anderswolleck

Gary Numan is best known to American audiences as the creator of the classic song Cars back in the 1980s. But Numan has never stopped making his unique brand of electronic music. Powerful, deep, hot and cold at the same time Numan revolutionizes music with every new album. His latest is Jagged which is produced by one of the best hard techno producers out there, Ade Fenton.

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Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?

Gary Numan: Today Ive been doing quite a lot of interviews. Also I moved over the New Year so Ive only been here for a little while and the studio is still in pieces. Ive got a new little baby that arrived in October, so thats difficult. Ive got a toddler thats two, so shes just hit that evil stage. It couldnt be more stressful if Id planned it.

DRE: Didnt you plan it though?

GN: Well, the baby was a complete surprise. We spent about seven years trying to have a baby, because we were told by the doctors that we couldnt have children normally. There was something not quite right with Gemma so we thought we had to go through invetro. We did that and it was really painful. There were lots of doctors appointments; we lost three babies for sure, possibly a fourth one, so it was very traumatic and depressing. But when we got the first one, it was so fantastic. One of the reasons the new album took me so long is that the baby arrived and I didnt want to miss a day. Then we couldnt believe it when she got pregnant naturally. Now Ive got two children so its just been really strange and fantastic.

DRE: Thats really wonderful.

Are you using a lot of new equipment?

GN: Its pretty much all new equipment; there are one or two things that Ive used that Ive had for a while but apart from those, its all completely new. I have a new computer, new discs, new software. Its a completely new experience for me. Id always worked on tape before so the move to ProTools has been a big step for me and Im really glad I did it.

DRE: Did you use it all for this album?

GN: Yeah, I started it about two and a half years ago.

DRE: What did using all that new stuff do for you?

GN: It made it easier. Although ProTools is a very powerful system, its surprisingly easy to use at a basic level. You can get started without really needing to read the manual by the end of the first day. So I was very surprised by that. I thought it was going to be a drama to try and get on top of it, but it was very simple and easy. I love the way it works with your synthesizers, your processing, everything all in one box. It is very reliable. I had fewer breakdown days with this system than Ive had for years and years.

DRE: Wont the music be different without those days the computer breaks down?

GN: Sometimes youre working on something and you have to have an idea but then the machines fucking break down. I was having five or six crashes a day with the system I was running. When that happens the creative side of what youre doing stops, you feel more like a computer maintenance man than you do a musician. You probably lose quite a lot of the ideas because the equipment is breaking down so often. With this equipment I was able to come up with ideas and get them down very quickly and just keep moving very fast. It actually became exciting to get to the studio and be able to go for days and days and days without anything going wrong at all. It made me really excited about the album. Before it was just depressing, youd come out and go, God, Ive been in there for 12 hours and only about three of those were actually making music. The rest of it was trying to fix the bloody thing. Im very glad that Ive moved on to that system.

DRE: Your new album sounds new and fresh, but its an obvious Gary Numan album. Were you resistant towards doing something that sounded too retro?

GN: I hate anything to do with nostalgia and retro. Youll never see me on one of those nostalgia shows. I really have a thing about it. The problem I have is that I dont have a particularly good voice, but it is very distinctive. As soon as I stop singing, I sound like Ive always sounded. What I try to do with every album is use as few sounds as possible that Ive used before. So I spend a great deal of time programming those sounds, to try and make sure that the sound element is at least something you havent heard before. That is why I constantly invest in new technology. A lot of the ideas I come up with are derived from people trying to get the best from the new technology. So I write lots of pieces of music simply to experiment with the technology. A lot of my albums are 50 percent made by the technology as Im beginning to understand it. Many of my albums are opportunist and lucky. Ive stumbled across sounds and ways of doing things that I hadnt thought of before. That side of it is very cool and very exciting. Im glad that I still want to come up with new sounds.

DRE: So do you create sounds off the computer then manipulate them or just make them right in the computer?

