Gary Numan: Interview

When it unexpectedly became a British number one hit in June 1979, ‘Are “Friends” Electric?’ helped to open up new terrain for electronic pop in the UK. With Tubeway Army and then solo, Gary Numan’s records brought cold-wave electronics to a mass audience, giving unprecedented opportunities to other post-punk synth bands who would go on to make synthetic pop the dominant sound of the early eighties.

I spoke to him about how he initially had to fight to convince his record company that electronic music was the way forward amid widespread hostility to the genre from rock traditionalists; how he created his Gary Numan persona to overcome chronic stage fright; how the British music press taunted him cruelly but Black American electro musicians saw him as an innovator, and how he sometimes felt like an outsider even within the UK synth-pop scene.

Around the time of the first two Tubeway Army albums [in 1978 and 1979], how much were you aware of what other people had been doing in electronic music before that?

I knew very little actually. I'd been aware of Kraftwerk, obviously, some of the things that Brian Eno had been doing. The ones with Bowie mostly, because I was a Bowie fan. And I was aware of the BBC [Radiophonic] Workshop, they did ‘Doctor Who’ theme and those kinds of things. And I remember they put out the ‘Doctor Who’ theme as a single, many years before. I bought that, I thought that was brilliant. But that's about it. Which is pretty pathetic really.

I didn't even know about the other people that were doing it when I started to do it - The Human League and Orchestral Manoeuvres, all those people. I was completely unaware of all that, which I think in some ways helped me a bit because I honestly thought that I was one of the first people to discover it, you know, which is slightly ignorant, obviously, because I did know about Kraftwerk and so on.

But in the way that I was doing it, you know, where electronic music was being merged with conventional instruments so it was adding a layer rather than replacing everything entirely, which is really what Kraftwerk and the likes of them were doing.

I went to the studio to make a conventional album [‘Replicas’ in 1979] then and I simply replaced quite a lot of the guitar and used a synthesizer instead. But essentially, I was grafting on a new layer of sound to something that was fairly conventional. And I hadn't really heard that before, although it was around, it wasn't I invented it, I just hadn't heard it before.

That was because I was listening to other things, I guess, and so I wasn't aware. And that made me feel so passionate about it, because I thought I discovered something quite new. And it was that passion that took me back to the record company to really fight for it and really try to persuade them that electronic music was going to be the new thing and they should jump on it.

I thought this new thing that I thought I had discovered was going to be huge, and we had an opportunity with that first album to be at the very beginning of something, as I thought - or otherwise they could make me stay doing the punk music that they'd signed me for, which I thought was at the end of its time, it seemed to be dying on its feet as far as I could work out.

We almost had a fight in the office, you know, me and one of the [record company] directors actually squared off against each other - it got really childish, really stupid, because I was absolutely convinced that I had the opportunity to be at the front end of something.

But I wonder if I would have felt quite as passionate as that if I had known about The Human League and Ultravox and all these other bands that were already doing it, and so I hadn't really discovered it at all - I had for me, but not for the world at large.

Did you go on to feel like you were part of some kind of movement with other bands like The Human League and Depeche Mode? Or did you always feel separate from them in some way?

No, I did feel part of it. Soon after I had my success, obviously that opens doors with lots of other people, you know, lots of record companies wanting to get their token electronic act, lots of people were suddenly sort of given opportunities with that sort of music that hadn't been there before. So it became very, very popular very, very quickly.

So there were people that were doing it before that now had the opportunity for people to hear their music, which had been denied to them before. Or there were people that were suddenly interested in it that hadn't thought about it before - suddenly, there was this new sort of sound, new sort of music and these instruments that you could go out and buy, you didn't need to be great at guitar.

In a way I suppose it extended from the punk thing in that the punk ethos had been that you didn't have to be particularly good, you just had to be sort of enthusiastic. And again, plenty of punk bands couldn't play for shit really. And electronic music I think was in some ways, for some people, an evolution of that.

I discovered [the potential of electronic music] by accident because I had gone to the studio to make a conventional album. I’d never seen a real synthesizer before. I’d never even touched a keyboard before I made that first album. Never. I didn’t have a piano at home. I didn’t know a single chord.

