GARY NUMAN

He pioneered the use of synths in rock, had number one hits and may have invented the concept of the sex robot. With new album Savage out this month, he’s also officially a T3 Legend

Gary Numan brought synths and dark lyrics about tech to the late ’70s charts, to a mixture of wild excitement and, it must be said, a fair bit of hostility. He’s since sold millions of records, and influenced everything from the hip-hop scene to Nine Inch Nails to, erm, the Sugababes.

T3: How did people react to you using synths and singing about technology, back in the late ’70s?

GN: Very different to now. I remember when the stuff first came out the resistance to it was… striking. People were really hostile, y’know? I think people actually saw it as a dangerous thing… That it was gonna change the world order of music – that guitars were gonna be thrown out the window, almost. I’ve got friends now who are in big, chart bands who openly admit they hated me back then. I had the Musicians’ Union trying to bloody ban me because it ‘wasn’t real music’! It was, erm… interesting.

T3: Now, ‘electronic music’ is normal… and guitars haven’t ceased to exist.

GN: Well it was coming from somewhere really ignorant because all my first singles had guitars all over them anyway. Now, synths are in every studio, they’re on peoples’ iPads, everywhere.

T3: What were the first synths you used?

GN: The MiniMoog. It is pronounced ‘Mogue’ – it should have an umlaut over one of the ‘o’s really. Then there was the ARP Odyssey and PolyMoog. The Odyssey you could play two notes at once and the Poly you could play multiple notes. Now for me, I couldn’t play for shit anyway so it didn’t make much difference, but for people who could use more than one finger at once, that was a leap forward.

T3: Do you still use those old synths?

GN: To be honest, no. Every time I start a new album there’s a whole world of new equipment and that’s really exciting to me. I feel slightly guilty saying it but I got the Moog Innovation Award a few years back and the prize they give you is the new D-Series MiniMoog they’ve done. Well, it’s a lovely thing to have and I was really grateful but I haven’t used it at all. The whole analogue/digital thing, I don’t really give a shit. Analogue isn’t ‘better’, nor is digital; it’s just different. All that matters is the sound that you make. T3: A lot of your early lyrics deal with technology as an alienating force. Do you

look at parts of the web today and see that as a vindication of what you wrote?

GN: Sort of, but I never in a million years could have foreseen the internet. I did write about the idea of robots alienating us from our humanity. Like [early hit, later sampled by the Sugababes] Are ‘Friends’

Electric? was about a man who lives in his bedroom and has sex delivered to him by robot prostitutes. So there was the idea that tech could make us more insular.

T3: Are you into tech and gadgets?

GN: Obviously, I like smartphones and tablets, because you can do things wherever you are. Which, of course, is a double-edged sword. This morning I woke up to about 40 emails wanting instant decisions on a dozen things. But on the other hand, they’re amazing. Phenomenal. I think of new cars being able to steer themselves and brake automatically. Incredible. My brother’s a pilot and I flew with him on a new Airbus he was flying and I could not believe the amount of automation. It’s staggering. So much so, my brother was saying as a pilot you’re almost disconnected from it, like you’re a disinterested supervisor.

T3: It’s like the pilot is only there because it would freak people out if they weren’t.

GN: I think so. I think when driverless cars happen and become a normal part of life. I think in some respects the danger is in keeping humans involved when really we should just leave it to the machines. I’d be alright with it, I think. It’d be… interesting.

“The whole analogue/digital thing… I don’t really give a shit. Analogue isn’t ‘better’, nor is digital; it’s just different. All that matters is the sound that you make”