Interview #175: Gary Numan

Gary Numan's new Fenton vs Numan single,Healing is out now, released on April 30, the follow up to Numan's Jagged album, which saw him collaborate with Ade Fenton. The album was described by Q Magazine as a 'shudder-fest of consistent quality' and has certainly given Numan's music fresh shape and vitality. Ade Fenton's new album, Artificial Perfect, featuring four songs with Gary Numan is out May 7th.

I Like Music caught up with Gary Numan to talk about fatherhood, flying, collaborating with Ade and his new music material, plus his advice for artists just starting out.

“I Like Music because… it has given me a life that I could only dream of and it allows me to get things out that I have no other way of doing.” Gary Numan

ILM: We last caught up with you in 2002 when you released Exposure - The Best Of Gary Numan 1977 - 2002 album and RIP. So it’s great to talk to you again. How are you?

Gary: Things are quite different now actually. In three and a half years we’ve gone from no children to three, so life’s changed quite a bit, so quite tired now.

ILM: How are Gemma, Raven and the new baby, Echo Moon?

Gary: Echo is fine now but she was in intensive care for a bit and that was quite stressy, then she was in the special care baby unit for two weeks after that, the whole pregnancy was difficult with lots of emergency trips to hospital and bleeding and some of it was horrific, so I’m very glad it’s all finished and then when she did come out the baby was really ill and that was just horrible but now she’s fine and she’s putting on weight. So now we’ve just got the stress of looking after three babies.

ILM: Well good luck and we wish you all the best.

ILM: You and Ade Fenton have a BBC Radio live performance on BBC Radio 2 on Thursday 17th May, on the Janice Long show. I guess that’ll be a whole different experience to recording sessions for John Peel?

Gary: I’ve done Janice Long before so luckily I’m familiar with the place and how to go about it so that’s cool. The John Peel sessions, the first two I did with John Peel weren’t actually that different to the way Janice does it. But the third one was quite different because there were people there watching and it was brilliant, really exciting. The first two were tucked away in the studio at Maida Vale and you’re in the middle of this great big building with no windows so you kind of feel like you’re in a big box. It was cool. It felt like a really exciting thing to be doing because it was with John Peel who was legendary even way back then. So it felt like it was a massively important step forward in my career. And it’s amazing to have done it, with a legendary human being for a legendary programme. It was really cool.

ILM: How did you and Ade hook up?

Gary: I’ve known him for a long time, for years, as a friend. But he was doing techno stuff and I’ve never really been in to that, so for quite a while our musical paths were very different. To be honest, I didn’t really have a lot of interest in what he was doing because I really don’t get the techno thing too much. But then he started to work on what he called his first proper album and he was bringing me demos of that, and it was so clever and so different to what he’d done before, so much more along the sort of path that I like and that I was going down, that I was really taken with it. And then, every few months, he’d come back and visit the house and he’d bring new or updated demos of what he’d done before, and the improvement and rate of progress that he was showing was absolutely brilliant, I couldn’t believe it.

You know, it’s quite common, if you’re in the music business to have people send you stuff… friends will come round and say, ‘I’ve written a song’ and it’s absolutely rubbish and you’ve got a few minutes to listen to it and all you’re doing is thinking of what you can say that isn’t going to be insulting and try and find something good about it. And I was a little bit worried when Ade first came round, but it was genuinely brilliant. I loved it! So, when he asked me to get involved … well actually, that’s why I got him to produce my last album because I was so impressed with what he was doing with his, I thought we could tap in to that. And then he asked me to do something on his as well and because it was so much my sort of music it was easy, so I’m glad to be involved with it.

ILM: So it’s been a fusion of your two styles?

Gary: Yeah, very much so. I’ve worked with a lot of people, I’ve been doing this for around 30 years and he really is one of the hardest working and easiest people to work with and I hadn’t expected it, because when you’re working with friends it’s often much more difficult because you’re normal relationship changes, it’s a little bit more brutal and blunt because you’re talking about something creative and gets a bit pressured. But he was fantastic. I didn’t have to ask him to change very much but when I did he took it gracefully and just got on with it. So it was a very easy and very fast working relationship.

And the progress, we just leapt forward. What had taken me quite a long time … when he first got involved and started work on it, I was almost finished and had struggled with it for quite a bit, but it was nearly finished, and maybe had two or three more songs to go, And, what he did on the first song was fantastic, so I gave him two more and when they came back I had three songs that Ade had done, and it was so good, so much more than what I’d had before, that we went back and just started the album from scratch. So everything that had been done before was put to one side and we started again. And from the moment he started to the time we finished was only five months so that’s very quick, although some of the songs had already been written, but even so it was a very quick process. And that makes it really exciting. There’s nothing worse than an album that drags out over years, like a never ending project. He had an amazing flow of ideas which then fired me up and I had hundreds of ideas of my own pouring out, and you just feed each other. When that happens, which isn’t often, it’s a really good exciting vibe to make a record off.

