Gary Numan
An audience with the electropop pioneer
While Gary Numan’s music is defiantly industrial in construction and dystopian in theme, the man himself cuts a pleasingly downto-earth figure. here he is, explaining to Uncut what’s on his touring rider: “Americans aren’t very good at bread,” he says. “So i ask for some decent bread, some butter and peanut butter. i’m so easily pleased, it’s embarrassing…”
it is late December and Numan is in Colorado on the closing dates of a 30-date North American tour. it is the latest leg in a global trek that has been running since September in support of Numan’s current album, Savage: Songs
From A Broken World. “The energy level is good,” he reports. “But the repetitive nature is beginning to wear a little bit.” Nevertheless, Numan is still vibed up for the business of the day: soon he has a pre-show meet-and-greet with fans, a soundcheck and then emails to catch up with before the gig. But first, he has your questions to answer – on a range of subjects, including voting Tory in his youth, ferrying indie pop stars round the UK in his private airplane and an unexpected encounter with Queen in the Far east. “it’s easy – talking about myself! i could do that all day!” A lot of people fetishise old synths: ARPs, Wasps and so on. Do you see the appeal in that? Or are you glad technology has moved on? Nat Wellington, London i don’t see any appeal in it at all. To me, synthesisers have always been like screwdrivers, hammers – tools you use to do a certain job, and once that job is done then i prefer to move on and find a new tool for the next job. There are a lot of people who look back on that early era of synthesisers, but those machines are of a kind. i think if you’ve made a number of albums with them, you’ve used the available palette of sound. electronic music is about finding new sounds and new methods and moving forward. Do you still have the fabled Mini Moog you discovered in the studio in late 1978? Grace Astor, Leeds i have few items of the original gear, but i do have a Mini Moog. When i lived in east Sussex, i had a garage with an attic roof. We put the house on the market, and i decided to clean out all this ivy that had grown in through the attic and smothered everything up there. i was hacking away, and i found a fucking Mini Moog pretty much growing under a bush. i got it done up again and it’s all lovely. i think my dad’s got it. You were at Victoria Station in May 1976 when Bowie arrived off the Orient express. Did he really make a Nazi salute? Nick Edwards, Cambridge i was there all day and never saw him! i was 18. i’m pretty sure i was wearing a green boiler suit. i just remember being there with lots and lots of Bowie fans and everyone went mad, screaming with exciting, but i couldn’t see him. in the ’80s, i did the Kenny everett show and Bowie was on, too. i was a massive fan, i had seen him countless times; i had an embarrassing array of bootlegs. The chance to even be remotely near him was an honour. But he asked for me to be thrown out of the studio and then taken off the programme, which was very disappointing. But as the years have gone by, i understood far more the way he saw things then. he was still a young man, with ups and downs in his own career, and i think he saw people like me as little upstarts. But later he said some nice things about me, so that made the whole thing better! You played guitar before you discovered synthesisers. Who were your guitar heroes? Dave Chandler, Nottingham i was a big Marc Bolan fan. The reason i got a Gibson les Paul is because Marc and Mick Ronson both played them. i’ve still got it – my mum and dad bought it for me when i was still at school. i still use it now. it’s been on every album i’ve ever made
and every tour I’ve ever done. Funnily enough, for all my blasé feelings about synthesisers, my guitar means the world to me! It’s symbolic, somehow. It played on the very first demo I ever did, the very first gig I ever played, the very first TV appearance – it’s been part of every single stage of the career. You got a lot of stick when you admitted to voting Tory during the 1980s. Do you still stand by that? Nicola Whey, Sheffield That particular one, I do. I’m not much of a political animal, to be honest. The thing to remember about when I voted Conservative is that they had a landslide victory – it wasn’t me alone voting for Margaret Thatcher. Whether we were fooled or not, whatever she did she managed to convince the majority of the electorate to vote for her. It was the only time I ever voted. Did you really fly Lawrence from Denim to the V Festival in 1996? Eddie Hammersmith, London