The Sounds of Gary Numan By Sam Molineaux December 24, 2001 06:35 PM PST When synth-pop pioneer Gary Numan made his less-than-successful Machine and Soul album in 1992, the future wasn't looking too bright. A string of self-released albums throughout the late '80s and early '90s had generated at first apathetic and then increasingly vicious press attention, which rather dulled the shine on his reputation as the founding father of new wave. Classic albums from his 1979-80 heyday such as Tubeway Army, Replicas, The Pleasure Principle and Telekon which had spawned massive European hits like "Are 'Friends' Electric?," "I Die: You Die" and "Cars" (his only U.S. chart single) were now long forgotten by all but the most hardcore Numanoids. But then a curious thing happened. Unexpectedly, his brand of alienated techno-doom found itself back in step with something approaching the mainstream, with Trent Reznor, Marilyn Manson and the rest of the U.S. metal-goth club happily professing their debt of inspiration to Gary Numan. Tribute albums began to appear, adding artists like St. Etienne, Moloko, the Orb and Damon Albarn (of Blur) to his swelling army of admirers, and Numan himself responded with a period of reevaluation that culminated in 1998's Exile, an altogether heavier, darker, more industrial sound, not dissimilar to his earliest recordings. In 1999, with the massive stateside success of his collaboration with Fear Factory on their remake of "Cars" and Armand Van Helden's "Cars"-sampling dancefloor smash, "Koochy," the following year, Numan fever made its definitive return. And along with it, props from everyone from alternative rockers Pop Will Eat Itself, the Foo Fighters, Beck and the Smashing Pumpkins to techno-industrialists like Prodigy's Liam Howlett and Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor, who publicly revealed that "after hearing Gary Numan's 'Cars' on the radio, I knew I wanted to make music with synthesizers." For his part, Gary Numan admits he's felt the pressure to justify the compliments. His latest album, an angst-ridden, modernized industrial-gothic opus called simply Pure, proves he's more than achieved that goal. With its brutal guitars, hard-edged synths, and characteristically disturbing vocals, it's classic Numan with a favorable 21st-century twist. From his rural Essex home, Gary Numan talks to us about the sounds on the new album and how he created them. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Is it true you recorded the entire new album in your home studio? I do all my songwriting and recording in a cottage in my garden which is just 20' x 12'. People think the more money you throw at an album, the better it'll sound, and they spend fortunes on huge studios where you get a maid and people to cook your meals for you, but none of that is relevant to making a record. Nowadays, the equipment has gotten so good and so cheap relative to the capabilities of what it used to be that it's not difficult to make good quality records in a little room at home. You don't even need to be that technically proficient, because a lot of this stuff is quite easy to work. Describe your studio setup. I've got 48-track digital in here. Two Otari RADAR I's, each with an Exabyte drive as backup, and a pair of fully automated total recall Mackie D8B consoles with onboard effects, gates and compressors on every channel. That desk alone is as capable as what you'd get in a conventional studio, yet for a fraction of the cost. I use Emagic Logic on the Mac for sequencing, and the Akai S5000 sampler is my main sound source. I also have various synths and workstations, but they're all secondary to the S5000. The main keyboard I use for working out ideas is the Alesis QuadraSynth, which has enough really good sounds that I can use as a building block for the rest of it. Gary Numan's latest album, Pure. I was expecting to walk into your studio and see racks and racks of old analog synths? (Laughs.) No, there's not a single one. I don't have that loyalty to them for one thing. The only instrument I've got that I've ever had any kind of serious affection for is my Gibson guitar, which my Dad bought me when I was at school. I've played it on every show I've ever done, and on every record I've ever made, from my very first punk record in the late '70s. There's a Minimoog out in the shed which I kept for old time's sake, but it's not particularly special, it's just one of the ones I had and I only kept it because I thought I ought to. The only two old-school synths that I've hung onto, which are both still very usable, are the Korg M1 and the Roland D-550. They're kind of like my old shoes. Have you found a recent synth that can recreate your early classic sound? It's not recent, but the Roland D-50 can do it all. A lot of people aren't mad about that synth because they claim it doesn't offer the same warmth as analog, but I disagree. I don't use banks of retro synths, yet I'm doing all those old songs live and nobody's saying they don't sound the same. I've found the D-50 quite capable of recreating ARP Odyssey sounds, pretty good at Minimoogs, very good at the Polymoog.... I spent just one afternoon matching up the sounds for a tour a few years ago, and I'm still using them and it's really good. I'm sure if I put some time into it, I could get them even closer. All the sounds I used on those early analog synthesizers I personally found relatively easy to recreate on a number of different synths. So is it fair to say you're a convert to digital? To be honest I don't go for in this analog-digital debate, be it recording equipment or synthesizers. To me, they make noises. I don't care what the method of synthesis is, whether it's LA, FM or whatever, it doesn't matter to me at all. If it makes good noises then I like it, if it doesn't make good noises then I'm not interested. When people start talking about what kind of synthesis is it, I believe they're missing the point. 