What turned me on was the fact that it was all about the sound. I used to say that sometimes one note will do, you just need one note because it’s the sound that matters, and how that sound evolves and what you can do with it. If you’ve got a really interesting sound, you don’t need to have loads of different notes going on, one note can conjure up all sorts of thoughts and images and feelings in your mind, it can create a sense of menace, a sense of power – it doesn’t have to be always dark, but it usually is for me.

As the electronic thing evolved and became hugely popular over the next few years, with all sorts of bands coming up and having success, I did feel a part of that, but in a way I never truly felt fully a part of it all - that might have been because I had so much trouble with the press. I felt a little bit like an outsider then, even within the music business.

Looking back now, the British music press were very cruel to you at the time. Why do you think they were so harsh?

Well, I think I was the first to have that kind of success. So I think that when you're the person that opens the door to something new, whatever resistance there is to that, you get it square in the face.

There was a great deal of hostility towards electronic music when I first started. The music was very, very different and the way I presented it was quite different. My whole image was sullen and moody. There was no smiling, and I do have Asperger’s so when I talked about things it was done in a way that wasn’t ‘normal’, I guess – I hate that word.

I’m not very good at manipulating or adapting what I say to suit people, I just blurt it all out. And I was just blurting out all this stuff that I wanted to be famous, I wanted to be a pop star. And I never saw anything bad in that, I never saw ambition as being a bad thing. But coming on the back of the punk movement, I think it was seen as a bad thing because punk was seen as being anti-hero and anti-popstar, although I don’t think it was actually, because so many of them became huge pop stars.

I think electronic music was seen with some suspicion they thought that it was going to replace guitars, which obviously never was, but I think people saw it that way. I remember even things saying that I hadn't written the songs, that the machines had written them, which was pretty stupid, because we were years ahead of anything like that; machines being able to come up with their own tunes, and maybe we're only really getting there now in a way. There was just a lot of ignorance.

A lot of guitar bands were against it and speaking out against it, saying that it just wasn't proper music. I don't know why. But that was certainly what was being written at the time anyway.

Perhaps some people sensed that you were somehow different, but they didn't really understand how you were different - do you think that might have been something to do with it?

It's quite possible. I honestly don't know. Certainly the music was very, very different and the way I presented it was quite different. I remember I think I talked about this in the book [(R)evolution: The Autobiography by Gary Numan], I watched [BBC pop chart show] ‘Top of the Pops’ for years and noticed that everybody smiled at the camera and looked at the camera all the time. And I didn't do any of that.

And the sound of it was just completely different to what had been around before. You know, I've got friends now that were in bands back then. And they freely admit now to my face that they hated me when I came along. Never, never met me, but hated me, hated the music, hated what I was doing. Hated the way they thought I was changing music. They didn't like the way it was going. They didn't want to see the guitar lose its dominance.

Nobody seemed to like me, even the electronic people didn't seem to like me - there were some that thought I'd sort of stolen their thunder a little bit because I'd come out of nowhere and had all the success that they've been working hard to achieve for a year or two with this new sort of music, and I sort of stole their glory, so to speak. And I never saw it that way.

And also - all those doors that had been firmly closed to those people and all those opportunities that hadn't been coming to them, now they were. And they were coming because of me and what I'd done. And I just didn't see why there should be this feeling of hostility towards me when I was a person that had only done my own thing. I hadn't stolen anything, I'd stumbled across this instrument, and done something with it that almost instantly become massively successful. And then all these opportunities were suddenly available to these people who all went on to have careers as good if not far better than mine. And yet, they were sort of angry at me, because I'd done it, I'd got there first. It's fucking weird.

Black American artists like Prince and Afrika Bambaataa, they loved what you were doing, but maybe they saw it in a different way from British artists. The original techno producers from Detroit too, they didn't see your music through this British perspective, they just saw it as interesting music.

Yeah, and I didn't know that at the time, I wasn't aware of that. I think Malcolm McLaren from the Sex Pistols, he said something about how he was going around looking into these early hip-hop scenes when it was still out in the street, before it was anything successful, and they were playing my music and other white European music.

And then I did a I did a thing with Afrika Bambaataa [collaborative cover version of Numan’s song ‘Metal’ in 2004], long after my initial success that happened, and he was saying about my songs, "I used to play this one and add that beat from that one."

It was years afterwards and I wish I’d known about it at the time, it would have helped to balance all the shit I was getting in England. It would have really helped. It lifted my spirits when he told me. It made me feel good.