You have to enjoy doing it, otherwise, what are you doing it for? If making albums becomes really difficult, like drudgery, then you’re probably in the wrong business or maybe you’ve done it enough and should get out and try something else.

ILM: New single Healing is out now (April 30th). The video is amazing (and scary)

[Gary laughs)

ILM: Can you give us your own personal description of it?

Gary: Well it came to me quite different to the way it ended up. When it arrived here, Ade had a vocal that he wanted to put quite near the end of it, and it was really quite slow. There was this big long bit at the beginning that I really liked and I thought I could come up with a vocal melody of my own for that, which is what’s on it now, the way it that starts, it’s the first vocal all the way through it, the one that I came up with, but then when Ade got it all back, he just had this brainwave of making it this big fast high energy kind of track and totally transformed it. I was amazed when it came back that this song that I thought was this relatively slow pretty song could turn into this high energy monster track. I love it. Most of my own stuff is relatively medium paced or slow and the way it just builds and kicks off half way through, it’s brilliant.

ILM: You’ve got lots of DVDs due out, from the Jagged Launch Gig DVD and Hammersmith Live to The Forum Telekon Tour DVD and Guilfest 2006 DVD – what do you enjoy most about putting DVDs together?

Gary: It actually took me a really long time to get into it. I only put my first one out three years ago, while other people have been putting them out for years and years. When I did the first one it was just a fantastic kind of snapshot of where you are with your career at a given moment. And I suddenly saw it for that, so I don’t try to do clever things with them. I don’t try to do the latest all bells and whistles kind of thing, I just like them to be snapshots of a moment in time. Like a documentary of your career really, and that’s how I see them, which is a very simple way of seeing them, but that’s what I enjoy about them.

ILM: Almost like a scrapbook of your career then, which is great for the fans too.

Gary: Yeah, because the music is evolving. Every time I go out it’s predominantly new stuff so each DVD you do the set is evolving, the band changes a bit, so there might be a different guitar or bass player and of course we’re all getting older, so it documents everything that you’re doing. It’s very simple and I love it for that reason.

ILM: I can’t quite believe it but it’s your 50th birthday next year – how will you be celebrating? Any plans to do a loop the loop in your plane?

Gary: [laughs] No, I actually sold my plane a year and a half ago. I wasn’t flying it enough to justify the cost of having it. I used to do air displays, I was an aerobatic display pilot and all the people I used to fly with, every single one of them except for one of them was killed in different crashes. The nature of it, what used to a really exciting elitist kind of thing actually became a bit sad. You’d go to an airfield and all your friends were dead, it was just a weird feeling. It was a particular day that it hit me and I thought, ‘I think I’ve had enough of this actually.’ I loved the flying and being in a plane but there was more to it than that, there was the whole social side and a lot of good friends I’d had. And one day something clicked and I thought, ‘I’m done with this now’. I miss it, but everyone I know had gone. The only other person who was part of my close friendship who wasn’t dead wasn’t doing it anymore either, he had pulled out himself. It is very dangerous and people die doing it every year.

It was quite common for five pilots every year from the UK to die, and I knew most of them and then people very close to you get killed; my brother had a massive accident but didn’t get killed and was very lucky to get away with it. These are big old aeroplanes and they break, it’s just very unfortunate. My wife wasn’t in to it, she used to air sick, none of my friends were there anymore, so I’d go down to the airfield on my own and it got a bit lonely. And it changed. I backed out of it slowly and eventually just stopped going.

ILM: Well now you have children I think that’s wise and I expect Gemma is pleased you’re no longer risking your life on a regular basis.

Gary: Yes. It really came home to my wife when the last person we knew was killed because she was close to him and that upset her a lot. But prior to that I was going through some of my old photographs with her and we didn’t have a single photograph where all the people in it were still alive and that shook her up quite a bit. She hadn’t really connected me doing that and how many people were killed doing it and it was only going through the photo collection it took her back a bit and from that moment on she didn’t want me to do it. The thing is, you’re going out to the airfield and you’re leaving behind someone who’s terrified and that’s no way to live is it?

ILM: No. You definitely made the right decision to stop and you had plenty of fun while you were doing it.

Gary: Yeah I loved it; I was made an examiner and used to teach other people how to be display pilots. So I got quite good at it and I really did love it. But I think I had my time.

ILM: You were shy as a child, music brought him out of your shell; how is music affecting your own children?

