GARY NUMAN
By Frank Correia 
What is it about Gary Numan that makes us think about our automobiles? Ahh yes, his idiosyncratic '80s smash "Cars." Nowadays, that ode to the auto has left him stalled in the breakdown lane known as '80s nostalgia, making the task of promoting his great new album, Pure, quite the uphill drive. "Being a one-hit wonder is a terrible thing to be anywhere," Numan says unabashedly. "Itās only one thing better than a no-hit wonder. So at least I'm one up from nowhere." When Numan cracked the U.S. Top 10 with "Cars" in the early '80s, it was an example of brilliant timing. Taking cues from Brian Eno and Kraftwerk, Numan fused his songwriting craft with the new technology of the synthesizer. Pretty unremarkable by today's standards, but back then it was a watershed moment for synth-pop. Early on, groups like The Human League and Depeche Mode got more than a few ideas from Numan's robotic rock. Another benefit, or perhaps detriment in hindsight, was the new technology of music videos. 

Looking like a replicant gone AWOL from the Blade Runner set, Numan became a hit on MTV with his video for "Cars." Of course, video hits on MTV often solidified one-hit-wonder status on American shores. But while most Americans forgot about Numan once "Cars" drove off into the sunset, in England he retained a die-hard fan base and practically released an album every year up until 1998's Exile, for which he toured in America for the first time in 16 years. 

Today, Numan's influence is blatantly obvious in groups like Orgy, whose future-chic schtick owes so much to Numan that they should be sharing their royalty checks. Everyone from Beck and Weezer to Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails have admitted their affinity for Numan via cover songs. Nails mastermind Trent Reznor even said that hearing "Cars" on the radio convinced him to pursue making music with synthesizers. In '97, Beggars Banquet released a 26-track Numan tribute album called Random, which saw artists like Blur and St. Etienne covering Numan. Industrial metal heavyweights Fear Factory teamed up with Numan to remake his most popular song, garnering heavy airplay on active rock and alternative radio throughout 1999. Safe to say that Numania, while not sweeping consumers, was fairly rampant among musicians in recent years. 

With Pure, Numan hopes to capture the ears of industrial rock fans with an album of slick soundscapes awash in dark synth and driven by the grind of distorted guitars. For fans that found Reznor's two-disc oeuvre The Fragile too much too swallow, Pure may be the right dose. While Pure doesn't mark Numan's return to music making, it does mark his return to great songwriting. 

"I tend to think of Exile as a soundtrack album for a film that was never made," he says of his previous album. "It lacks variation in tempo; it's all of a similar pace and atmosphere, very much as soundtrack albums tend to be. Although that was the intention when I made it, I think in hindsight that it was a mistake. With this one, I tried to make it much harder and much more dynamic in terms of tempo, variations, and even the vocal styles. That stream dynamic was something I was very keen to get right from the word go. But all of that I had learned from what I had thought was wrong with the one before." 

"It was easy for someone like me to be considered innovative, because I was using synthesizers a long time ago. But in truth, there's nothing innovative about what I did at all. The person who was innovative was the person who invented the synthesizer." 

In a sense, Numan has come full circle in terms of influence. Now, the teacher-student role is somewhat reversed, as Numan readily admits that he finds influence in Nine Inch Nails and bands like Deftones. He was particularly impressed with Reznor's remake of "Metal" and Manson's take on "Down In The Park." 

"I just loved what they had done with it, both of them. I loved the way they had turned what had been very electronic into something more. It just set me off in a slightly different direction perhaps. When I came back from the Exile tour, I was very much aware of what they had done. On the very same tour, Marilyn Manson had come onstage with us in Los Angeles for 'Down In The Park.' I was exposed to the whole vibe of them a great deal on that tour. 

"When I got back, I just got more and more into it. I got into Deftones and a number of other things. The Deftones were particularly useful because they had the dynamic I was looking for -- the extreme choruses. So all in all, I immersed myself in that music, learned my lessons from previous album, and started to put it together. I didn't really listen to a lot of music when I was making the record, because that's often a mistake. You end up writing things you think sound really good, but that's because you heard it the day before. You have to be really careful of that. Nevertheless, I was very aware of that sort of music when I was doing it." 

For fans looking for the old Telekon or Pleasure Principle days, Pure will undoubtedly be a shock to the system. "In many ways, I'm actually learning how to write songs again. Throughout the '80s and into the early '90s, I'd lost the plot quite badly and became very misguided in the direction the music was taken. It was only after this album in '92 -- a particularly poor album by me called Machine & Soul -- that I gave up on all that and went right back to the roots and started again. Then the music became much heavier. I tried to go back to making it a hobby again and doing it for the pleasure of it. I tried to get rid of all commercial considerations. I ended up writing this very heavy record in '94 called Sacrifice. I just went off on that track ever since -- I love it." 