Around the time when you started, you still had all these prog keyboard wizards - Rick Wakeman, Keith Emerson - who had these enormous banks of synthesizers and were very flamboyant…

Yeah, I never liked any of that. Because it wasn't about sound, it was about technique and showing off what a great player you are. Nothing wrong with that. I don't mean that as a criticism. But I think that's why it didn't touch me.

The Rick Wakemans and Emerson, Lake & Palmers and all those sorts of bands, because they were so talented, they were so clever as musicians, everything they did tended to be an excuse for them to show how good they were. Well, I didn't have any of that. I couldn’t play for shit. And that wasn’t what I was interested in. I was interested in trying to find sounds that people hadn’t heard before – that I hadn’t heard before. It was just a different approach to it. It was a very non-musical approach, because I wasn't coming from a musical direction, I was coming from the direction of sound.

When I started to learn to play guitar, when I got into electric guitar, ultimately I never really got that good at it because I wasn't really that interested. I would often not even have the guitar on the strap over my shoulders. I would put it on a stand and plug it into lots of different pedals and just hit it with my hand so it just would ring and then start to twiddle all the knobs and use different effects pedals and click things in and out to see what sort of weird noises it made and then try to find a way of making that musical. And I think why synthesizers appealed to me. You hit the key, you make a sound. And then you try to make that sound interesting. And when you've got an interesting sound, now try to come up with a little groove, or a little melody for it. But the sound comes first.

The visual images you created for yourself for the album covers for ‘Replicas’ and ‘The Pleasure Principle’ were incredibly strong - what elements went into that?

I was getting terrible stage fright, really terrible, and I needed to find a way of dealing with it. So I created a persona that I could hide behind, so I could become this other character, this person who wasn’t nervous, who was absolutely as confident as you could possibly be and knew exactly what he was doing, while underneath all that is me, who isn’t confident at all and doesn’t know what he’s doing and is painfully aware of that.

And that's where the images came from - it actually wasn't ever trying to do what Bowie had done, although I understand absolutely why it would seem that way and why it's probably difficult to believe that it wasn't because I was a Bowie fan.

But it was actually a way to try to deal with stage fright. And I know even that sounds stupid, because you're still you standing on the stage in front of people, just the same as if you didn't have a persona. But it does make a difference. It does. In your head, you become this other person.

I don't do it now, I've been doing this for so long that it's not been necessary now for quite some time. But I can clearly remember being on the side of the stage at Shepherd’s Bush Empire and clicking into gear, hearing the intro music start and I'm off to the side in a little corridor and I’m clicking into the whole Gary Numan persona.

My wife says to this day that when I'm being Gary Numan, I walk differently - it's a whole thing that you just switch into. I have a Gary Numan walk, I have a Gary Numan voice, apparently. And it was all to come up with this character, this persona that wasn't nervous.

Was Bowie an important character in your life? Someone who suggested you can do things in all kinds of different ways, you don’t have to them in the way that everyone else does? You don't have to be, as you said earlier, ‘normal’?

It's hard to say, it really is. I was actually quite late getting into David Bowie because I was a T. Rex fan. So I, as a loyal T. Rex fan, I wouldn't even listen to David Bowie music. And so I was really late when I got into Bowie fully, but he was a very important to me as a part of my childhood and growing up. But whether it had an effect on the imagery that I did - it's quite possible, it is quite possible that that was in a part of my brain. But it wasn't a conscious decision.

The imagery you use in your early songs, they’re like short stories…

Yes they are... I used to have a very upside-down structure to songs. ‘Are “Friends” Electric?’ and ‘Cars’ don’t have conventional choruses. ‘Cars’ doesn’t really have one at all. It wasn’t deliberate, you know, I didn’t think, “Oh, I’m going to try to write songs back to front to other people.” That was just what came out. And I used to be quite embarrassed by those differences. I didn’t sit there being proud of it and thinking how different I was and what a breath of fresh air I was, I just felt really awkward all the time.

So I used to struggle with that and I hated my voice, and was aware that it was different but never tried to sing differently, just never quite liked what I was doing. Fucking hell, man, I was very confused for a very, very long time.

Interview by Matthew Collin for ‘Dream Machines’, October 18, 2021.

Photo from the record sleeve for 'Cars' , 1979.