GN: Both. A lot of the technology has the sounds set up within it then you can then manipulate those. Also there is some software you can buy that is a complete blank canvas and you create the tracks. You can also go out on the street with a microphone and a recorder and just hit and tap things. Once a long time ago I stuck a microphone by the exhaust pipe of a Corvette and that was a fantastic sound. You do things like that then you go into the studio, you work on it and you change it and you put different effects across it. From one sound you can sometimes create ten, fifteen sounds, each one progressively stranger than the original. Then you create a library of sounds that are unique to you and you mix those in with other sounds or synthesizers. Thats how it works. So an awful lot of the time spent making one of my albums is creating the sounds. Hopefully the outcome of that is that you have an album full of sounds that people havent heard before. To pin my music down and to create sheet music and chords that people can use is really difficult, because a lot of my music is really noisy.

DRE: How did you hook up with Ade Fenton?

GN: Ade has been a friend of mine for quite a few years. Hes a techno DJ and I cant stand techno, I think its dreadful. So musically we didnt really connect but he liked my stuff, Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails. We liked the same kind of music outside of dance music. A few years ago he started to work on his own industrial albums which were very different from what hed done before with the techno music. I thought that was very impressive. He asked me to do some singing on it, which I did. Then he came back a few months later with more developed songs and they were very impressive. They had some really powerful heavy electronic things going on, and I thought Christ, in a very short space of time hes now much better than me. I was initially a bit embarrassed then I thought he would be a great producer. At the time I was having problems with the people Id used in the past and I decided I might as well use Ade. Hed never produced an album with anyone so it was a risk. I gave him one song and that ended up really good so I gave him a second song and he was so good I decided I wanted the entire album to be done that way. We went over everything wed already done with other people and redid the whole album from beginning to end. I think he did such a brilliant job.

DRE: Have you changed your mind about techno?

GN: No. It just isnt for me. I dont like much music at all. I have limited taste, which isnt a good thing for a musician. But I am able to see what other people see in techno but it just doesnt touch me. Jazz for example, doesnt touch me in the slightest, but I appreciate it as extremely clever.

DRE: Ten years ago I saw Warren Zevon play. At the end of the show he walked off stage. A few minutes later he walked out and said Fine, Ill fucking play it and he went into Werewolves of London. Do things like that ever happen to you in concert?

GN: Im actually all right with it. The funny thing is the only successful song I ever had in America was a song called Cars, many years ago. The last time I toured there I played that, because I thought, this is the song that people are going to know. It actually went down as the least favorite of the night. Sometimes fans get bored because they know youre going to do it. But sometimes it works really well and I dont mind doing it provided Im free to play the stuff that Im really into which tends to be the newer things. Im happy to stick in a variety of older songs though I tend to rework them to make them sound more contemporary. Since some of them are 25 years old I wouldnt want to do them the way they were originally done because it was a time when music wasnt as developed yet. I will play some of the things fans expect to hear. But its very difficult because Ive got something like 300 plus songs and you only have about 15 you can do at a show. Whatever I do, Im going to be leaving out a whole range of stuff that people thought I was going to do. So its inevitable that most people will be disappointed.

DRE: I read that Gemma was a fan and thats how you met.

GN: Yes, weve been together for 14 years and married for nine.

DRE: I would imagine it would be different if youd met and married a fan off the internet now.

GN: [laughs] I dont know about off the internet. It was just a cool thing because she had been a fan for a long time. What I noticed about her was that she would come and get things signed after the shows but she never hung around. She wasnt schmoozing with everyone. Shes ten years younger than me so I kind of watched her grow up. She was really quite fat for many years and then one year she showed up and she just looked amazing. I took an interest after that but I only ever saw her when I played live. One year I noticed that she wasnt there, which was surprising, until the very last night when she turned up. I said I havent seen you, whats going on? It turned out her mother was dying and she was really upset. I must have talked to her for hours that night. She was such a cool person and she was going through such a terrible thing, yet she had such fantastic dignity. Shortly after that I heard her mother died so I rung her up, and said Ive got to go up to the north of England and do this radio show. Do you want to come with me? We took this long drive together to the station and by the end of that I felt that she was the most brilliant person I have ever met. We started seeing each other after that. We lived together for about a year and then we got married.

DRE: Are you planning on touring for the new album?

GN: Were doing Europe and then coming to America. We have a gig in March, which will launch the whole album. Then we do a full British tour in April, go to Europe in May and then we come back to England. The plan at the moment is to go to America for either all of June, or late June early July.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck