Gary Numan - Interview With Nick Serre, September 2000

Gary Numan Part 1 

With the imminent release of his latest album, Pure, the musical chameleon and legend that is Gary Numan has taken yet another direction. He shares his progression with Nick Serre in part one of this exclusive interview... 

Gary, your sound has often been associated with the equipment you use - is that deliberate?

Well, I guess Cars was synonymous with sounds I was using at the time, from Minimoogs and the like (even though it was written on a bass originally), and then fast forwarding to the last album, Exile, a lot of that came about from the sounds on the Alesis Quadrasynth. It had a particular sound on it which was very dramatic but quite filmic, and that guided me a lot in the initial style, and therefore the album followed that particular path. But I stumbled across it rather than it being an intention. Which is pretty much true for everything I've ever done except for this latest one.

What's different this time round?

I was touring America in '97 and it had all gone very well. The whole career thing was on the up, and people were saying all these nice things about me, which was great. But I realised I would need to do something a bit special to justify that interest and what these people were saying. So I started to think about what I would do next and I decided that what I wanted was a much more aggressive version of Exile. I wanted the darkness that Exile had, and the same sort of lyrical slant, although non-religious. Exile was very anti-religion so I didn't want it to be like that at all because it had a dark questioning side.

Where Exile was very soaring and flowing and so on, and it had big grooves underneath it, it wasn't aggressive atall; it was even pretty in places. I wanted the new one to be much more dynamic, and much more varied in terms of tempos and so on - aggressive is the best way to describe it. Which means a lot to me, and possibly sod-all to anyone else!

Is that in terms of instrumentation or the whole approach?

The general vibe thing really. Sound being an important part of it, obviously, which is where I struggled when I started to make it. But also the dynamics of it - just how big it was going to get in the big bits and how quiet in the quiet bits. And whether you could carry that through a number of songs, or would it sound too same-y? How would you vary it and still keep that as a general guideline or structure of it, could you fit more ballad-type songs in there but still keep them aggressive?

All these sort of things I was trying to think about whilst on this tour and I gradually began to have a clear idea in my head, and in my head I could hear it perfectly. I could hear all the parts. I could see me on stage doing it, and then I started writing it and it just didn't come at all. I wrote more songs for this record than I've written for any other record I've made - by far.

Was that a frustration or an essential part of the creative process?

I guess both. Every time I wrote a song, it wasn't quite right. So I was trying to figure out what wasn't quite right about it and then I'd write another one, and another. I wouldn't tweak the one's I had, I'd just keep them open. And it seemed quicker and easier, and more exciting to keep writing new stuff and to use that as the exploration towards what I wanted rather than constantly treating things that didn't sound quite right.

Quite a different approach to some previous albums, then?
Well, that itself has evolved over the years. The approach was similar to Exile but that was away from the one before that. And that one was very much away from the one before that. That's how you progress. The songwriting over the last two or three albums evolved into being very much sample-based; loop-based initially, to get a groove going. But with this one I created a whole load of my own noises - a sample library really, with Richard, my drummer, and Steve Harris, the guitarist.

They came in to the studio here and we spent ages just making noises; doing the weirdest stuff you can imagine! Recorded everything as samples, broke it down into hundreds and hundreds of bits; feedbacks, clunks, passages, and so on. And slowly I tried to build up my own sample library of live stuff that was exclusively mine. That's not saying that I didn't use any other sources either, I wasn't trying to be precious about it but I wanted to have a big bank of new stuff that would inspire me, and hopefully take me in the direction that I was looking for.