© Copyright Clive Young
From Cafe80s.Com, August, 1998.Gary Numan's Return With Exile
By Clive YoungIt can't be easy being Gary Numan. In the U.S., he's seen as a one-hit wonder for the synth classic, "Cars," but in the U.K., he's known as a hitmaker who had a string of early '80s smashes, then continued to release albums on his own label each year with increasingly diminishing returns. And then there's the fact that he was always the whipping boy of the British music press--his egregious crime was he wasn't, you know, cool.
After all, here was a pop star whose idea of a big production number at his concerts was to have two neon triangles dance with each other. A musician who posed film-noir style as a 1940s spy for an album cover, but only looked like a hopeless dork. Hell, the guy even brought his mom and dad along when he went on tour.
"I'm not a natural leader, just a natural bully." Probably Numan's main problem, though, was that he wasn't afraid to say what he thought--which is one thing if you're a sopping drunk at the end of the bar, but its another when making a living wage requires courting the media in order to draw people to your music. "A few years ago, I made the mistake of saying who I was going to vote for, and got absolutely crucified for the next 10 years, because apparently I said the wrong person," he says. Stabbing back with press-condemning songs such as 1985's "Your Fascination" didn't improve matters much.
But all that may well prove to be a tempest in a teapot compared to Numan's latest career moves. Signing to the stateside Gothic indie label Cleopatra, Numan recently toured the U.S. for the first time since the early '80s to coincide with the release of Exile, his first American release in a decade. The disc--an aggressively sacrilegious concept album--is definitely not for the easily offended.
"I think that a lot of people take music too seriously in general, to be honest," says Numan, an avowed atheist. "It's a horror story--something to think about and then get back to your everyday life. The album looks at the idea that all the evil in the world might just be another side of God. And that God might be very menacing and very vicious, very unpleasant really. And then it goes back and looks at certain parts of the Bible--the three wise men and the virgin birth, that kind of thing--and it just reinterprets them slightly. That's what it's about. It's not meant to be offensive towards religion or anything like that." Uh, yeah, sure.
It's readily apparent that during the time that Numan spent releasing his own records, he became a canny marketer who is deeply involved in all parts of his image. He designs his albums' artwork, concert T-shirts and backstage passes, and is currently at work on an autobiography due out in England this fall. So then it's not hard to imagine that when Marilyn Manson, the '90s answer to Dee Snider, started to cite Numan as an influence and began covering his tunes, Numan saw the writing on the wall and created the equally virulent Exile.
But while that may not be hard to imagine, it's not quite the whole story either. Though Numan has released records and then toured England nearly every year for the past two decades, his album sales were progressively falling off throughout the late '80s. Pretty soon, he hit rock bottom: "I did an album in 1992 called Machine and Soul which is a shit album, and there's no getting away from it. I had to stop, take some time out and think seriously about what the fuck I was doing. I completely re-evaluated why I was in the business, did I want to stay in it, and if I did, how did I want it to progress. I completely changed my attitude and method of songwriting and working in the studio. I went very, very insular again, shut myself off from the world, and started to come up with a lot more imaginative things and enjoy the writing process again."
Technology and alienation have always been two of Numan's favorite themes--take the typical early song title "Me I Disconnect From You" or the lyrics from "Cars." As a result, "going insular" was a simple thing to do. Thanks to advances in technology, professional-sounding albums can now be made in home recording studios, so a spare room in Numan's home was fitted with a mixing desk, recording machines and the rest. Though he had always produced his own music since starting out in the late '70s, Numan took up sound engineering and found that working mostly by himself suited him.
"I'm really not a very tactful person," he says. "I don't always work well with other people because I'm very impatient when someone comes up with an idea and it's not quite what I wanted. Then you've got to diplomatically say that you think it's shit, but you don't want to put it like that." He later acknowledges, "it's not a good thing at all; it's horrible and I don't like that," but then adds, "I'm not a natural leader, just a natural bully."
Working at home has its upsides--no commute and easy access to the kitchen fridge--but there are also drawbacks. "I've got dogs and cats and all kinds of things that want to come in the room and sit and listen to what I'm doing," he mentions with a laugh. "Or my wife Hoovers [vacuums]; there's nothing worse than you're sitting down there, trying to write a lyric and a Hoover goes past the door, taking your mind off it. So I need to get out, I really do." To that extent, he plans to purchase a ready-made Scandinavian 20'x20' shed and convert it into his studio--not merely for the quiet and the extra room, but also for the discipline: "I think there's something psychologically important about going out to work; you can apply yourself much more to it. Even if you're just going out the back door of your house into a shed, you're going out."
That may well explain Numan's intent focus while touring the U.S.--a cross-country jaunt that served up new music and his old hits remade in the style of his current sound. "There's this fine line between wanting to move forward, being seen as a viable act in 1998, and also acknowledging that I have been around for a long time. "Cars" has hung around my neck like a bloody stone! It creates a shadow that's almost impossible to get out from underneath--and yet to not do it would be arrogant because it is a big song. I think revamping the songs has made them very exciting and they don't sound 20 years old."
Similarly, concertgoers expecting the cold, robotic Numan of old with a stage presence that could be measured as .00 nothing, are in for a surprise. "It isn't me standing on a stage, trying to look robotic and enigmatic. The show is very aggressive, the music is hugely powerful, it's everything. By the first chorus of the first song, we're sweating! And it's pouring off us, and we're down and banging and we're going for it! I'm suffering for it, actually--I've pulled every bloody muscle in my body so far."
The show, compared to Numan's early concerts, is like night and day. "I've had to learn, almost painfully, to get over all those hang-ups and inhibitions that I had. I didn't move around much back then because I didn't know what to do! It was so awkward; I would be halfway through a song, and I would think, 'Oooh, I haven't moved my arm for a while; I should move my arm.' So I'd lift my arm up, and it was as crap as that! Talk about un-bloody-natural. Then people reviewed me and said I was very wooden, and I'd get all upset! Absolutely right! I've never had so many accurate reviews in my life."
But that was then, this is now, and tomorrow is what Numan's (still) looking at. Thanks to props from Mr. Manson and other current acts, plus a number of tribute albums, he's experiencing a certain cache these days. The new album is selling, the U.S. tour played to sold-out crowds and there's the autobiography that's still not completed yet. Add to that a European tour, a Far East tour, upcoming collaborations with Prodigy, Fear Factory, Tricky, Dubstar, Afrika Bambatta (!) and George Clinton (!!), an acting debut in a small film shooting this summer, and a new, "more aggressive" album that the record company wants by next January, and it becomes readily apparent that Numan will not be sleeping anytime soon.
For now, his immediate concern is promoting Exile and making sure that people see it in the light he intended: "I would warn people against taking too much of it literally. Some musicians really do speak from the heart and others consider themselves to be like actors; I guess I'm somewhere in between."
The album, the U.S. tour and media attention like this article may help Numan finally shed his robotic image of old, but it remains to be seen whether the public will come to see him as a hardworking musician making a comeback, or instead pigeonhole him as an atheist who writes sacreligious material.
"Oh God...." he sighs, without a trace of irony. "I imagine this'll be hard to read, being misunderstood in one way or another." Another sigh. "Too much to undo, I guess."
