The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Electronic music icon Gary Numan returns to the spotlight
NEW YORK — While working on his new album, electronic music pioneer Gary Numan found himself stuck. He’d been working on a song all day in his Los Angeles home studio and his dark waves of industrial synth weren’t crashing quite right.
That’s when his 11year-old daughter, Persia, came home from school and poked her head around the door to offer a friendly “Hello, dad.” Numan seized the opportunity.
“She came in and I said, `While you’re here, I’ve got some problems with the song. Would you mind singing for me?“’ recalled Numan, 59. “She’s a natural. Absolutely natural at it. Within half an hour, done.”
The song that father and daughter created that day was “My Name Is Ruin,” and it’s the lead single on Numan’s strong 21st studio album, “Savage (Songs from a Broken World),” a CD of post-apocalyptic electronic music beautifully littered with Middle Eastern rhythms.
The layered album reunites the British innovator with producer and frequent collaborator Ade Fenton, and the duo finished it in just six months. Numan, ever the tinkerer, had a hand in everything, right down to the font on the album cover.
“Savage” comes four years after Numan, who first shot to fame with the New Wave hit “Cars” in 1979, found himself back on the British charts again in 2013 with “Splinter (Songs from a Broken Mind)” and newfound respect as a godfather of industrial rock.
“The credibility and recognition that came from that was enormous. But the problem with that is you’ve got to do it again. I allowed myself 5 minutes to go, `Yeah, how amazing is that!’ and then immediately started to worry,” he said.
Some four decades ago, Numan plugged in a synthesizer and created the electropop masterpiece “The Pleasure Principle” (with the hit “Cars”), influencing everyone from Nine Inch Nails to Marilyn Manson. He was fascinated with making interesting music and had a stack of synthesizer manuals by his bed. (“I was an exciting date,” he joked.)
“My career started really well and went down rapidly after that. It bobbled around for a bit and the music became much more industrial and heavier and more interesting, in my opinion,” he said. “So it’s been an exciting but gentle rise back up again.”
The new album is a grim vision of the future, set in a “windswept hell” generations from now after global warming has erased the concept of East and West and created violent tribes.
Keyboards might be king these days, but Numan recalls the days when he faced a synth-pop backlash. Guitar bands would proudly sneer “No Synthesizers!” and the nation’s musician’s union tried to ban him, saying he was putting musicians out of work.
“I wasn’t trying to create sounds that you could get on the violin,” he said.