I flew him, but not to the V Festival! There’s nowhere to land there. I flew quite a lot of people around – literally hundreds of people. I used to do low-level formation aerobatic displays all over Europe; I was an examiner in that for years. I flew a Harvard – a two-seater, WWII radial engine airplane. Eventually, pretty much everyone I knew [involved in aerobatics] was killed in one accident or another. I used to do formation aerobatics as The Radial Pair with a friend – then when he was killed in a crash flying another plane my wife said, “Fuck that.” She knew him really well and his death shook her. We were talking about starting a family as well, so I thought, ‘I should probably think about getting out of this.’ What was your first band called? Debbie McCulloch, London They were called the Monkee Juniors. It wasn’t really a band. We were kids – 10 or 11 – and we would go to people’s houses and put on a show, as we called it. We’d put on a Monkees album, and mime to two or three tracks. We’d get a couple of shillings each and then off we’d go and try and blag into someone else’s house and do that same thing. We all had to be a particular Monkee, and I was Mike Nesmith! You were meant to tour Japan with Japan during the 1980s. What happened there? Susie Lever via email If my memory serves, they suggested I come on tour as guest performer with them. It was all a bit vague. Anyway, I made my own way to Japan. I went to their hotel and they didn’t seem to be massively pleased to see me! I noticed them fucking off out the side door of the hotel. So I jumped in a cab and chased them to the first venue. I sat out in the auditorium waiting for someone to come and get me to do the soundcheck. Next thing I know, the doors are open, the venue is filling up and I realise no-one’s got the bottle to tell me they’ve changed their minds and they don’t want me after all. As I made my way back to Tokyo, I saw on a poster that Queen was playing at the Budokan. I went to the show and the next thing I know I got taken backstage. Queen were lovely! I got adopted by Freddie. The
“I had this room set up as a bedsit, with a little bucket to wee in and a deep-fat fryer”
band took me out after the show to a sushi restaurant – but I don’t really like sushi, so Freddie sent his chauffeur out to get a McDonald’s. They couldn’t have been nicer to me! Has your Asperger’s affected the way you make music? Lee Troughton, the Wirral It’s been a massive benefit. It gives you a focus that’s almost unparalleled. One of the traits of Asperger’s is to have obsessive tendencies – which is quite useful in the music business. That kind of tunnel vision and the ability to emotionally disconnect at times can be very useful when dealing with criticism. The only downside is that I don’t think I’m very good socially – in fact, I’m awful! But it’s a small price to pay. I think it first became apparent when I was 14 or 15 – so 1973, ’74 – although I don’t think they had an official diagnosis for Asperger’s
until the mid-’80s. I went to see you in Croydon Fairfield Halls in 2001; it was my lowest Numan-fan moment. What was your lowest moment? I’ve seen you 63 times. Lilley James via Twitter My lowest point was when I put out an album in ’92 called Machine And Soul. I will regret that to the day I die. It’s just a really shit album. I’d run out of ideas, I’d lost my confidence, I thought my career was over. Imagery was shit, subject matter was shit. Musically it wasn’t shit – but it was just not a Gary Numan album, that’s for sure. Everything about my life at that point was shit. I was in massive debt. I hated the music I was making. I hated everything, it was horrible. Fortunately, I got it together again from ’94. I went back to doing music for the love of it. What was your greatest excess? Charlotte Bowyer, Eastbourne Airplanes. At one point I had three – I had two and my brother had one. I had a Ferrari, but it was second-hand, mind. I had a big neo-Georgian house on Wentworth golf course, but I was convinced it was haunted. Some weird shit had been going on – I’d come home and the house was in darkness when I was convinced I’d left the lights on. So one day, I made a point of turning on every single light in the house. I got back from the studio and – fuck me – the house was in total darkness. It freaked me out completely. I had this room set up as a bedsit, with a little bucket to wee in and a deep-fat fryer to cook food – I only ate chips at the time. I’d lock the door and wouldn’t come out until the morning. Gary Numan tours the Uk in March. Turn to p43 for our buyer’s guide and our review of his 1981 album Dance