Finding his GROOVE
Ex-pop star Gary Numan connects with darker side
Synth-pop pioneer Gary Numan doesn't spend much time missing his early '80s days as an international pop star. He's glad those days are over.
“I'm not a pop star by any stretch of the imagination, but I was one briefly,” he said this week. “At the moment, I can have an enjoyable life, full of adventures still to come. But I can also live an ordinary life, go to Disneyland with my children and not be hassled. When I started out, everything was manic, and I'd never want to go back to that. You can't have a family when everybody knows who you are.”
Though he's upbeat in conversation, Numan's music has grown considerably darker over the years, closer to the industrial sound of Nine Inch Nails (and he now sports Trent Reznor-like, jet-black hair to match). His two latest albums, “Splinter (Songs from a Broken Mind)” and “Savage (Songs from a Broken World),” deal with his struggles with depression and the prospect of a global-warming apocalypse. The new music will fill most of his set when he plays the Paradise on Thursday.
Numan says his moment of reckoning happened in the early '90s, when his tastes were changing and his records weren't selling.
“I had really lost my way. I was trying to write songs that would get on the radio and recapture my career. It wasn't heartfelt and I wasn't good at it, so I made a number of albums I didn't like. I thought I was finished, so I went back to doing music as a hobby. I made an album at home, and that was good fun. It was darker music, much more aggressive and not radio-friendly at all. And as luck would have it, that got a better reception than anything I'd done in years.”
At that time, he had a connection with Depeche Mode, who were also hardening their sound.
“The record I was listening to the most was `Songs of Faith and Devotion' and I was good friends with (Depeche Mode member) Alan Wilder, who I think was instrumental in creating that sound. I think Nine Inch Nails are great, but for me, Depeche Mode was the driving influence of the period, along with my particular way of doing things.”
He still does the old hits “Cars” and “Are `Friends' Electric?” but recast in his new industrial style.
“I used to think `Cars' was the reason people came out, and for a while it probably was,” he said. “But as the years go by, it seems that people groan slightly when we do that song. It's not representative of the main body of work, and as every year goes on, the number of people who want to hear it has declined.
“I still do `Cars,' but it feels like an oldschool cliche to trot that one out. I honestly believe you're only as good as your last album. You should not have a career because of something you did in 1980. And if you've got nothing new to offer, get out of the way.”
Gary Numan with Nightmare Air at the Paradise, Thursday. Tickets: $30; ticket master.com.