'Cause you know the next question after that is how many bits is it? And at that point my head shuts off completely. Numan's Pleasure Principle What makes the best noises for you? My sampler. With the last few albums, I've spent the first couple of months on the computer just creating the samples, making new sounds. It's not difficult, but it can get very time consuming. For example, on this last record my guitarist Steve (Harris) and I spent a day in here with his guitar plugged into the computer through the desk and all he played was noise -- no riffs, grooves, or chords. At one point I even had the lead and I was tapping it against various things in the studio. Just doing stuff. And there are a couple of songs on the album where 90% of the sounds on it are from Steve making these noises. It may have become the groove or the riff, and maybe there's a little bit of keyboard on top, some real drums perhaps, or some guitar, but all the synthetic noises are actually samples based on banging guitar leads, hitting strings and making little noises and running them through processors. That sounds like a laborious process. It is laborious, but it's worth it because you get thousands of sounds that no one else has. It's that leg work at the beginning of the record that becomes the backbone and shapes the sound of the whole thing and makes it original. As well as being considerably darker than any of your previous albums, Pure is noticeably guitar-heavy. Was that a deliberate attempt to revisit your early guitar leanings? This is actually the third in a group of three albums in a similar direction. The first was Sacrifice, which was heavier and darker than anything I'd done before. When I was making that record, it felt to me like I'd stumbled across the road I should have been on all along, but which I'd strayed from after my third album around 1980-1981. So I stayed there and I did Exile in a similar way, and then Pure, which I think is the best of the three. With the last two albums being more guitary than previous records, I noticed that when we played live that element was really adding a great deal to the sound. When the guitar kicked in, the power of that, mixed with all the loops and samples, was a really cool mix of sound and I was finding that aspect of it the most exciting. So when it came to the new record, it was a deliberate attempt to boost the guitar element even further. How did you work the guitar parts in when you were recording? A lot of it I did on my own. It was written on piano initially, then I'd start to add all the samples to built it up, and then I'd just play big guitar chords, chunky bits over the top of what I had. A few months before the end of it, I gave one track to a mate of mine to do some guitar work and he did an amazing job of it, so he ended up adding additional guitar parts to every song. Where perhaps I'd have added more keyboard parts to highlight or produce a certain part of the song, what he was doing was really working. It gave it an aggressive edge that I don't think I'd have achieved with a synthesizer. So I stuck with it. Although I'd intended to have guitars on it anyway and I wanted them to be quite prominent, it ended up having a lot more than I'd intended. How has your process of creating sounds evolved over the years? Actually, other than the means of recording, it's not that different. When samplers first came along we were already doing it, making the loops out of tape. I remember really early on, around 1981, putting a microphone up the carburetor of a sports car and taping it sucking in the air -- that was a really amazing sound! We'd do things like go out and bang anything metal we could find, at all different pitches and we'd build up grooves by splicing bits of tape together. We'd have it going into a tape recorder, through the heads and around the capstans and then down around an empty reel on the floor to keep it taut. You couldn't sync it to MIDI, we didn't have MIDI then anyway! You couldn't ever play it, it was just something we put together with little bits of noise. Shortly after that the AMS digital delay came along, which was this thing where you'd push a button and it would record whatever the previous second was you put into it. That was the first sampling gadget, but it wasn't an instrument, it was an outboard effect. We used that for a while and then the Akai and E-mu samplers came along and suddenly we had a machine that saved all that time and made the whole process a lot easier. In the U.K. you've had dozens of hit singles and you've released more than 25 albums, yet in the U.S. people only seem to know you for "Cars"? It's strange, I go to America and people say, "What's it like to be a one-hit wonder?" I try to explain that in Europe, in Britain particularly, I've had something like 30 chart singles and 25 chart albums, but in America I'm suddenly a one-hit wonder! Yet there are some very successful bands over there that talk about me as being important to them. It just goes to show that your influence isn't necessarily a reflection of your commercial success. The album that Trent Reznor talks about as being the one that was most influential to him when he was making Downward Spiral was an album of mine called Telekon, which I'm not sure was ever even released in America. Have you noticed an increase in your profile in America, in the light of people like Trent Reznor, Beck, Marilyn Manson, Billy Corgan and numerous others citing you as an influence? Yes, definitely. There have been a couple of tribute albums, and I got an award recently from the BMI for "Cars." I thought when I was going to get it that it was because of the amount of airplay it had got over the last 20 years, but it wasn't, it was for the amount of airplay it had got in the last year! It got played 170,000 times in America alone, in 1999. But it was "Cars" again. It's a double-edged sword. I can't grumble because it was lovely to get it, and it was Fear Factory's version, a new version for an entirely new generation of people, so it had all that going for it. So it was really lovely but a little bit frustrating at the same time.