracted a devout following that bordered on cultish (his properties have attracted a number of unsolicited visits from 'Numanoids', many of whom he welcomed with a harpoon). It was a phenomena that peaked at Wembley Arena in 1981, where approximately 12,500 people had gathered to see Numan's grand, Tron-like 'farewell' show, though he reneged on his decision to retire from performing shortly after. 

But the facts obscure the reality of this period: Numan was hated by many of his peers. His success brought with it the sort of open derision usually reserved for, say, a Top 40 novelty act – and, indeed, his pioneering use of synths was wholly dismissed as a gimmick – but perhaps there was something running deeper behind the opprobrium than just another bout of sniping from the indie mafia. A brief stint at music college proved to be a prologue for the sort of obstacles Numan dealt with in the bloom of his career.

"[The teacher] had asked us to go home and write, in notation, a four-part piano piece over eight bars. So I did all that and went back, and the man sits down at the piano and he plays everyone's piece of music that they've written. He gets to mine, and he says 'We can't have this'. And I said to him, 'But it sounds alright, doesn't it?' And he said, 'That's not the point.'

Numan's muted Cockney vowels crackle with renewed disbelief, as if it had only happened an hour ago. 

'That's not the point!? FAHKING MEWSIC!? How can the way it sounds not be the point!? So I left music lessons, and I said 'That's utter bollocks.' I had a big row with the teacher, got thrown out of my music course because of it. It was all about the dots and the dashes and the quavers and the crosses. Fuck that!"

Numan concedes that he's "not as much of a musician as [he] should be." His forthcoming record Dead Son Rising, like the majority of his albums, had been pieced together through a painstaking process of trial and error. Even so, this doesn't quite strike at the heart of why Numan had become a bête noire for so many. 

As Numan transgressed further into the weird, reclusive caricature that the NME and others took delight in reporting him as – his hair transplants and perceived aloofness were regularly mocked, as was his passion for air display flying, which he speaks of with considerably more affection than his career in music – so others became more open with their contempt for the man dubbed 'the dark lord of electro-pop'. It wasn't long after 1980’s Telekon, his last #1 album, that his career went into freefall. Dwindling album sales and an increasing creative inertia, manifesting in oddly asexual funk-rock experiments and wayward songwriting, hit a nadir with Machine & Soul in 1992, an album that Numan says represented "the bottom of the barrel."

"I don't necessarily think it was a bad album musically, I just think it was a really bad Gary Numan album, I don't think I should have made that album at all. 

"Creatively, I had no idea what I wanted to sing about, I had no passion for it, I didn't even really like what I was doing. The good thing about it was that it was so bad, that it stopped me. I just... just... stopped doing anything, and I said 'This is fucking dreadful; if I'm gonna stay as a musician, I need to sort myself out.'"

Dead Son Rising is a continuation of Numan's critical rehabilitation, a recovery that began with the dense industrial stomp of 1994's Sacrifice. Though his new album documents another considered descent into cavernous darkwave that has more in common with Nine Inch Nails than erstwhile contemporaries Duran Duran or Soft Cell, Dead Son Rising makes tentative inroads into something resembling proto-EDM: for example, a conspicuous 4/4 rhythm drives The Fall's horizon-spanning layers of buzzsaw synth and industrial guitar. Numan admits that he had intended to scrap the record altogether as it was nearing completion, because he "fucking hated it."

"A year and a half went by [after he and Ade Fenton, a regular collaborator and producer of Dead Son Rising, had finished recording the album]. I was on holiday with my family and I heard my wife Gemma playing some music in this house we were renting, in another room, and it sounded great and I went flying in and said "What's that, that sounds brilliant", and it was fucking me! And she said, 'That's you, you idiot.'

"I dunno what happens with that, whether it's a confidence thing or whether you just get a bad vibe about something that colours everything that you do, but exactly the same thing that I thought was a piece of poo about a year and a half ago I was now thinking was really good."

It's a view that his peers, past and present, have grown to share. Acts as disparate as Basement Jaxx, Factory Floor and Sugababes have flipped early Numan songs to (mostly) great effect, and even old foes like David Bowie have belatedly expressed their admiration. Numan seems grateful at a renewed appreciation for his seminal works, though the facade doesn't hold up for long.

"Last year, we did Sonisphere. We do a set, bloody brilliant, crowd go mental, I walk off there thinking I've done something really, really worthwhile. Nearly all new stuff, only a couple of old songs in the whole set. Then they show it on TV, and they show fucking Cars.

"Oh, for fuck's sake! And that really bothers you. It's not me that needs those songs. For three or four years, I didn't even play Cars live, 'cause I was so desperately trying to get away from it."

Numan is prepared to cross borders to do so. He is in the process of emigrating with his family to Los Angeles, partly because he sees his future in film music ("You can do the whole touring thing and being on stage and being angry and aggressive for so long, but you get to a certain age where it doesn't work, unless you're Mick Jagger"), and partly in order to facilitate a collaborative project with NIN lynchpin Trent Reznor. 

"I love him, he's such a brilliant bloke and he's so clever. He's a genius and I bow in awe, really. But he's a workaholic, so he's always doing something really important, like an Oscar or something, and I feel really embarrassed about saying 'Hey, how about my little thing, how about we get onto that in between those two Oscar things you're doing?' So I've been really passive about the whole thing. I think that he sees my passiveness as being not interested, and we're both quirky blokes, we both have our emotional issues, but I'd love to do it."

Conversation turns briefly back to Numan's mid-80s decline, a précis of which is preserved on YouTube. It features an extract from an 80s television show called 8 Days A Week, in which a panel offer their opinion on a piece of music. One of the panellists is Marc Almond. He is shown a then new Numan album, 1983's Warriors, and proceeds to rip it, and Numan, to shreds. The only thing more shocking than Almond's vituperation is that his fellow panellists and presenters indulge him, which suggests how high the threshold for taking the piss out of Numan had gone. 

"If you're famous, that shit happens. You just laugh about it. Perhaps me having Asperger's is a useful thing, because that kind of thing tends to roll off you. It's inconsequential; it's an annoying little aside that you forget about ten minutes later, because you're driven in a certain direction, and only the things that help you go in that direction are important to you."