The dark matter at the core of Numan's lyrics on Pure is a goth rocker's dream. "'My Jesus' is about a man who hears voices telling him to do terrible things," Numan explains. "The song Pure is about a child murderer. So there are some fairly heavy things there, and yes, there's a reasonable smattering of God stuff there as well." 

Although Numan planned on moving away from the God themes of his last album, Exile, a very real tragedy brought about deep reflection about God's existence and motives. Numan and his wife, Gemma, were planning on having a baby; unfortunately, she was lost prematurely. "I intended to leave God out completely because I'd done it so much before. Exile was virtually a theme album about how I considered the Bible had been badly misinterpreted and we had been dangerously wrong. A lot of Pure came about when the baby died, I must be honest. At least 'Little InVitro' and another song called 'Prayer For The Unborn,' were written after the baby went. 'A Prayer For The Unborn,' particularly in the loud half of it, is a bitter attack on God." Numan's venom towards God on "A Prayer For The Unborn" is enough to make Marilyn Manson take a step back. Lines like "I'd spit on your heaven if I could find one to believe in" are delivered with a poignancy that Manson has yet to achieve in his anti-religion crusades. Surprisingly, Numan himself was never force-fed religion while growing up. 

"As a songwriter, it's just an endless source of fuel, an endless source of inspiration to find things to get angry about," Numan says about religion. "I don't quite know where the venom comes from, to be honest. It's never been forced down my throat at all. Even when I was in school, at the age of 13 or 14, I was actually excused from religious instruction. I said to the headmaster, "It's taking 40 minutes of my week learning stuff I'm not interested in and I do not believe in. Why don't I just do extra history lessons or extra math lessons to make better use of the time?' And he said yes! That was cool with him, which I thought was quite open-minded, really." 

"I've avoided nostalgia, retro tours, '80s documentaries, anything like that - I thought it was the plague." 

One thing he's is not open-minded about is being considered an innovator. "When the synthesizer came along, the way it made sound was so different that everything you did sounded new. It was easy for someone like me to be considered innovative, because I was using synthesizers a long time ago. But in truth, there's nothing innovative about what I did at all. I just played the same songs on a synthesizer. It just sounded different because there were not many people who had done it before. It wasn't really innovative at all. The person who was innovative was the person who invented the synthesizer. The rest of us just followed along like lemmings and made use of it." 

As for technology's role in today's music, Numan has mixed feelings. On the one hand, an endless variety of sounds are available to anyone's fingertips via samplers, drum machines, synth et al. On the other, Numan sees countless "musicians" abusing the privilege, thanks to laziness and "a complete lack of talent, actually." 

"The sampler is the backbone of what I do, particularly on Pure," he explains. "The whole way I've designed my studio, which I redesigned when I started on Pure, is completely built around the sampler being the core of it. Now I think the sampler is possibly, arguably, the most widely misused instrument there's ever been. Not that this is a scientific survey or anything, but it seems to me that nine out of 10 people that use samplers simply nix someone else's track and build their own thing over the top of it. Now, I obviously don't approve of that. I'm fairly old-fashioned and conventional when it comes to songwriting. The fact that samplers can give you so much scope for creating new sounds by manipulating what there is, it's quite possibly the most powerful instrument that we have at our disposal." 

Numan will take his samplers and his backing band on a North America tour beginning mid-April. Instead of tour programs, he will be offering a 72-minute audio CD entitled Purified, which will answer questions submitted by fans via his website, NuWorld (www.numan.co.uk), and the official Gary Numan magazine, Alien. And, of course, he's battling that nostalgia curse once again. Nick At Night wanted him to perform "Cars" while dressed in '80s clothing. And when VH-1 insisted upon him playing "Cars" instead of "Metal" for an upcoming special, Numan opted out. 

"I'm still on the trail to reintroduce myself to people," Numan concedes. "It's just a major hurdle to get over. The problem is, the thing that I have to make use of is the epitomy of nostalgia. It's a horrible position to be in, in that all I have to say to people, 'This is me,' is 20 years old. And yet to start off absolutely from scratch puts me at a disadvantage. I'm 42 years old. All in all, I'm in a peculiar position, really." 

"Maybe the way people react to nostalgia in America is very different to the way people do here," Numan wonders aloud. "I know for sure that here, just reading the reviews of Pure, it's very apparent that the reviewers have noticed all the people doing retro tours and going out doing "Golden Years' tours, and that I haven't. I've stuck with trying to make new music and push forward all the time. Over here, I've avoided nostalgia, retro tours, '80s documentaries, anything like that - I thought it was the plague. Now it's beginning to payback dividends because I'm being applauded for that. And the other people are being ridiculed for living in the past and not being able to move on." 

Whether or not the public lets Numan move on from the '80s is yet to be determined. But one thing's for sure, he's much more content to live in the present with artists like Reznor, Manson, and the Deftones than to revisit the past. "I love what all those people are doing, and I just wanted to add my slant to that type of music. I'm very happy with where I am." 

   
  
 
    
     
   
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