April 19–26, 2001

Hello, Numan

Gary Numan didn’t really go anywhere, but he’s back all the same.

by Helen H. Thompson

Rise and shiner: Dark lord Gary Numan.

“Ohh, Gary Numan,” nods one of the uninitiated. “Didn’t he write that ‘Short People’ tune?”

Nah. Different Newman. But this Numan is also largely remembered for one song, his coming from the early days of MTV: “Cars.” It was one of the original pieces to bring British New Wave to the American mainstream. It had fairly simple synth hooks, with rich, sweeping pads and a beat that still passes muster on a synthpop dance floor. But one song does not merit an entire North American tour some 20 years later.

Or does it?

Numan’s back, with a vengeance. To some, he never left, with some 17 albums to his name. To others, he’s drifting back into the collective musical consciousness as a godfather figure to many artists in the hard dark electronica genre — from Carfax Abbey to NIN’s Trent Reznor. Still others just remember that he’s that man-machine thing from “Cars” and have no idea that he spent most of the ’80s trying to recapture that success.

“It’s just as well, in my opinion,” says Numan, almost apologetically, taking a breather from post-production work on his latest video, “Rip.” “I’m not saying it was bad music; it was done with good intentions and done as best as we could. But in terms of style, whether or not it was the sort of thing I should have been doing? It just wasn’t.” Of his vast catalogue, he has released only three full-length original albums since 1993. To Numan, these three albums — Sacrifice (1994), Exile (1999) and most recently Pure (2000) — represent his strongest work. To his fans, they’re darker, more mature and more intelligent. To critics, they speak of an artist who’s finally figured himself out.

Numan, now 43, credits Depeche Mode’s 1993 album Songs of Faith and Devotion with being the adrenaline jolt that pushed him past his previous limits. “I thought that was a great album. I just loved what they were doing, and it just made me realize how misguided my own music had been in years prior to that. It was a real wakeup call for me: as soon as that came out I just loved it 10 times more than anything I’d written.”

Since then, Numan has been doing his homework, immersing himself in the very work he inspired. You can hear the admiration dripping from his voice as he talks about how mainstream industrial completely changed his perspective on writing music. “More recently, I like Deftones, Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, that sort of thing. When I toured America in ’98, I got to hang out with Trent Reznor a bit, and I was exposed to music in various industrial clubs. I was listening to brilliant stuff that I had just never heard.”

It comes shining through on Pure. If Numan is the godfather of post-punk electronica, then the godsons have taught him quite a few lessons. He’s not afraid to be at once melodic and menacing. The music creeps and slithers, with a cathartic lyrical tapestry flowing amid the densely worked synths and guitars.

The album, as a whole, would put his earlier work in the hospital for being just too darn fluffy.

Numan is very taken with the notion of writing a soundtrack for a horror movie, and cited his wife’s miscarriage as being the emotional punch behind Pure. But overall, Numan, amiable and chatty, delights in his darkness. His own private renaissance, borne of that symbiosis between what his past inspired and his voice in the present, has made the 20-year journey to a quieter success that much more fulfilling. “I’m still learning, getting on top of various studio techniques and learning to understand my own limitations,” he says of his songwriting. “I don’t really have a voice which is suitable in many ways for [industrial] music. If I shout, I sound like a schoolgirl having a tantrum — it doesn’t sound very intimidating or frightening. So I have to learn what I can do well and what I can’t do well, what to avoid and what to adopt more thoroughly. I’m having more fun making music now than I have in 15 to 20 years.”

 

(Republished February 27, 2024, from the now defunct Philadelphia City Paper; original available on archive.org at this link.)