Gary Numan: 'Bowie saw me as some little upstart stealing his thunder'
Gary Numan plays in Dublin and Belfast in May.
After a run of dates at Wembley Arena in April 1981, Gary Numan walked off stage having announced his retirement at the age of 23. It had been an amazing period, producing a run of hits including two UK chart-toppers in 1979 with Are Friends Electric? and Cars.
After three years in the public eye as a bonafide, albeit outsider pop star and at the height of his fame, Numan appeared to be calling it a day. He has performed sporadically since, and is about to return to the stage with an extensive tour that takes in gigs in Dublin and Belfast later in May.
“I’m hoping I don’t get freaked out by the whole thing which is possible” admits Numan (64), “it’s something that I’ve wanted to do since the last time. I remember walking off stage realising I’d made a terrible mistake. It’s been a long journey getting back to something I threw away much to my regret. This moment has become so important to me that it’s almost overwhelming, it’s almost a lifetime ago.”
Back in the 1980s, those 'final' shows came on the back of solo success, and before that fronting Tubeway Army. Replicas and two solo albums The Pleasure Principle and Telekon all helped create a significant cultural moment for Numan.
“It’s been a four-decade dream to get back to this level,” he says. “I don’t want to mess up, we just had a breakdown in America and had to stop the show for ten minutes, I’d hate for that to happen.”
A sense of dealing with his past has added succour to this current tour in support of his 18th studio album Intruder. “I’ve spent more money and put a huge amount into it. This is the most spectacular stage show since Wembley and we are touring everywhere. This show is a way of saying thank-you to the fans who feel the new success as much as I do.”
His hardcore fanbase of ‘Numanoids’ has added to its number whether it be old cohorts returning or a younger audience discovering the singer. Well-known admirers also played their part when acknowledging Numan’s influence over the years. Among them Kurt Cobain and Prince, the Purple One suggested Replicas was one album on constant rotation during his formative years while Trent Reznor described Numan as “a vital influence as to what ended up shaping the sound of Nine Inch Nails’.
“That did a huge amount for my recovery in how I was seen by the public and the media,” suggests Numan. “It attracted interest from people that never listened to me before. With Trent, Bowie and Prince [referencing Numan] people wonder what all the fuss is about and there is a pressure attached to those figures saying they are listening, you’ve got to prove yourself and it was lucky that this was the mid-90s.
"I’d done Sacrifice which was my best album in a long time. I was back on form in terms of songwriting. If that had happened a couple of years before it could have been different, I’d done an album called Machine (+Soul) which was a big pile of shit. At the end of the 1980s, I ran out of money and my career was going nowhere.”
A decade earlier David Bowie had Numan removed from the studio while filming the Kenny Everett Show. It had been a painful experience for the life-long fan of Bowie. “I think he saw me as some little upstart stealing his thunder at the time but I put it down to him not being in a good place at that moment. I don’t hold any bitterness about it and he more than made up for it later when he said I’d written two of the finest songs in British music history which is pretty cool. I’m just sad he’s not around more than anything, he was an absolute genius.”
Numan’s attempts to write a science-fiction novel have helped inspire sleeve art, lyrics and the overall atmosphere in his work. “I loved writing stories from when I was very little and that lends itself to writing songs,” explains Numan. “I’ve never finished a novel but it's a way of getting ideas out. Savage (Songs From A Broken World) started as a series of notes for a novel. I wanted to write about this figure during a post-climate change apocalypse and how that affected the human condition.”
The 2017 album would reach Number 2 in the U.K charts providing Numan with his biggest hit album since 1982. He suggests the same approach helped cultivate his seminal albums. “Replicas and The Pleasure Principle both started as short stories, also Sacrifice.”
Numan’s robot aesthetic influenced by Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, several years before Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, assisted the Numanoid personae illustrated on the Replicas sleeve. It’s one of many covers that stopped record buyers in their tracks.
“I do all the artwork and start with vinyl,” says Numan, who has previously revealed he has a mild form of Asperger's syndrome. “It’s a more immersive experience and more in the way the artist intended. You are listening to a body of work that someone has worked on for two years of their life, within all that is the sleeve, all the interesting bits of information, where it was recorded, the musicians who played on it, lyrics, acknowledgements and what people looked like, a good sleeve does that anyway.”
While Numan has yet to finish a novel his autobiography (R)evolution was released during the 2020 lockdown. It’s a refreshing change from the usual tales of sex and drugs. "When you’re 60-odd years old, you don’t want to be talking about sleeping with women and what drugs you have or haven’t taken.”
He does write about coming close to death as a stunt pilot flying World War II planes. “Pretty much everyone I knew was killed, it was too reckless as a hobby. I’ve since sold the airplane but it was my whole life for a while, more than music.”
As a family man with three daughters, now based in LA, he explains his wife Gemma drew a line under Numan’s former pastime and he attributes her involvement in rediscovering his love of music after some lean years. “When I met my wife, life changed and I started to enjoy music again, thank God for that."
(R)evolution reveals a meeting with another of Numan's boyhood heroes, Freddie Mercury. It proved to be more gratifying than his encounter with The Thin White Duke. “I was in Japan to work with this other band and was dumped at the last minute. I saw Queen was playing and decided to buy a ticket.”
Numan caused a stir when Japanese fans quickly recognised him. “I got rescued by Queen’s security and was adopted for the night. They took me to this sushi place where Freddie began to hold court, he must have told 1,000 stories and was just brilliant, very articulate and entertaining. I was just blown away by the whole thing because I was a big fan. He noticed I wasn’t eating as I don’t like sushi. I told him I was ‘as good as gold' and would grab a McDonald's later.
“The next thing was him handing me a McDonalds, he had sent their limo driver out to get one. I couldn’t believe he would do that. I had met them before at the Rainbow Theatre in London as a teenager, most bands would be straight off but they would spend time with the fans."
Numan says he learnt an important lesson in the way Queen looked after their fans. "you can be a larger-than-life superstar but still be a decent human being and treat people with respect. I never forgot that.”
- Gary Numan will play the Ulster Hall in Belfast on Saturday, May 21; and Olympia Theatre, Dublin, on Tuesday, May 24
