‘IT’S BEEN A LONG BATTLE TO GET BACK’
Gary Numan on his gratitude on getting a second bite of the cherry
After a 37-year absence from the top three, Gary Numan was so overcome with joy when he heard his 2017 album Savage had gone straight in at number two in the UK charts that he burst instantly into tears. ‘It was my wife Gemma who took the call from the record company. I couldn’t, I was too nervous,’ the English electronic rock legend recalls.
‘When she just turned to me and she said: “You’ve gone in at number two” I cried like a baby. I don’t think she got to the end of saying “two” and I was gone.’
His outpouring of emotion contrasts with the image of the Gary Numan that marched Tubeway Army to the top of the charts singing Are ‘Friends’ Electric? in 1979. He affected an icy, almost robotic presence, and appeared no less inscrutable when fresh from jettisoning the Tubeway Army name, he topped the charts again three months later with Cars.
In the period from May ’79 to September 1980 he had a staggering three number one albums.
As someone living with Asperger syndrome, Numan found instant stardom and the attention frightening. He was drawing comparisons with his hero, David Bowie but his answer to being placed on such a lofty pedestal shocked his fans and the music industry.
‘I announced that I was retiring in 1981 which was a genuine decision but I didn’t see it through,’ he says.
‘I was really struggling with the whole fame thing and I thought it would be better to just get out.
But I shouldn’t have said what I was going to do, I should have just quietly done it. I shot myself in both feet with that.’
He trained to be a pilot and later even founded his own aviation company Numanair but the desire to make music was too strong and he returned with I, Assassin in late
’82. Although he made the top ten, he was out of step with the glammy pop of the New Romantics ruling the charts. In some quarters, his decision to announce his retirement and return so quickly was greeted with derision. ‘I’ve spent 40 years struggling to make up for a mistake I made near the beginning of my career,’ he says.
‘It’s been a long battle to get back to anywhere near that level of success again.
‘It feels incredibly satisfying. When I first made it, I didn’t appreciate how amazing it was. Now, if I get to two, five, ten or whatever with the new one, I don’t mind, at least I have been able to get to the upper ends of the charts again.’
His new album, Intruder is in a similar vein to Savage, whose subtitle was Songs from a Broken World and imagined the state of civilisation in a post-apocalyptic Earth.
One of Intruder’s recurring themes is that the Earth is ‘angry with us’ as humans and fighting us as invaders.
‘Maybe the earth, somewhere in its mechanism, sees humans as an infestation,’ the 63-year-old says.
‘It is a concept on which to base the album. I don’t literally think the Earth is battling with us. But when Covid came along, the pandemic fitted in seamlessly with what the album is saying. The idea that Covid could be the first among many attempts the Earth might employ to fight back against us. It could also be that it’s been doing it for hundreds of years with different diseases. It is only our ingenuity and creativity that has enabled us to counter those attempts.’
He says that it is inevitable that ‘drastic change’ is needed and admits he will have to change his own behaviour.
‘I am absolutely a hypocrite when it comes to that. I often fly an aeroplane or take a flight but that is the world we live in,’ he says.
‘But we are missing the bigger target. It’s not people like me flying a bit less that is going to make all the difference, it is people like [US president Joe] Biden and world leaders that are in the position to make these sweeping changes to create new industries that will mitigate the damage.’
On a lighter note, he can’t rule out becoming emotional if Intruder goes one place better and takes him to number one for the first time since 1981.
‘The last time, when Gemma took the call, she shamelessly videoed me and my reaction which was a bit embarrassing,’ he says.
‘It was such an outpouring of emotion I didn’t even realise was there. All this [late career success] means the world to me, it really does. It has made my life so much more enjoyable because of it.’ n Intruder is out now. Gary
Numan plays the Olympia Theatre, Dublin on May 24, 2022. Tickets go on sale on this Friday
‘It was such an outpouring of emotion I didn’t even realise was there’