Spotlight Numan: Plugged In to Synth-Pop's Origins By Mark Jenkins Special to The Washington Post Friday, April 13, 2001; Page WE05 ALTHOUGH he had more than 30 hits in his native Britain, Gary Numan climbed the singles chart only once in the United States, and that was 21 years ago. Yet the synth-pop musician, who appears Tuesday at the 9:30 club, still has a high profile, thanks in large part to the efforts of companies like Oldsmobile. For Numan's biggest song is a sleek, catchy ditty called "Cars," which still sounds nifty in automobile commercials. Such ads, says Numan by phone from his home outside London, can "cement the opinion that it's the only song I ever wrote, which is a bit frustrating. But it reminds people that I'm still around and doing other things. And it's been covered by people like Fear Factory; and that's been a very good thing, because it's introduced me to an entirely new generation that perhaps hadn't heard the song before." Numan doesn't particularly object to advertisers using "Cars," but it wouldn't matter if he did, because he doesn't own the song's publishing rights. "I often don't know that these things are going on," he says. "I'm normally told as a courtesy, but no more than that. "I'm very proud to have written a song that's been that long-lasting. Every time it's in an advert, I earn from it, and my name pops up again." He adds, however, that he's largely stopped appearing on British TV shows because their producers always want him to play either "Cars" or his other early British No. 1 hit, "Are Friends Electric?" Today, of course, it's the rare hit single that doesn't include synthesized riffs and rhythms, but Numan took much flak after switching from guitar to synthesizer at the height of Britain's punk frenzy in 1977. "I had a lot of trouble with the musicians' union here when I started. They said I was putting people out of business. Labels like 'push-button music' were being applied." The singer-songwriter admits that at the time he didn't consider himself an advocate of electronic music. "I got into it for very selfish reasons and I didn't have any great expectations for it above and beyond what I thought it could do for me in the short term. I thought my career would be a relatively short-term thing, as most of them tend to be." Now Numan is often named as a pioneer, but he discounts such a role. "It's lovely for me, but to be truthful, I think it's probably because I wrote one of the more well-known songs. There were all kinds of people before me. I was just lucky to be one of the people who became a pop star with it." Now that he's back on the live circuit in United States as well as Britain and Europe, he finds that audience responses are similar. "The same songs are recognized," he says. "Even though I've not had the hits over there [in America], the fans that I do have tend to react to the same songs that people over here do. I can actually put a set together that is almost identical from one country to another and be pretty sure that the reaction to it is going to go down the same." Numan has noticed one national difference between Americans and his countrymen. "We have a tendency to be sour. We have a rather snobby attitude, and it isn't always pleasant. If you're trying to succeed someplace, America is a more exciting place to try. There's a greater desire to enjoy yourself over there." The performer's recent live sets contain 15 songs, nine of them from "Pure," his latest release. "The focus is on the new album always. But there's an obligation to play songs to people who paid money for their tickets and expect to hear certain things. I do "Cars" -- it would be churlish not to -- but I tend to do it the way Fear Factory do it, rather than how I did it originally. With the older songs, I keep the melodies the same and I keep the arrangements very similar, but everything else is new. I try to make it sound as much as though it could be on the new album as possible. That way the set has some kind of cohesion." Although such new tunes "One Perfect Lie" tend to be mid-tempo and melodic, Numan calls his current style "hardcore industrial." He turned to this sound after his 1992 album, "Machine and Soul," which he describes as "really poor, actually." He was so unhappy with the disc that he "had a long think about what I was doing and why, and realized that for a long time that I'd been writing songs for the wrong reasons. "My career was in terrible trouble, even here. I realized I'd been writing songs simply to try get on the radio. None of it was from the heart. So I gave up on any kind of commercial success. I'd had my time, it seemed to me. So I went back to writing songs for the fun of it. I found that I really enjoyed the writing but also found that it was much heavier. It felt as if I'd stumbled upon the road I should always have been on." Touring the United States in 1998, Numan met such famous longtime fans as Trent Reznor and Marilyn Manson and was introduced to music that was even harsher than the songs he'd recorded after his stylistic shift. "Having done two heavy albums, I decided that this one was going to be even heavier, and I just started to work on how I could do that. I don't have a good voice in general, but I particularly don't have a good voice for this kind of music. I can't shout. I'm not particularly powerful. If I try to be aggressive on records, I sound like a schoolgirl having a tantrum. So I had to find ways of getting around that." Ironically, one answer was the guitar, which Numan says he doesn't play well but nonetheless plays on every track on "Pure." The instrument "adds an element of aggression that I'm not really getting with the electronics." Yet "Pure" is based on samples, including treated sound bites of gunshots, a carburetor and a camera's motordrive. "A very ordinary sound to start with," he says of the latter. "I slowed it down, detuned it, put some weird backward [stuff] on it, and it just became something bizarre." Numan may have returned to guitar, but he still sounds like a synth booster when he explains why he likes tinkering with such noises: "It means you come with something that nobody else has." GARY NUMAN -- Appearing Tuesday at the 9:30 club. • To hear a free Sound Bite from Gary Numan, call Post-Haste at 202/334-9000 and press 8108. (Prince William residents, call 690-4110.) © 2001 The Washington Post Company