Gary: It’s difficult to say. The strange thing about music is it gives you the ability to have an alter ego, you can go on stage and just be someone else, it’s a similar kind of vibe to acting. One of the reasons I got into the use image right from the beginning it felt like something to hide behind, especially with light shows and that sort of things. Having a persona. It gives you this artificial barrier. So although I was very shy, when I was doing little pub gigs before I made it I was having a nightmare, for a week before the gig I was so frightened and the day of the gig I was just impossible to be around terrified. I realized unless I can get over this, I’m never going to do it so I decided to write songs which had persona’s in them, and when I got the first record deal, that was the way I went. I created characters and become that for a bit. It’s like when you’re young and you want to play Cowboys and Indians and you put on a cowboy hat and you feel like a cowboy, so it was just like a grown up version of that. You dress up like a pop star and put on a bit of make up and go on stage and behave in a way that’s pretty different to the way you really are, and you do that for a few years and as you build up your own confidence and talent, you don’t need to do it anymore. So it was a way of getting me through that phase. When you go on stage and you’re strutting around and you seem arrogant, you can kind of get away with it. It gives you that push to get on and do it.

ILM: You’ve been signed to various labels including Beggars Banquet and IRS, the latter held you back refusing to release or fund certain things. What’s your advice on getting the right deal?

Gary: That’s not easy actually. The problem with record companies is, the people who work for them change constantly. I’ve had this several times, you get signed by a particular person who’s your champion and a few months later he moves and gets a better job and you’re left with people who didn’t sign you and don’t support or even like what you do. Signing to a label is not the answer to everything it’s just the beginning of your problem. Most labels will try to reshape you and change your sound. You think you’re being signed for what you do and for what you are and for the music that you make. But often they’ll sign you because they see something in you that they’d like to have and they try to turn you into that, I can’t tell you how much advice I’ve had from record companies on what I should and shouldn’t be doing and you think why the fuck did you sign me. If you want me to do something different, why didn’t you just sign someone who does that?

You go into it with so much confidence because they feed you so much rubbish, then a little bit down the line you realize they don’t actually want you the way you are at all, and you’re having to fight for every single song you put out. And it gets really frustrating. Some people say go with the people with the most integrity not the people with the most money. But that’s rubbish! I don’t think there is much integrity. My advice would be: go for the people with the most money, because you’re going to have exactly the same problem with them, big label or small label. I have a very cynical jaded point of view I’m afraid.

ILM: It’s like saying to an artist who paints: ‘please can you draw that line differently’.

Gary: Yeah, like, can you draw roses instead of carnations?

There are plenty of people who are putting out music they don’t really like, but if they don’t do it the record company will drop them. And the other problem is it’s common for a record company to sign a band and the band think they’re on the way to the top and they go into the studio and record a few tracks, then the record label put out a white label of a potential single and give it to radio, then radio don’t show an interest in it, and before they’ve even finished the album, the band get dropped. Instead of developing and improving artists over time and investing in them to create success together it’s not like that anymore, it’s in and out, if it works you’re in, if it doesn’t, you’re out, finished, very cut throat.

You can’t go into this thinking you’re the best and that the world owes you something. I’ve got a friend who’s a great musician but thinks he’s better than he is, and he just can’t believe he got dropped a while ago, and it’s finished him. He’s like a shell. It doesn’t matter, I’ve been dropped by more record labels than most people have even heard of, it doesn’t bother me, it just makes you angry and makes you want to prove them wrong, it’s not the end of the world. Making music is the most important thing to me, but the world isn’t going to stop if I don’t make another album.

ILM: And you’ve persisted and got on with it and still have a fan base, so it’s better to have that outlook.

Gary: Yeah. The most important thing is, you must enjoy making music above all else. If you want fame or recognition above all else, you’ll come unstuck, but if you just enjoy making music, that’s the best attitude to have. If you write an album, some people don’t like it, never mind, make improvements and make another one. If you don’t get signed, find someone else who will sign you and, these days, if you can’t get signed, it’s not that difficult to put out your own music, to do it yourself on the internet and it doesn’t even cost that much

If your ego is that fragile, move on, do something else. Have a strong sense of determination and being highly focused and a small ego is probably the best way. Like what you’re doing but don’t think it’s God’s gift to music. Be proud of what you do but don’t expect anyone else to like it, and then you’ll be pleasantly surprised when they do. That’s much better than being shattered that people don’t.

ILM: What track do you stick on if you want to chill out?

Gary: I don’t ever chill out really. I play the same music no matter what mood I’m in. The album I’d play the most would be Songs Of Faith And Devotion by Depeche Mode.

Fenton vs Numan - Healing is out now (released April 30th). Gary Numan - The Complete John Peel Sessions album is out May 7th