GARY NUMAN
From Zero magazine, June 1998. It's free around here, my friend Dan got it for me. I've cleaned up most typos. Editorial comments, set off by [brackets], made in jest - mostly. :-) Enjoy!
I remember back in 1980 when I was in junior high school. Gary Numan started getting somewhat popular with his hit "Cars." Around that time, he appeared on Saturday Night Live. The following Monday, the talk around school was "how lame" he was because he wore eyeliner, had an earring, and dressed like a "freak."
Gary Numan didn't create his music for closed minded people. He created it for himself and his loyal following. If you're the type that feels that the "Cars" sound is just a little too new-wavey for your taste, maybe you should check out his earlier Tubeway Army project (prior to his solo material) albums that have some great guitar hooks. You'll find that there is much more to Gary Numan than you originally thought.
Not wanting to pass up the opportunity to pick the brain of this innovator who was way ahead of his time, we pinned him down during his first US tour in sixteen years in support of his latest material, released on Cleopatra Records.
Zero: How have the shows been doing?
GN: Pretty good, we sold out six out of nine and the other three were packed and I'm getting a lot of younger people in, which is one of my biggest worries. [WOO!] I thought when we got here it would be a bit retro and nostalgic, but that hasn't happened. Although the older people are there, it's been much, much better than I had hoped for. We're two weeks in, with another three to go.
Zero: Who's in the band now?
GN: No one from the original days at all. Two keyboard players, a drummer, and a guitar, and I play a bit of guitar as well.
Zero: Are you playing Tubeway Army stuff?
GN: Yeah, some of it. I guess it changes from night to night. It's about fifty-fifty between stuff from the last two albums [bull shit! One Sacrifice song!] and stuff from 1980 and stuff before. I'm missing out pretty much everything from '81 to '92 completely. There's one song from '88 and one from '82.
Zero: What kind of airplanes do you fly?
GN: I fly World War II combat airplanes. I started flying in 1978 and I've been doing air displays since '83.
Zero: What bands do you listen to?
GN: I guess my favorites at the moment are Nine Inch Nails, Gravity Kills. I like the new Marilyn Manson stuff, Prodigy, Sneaker Pimps, and Garbage. I don't know about the new Garbage, I haven't heard that yet, but the first Garbage is excellent. Umm, Course of Empire - that new TVT band are pretty cool. Nothing '80s whatsoever.
Zero: Who were some of your early influences?
GN: When I first got into it, I guess Ultravox would be the only one really musically I was getting ideas from at all. This is when John Fox [sic] was in it, not when Midge Ure was. [And Ure dissed on Gary so screw him. :P] When John Fox [sic] was in it, I just thought they were doing things along the line I wanted to be doing, in terms of sound and so on. Personally, I thought they did it better than I did. I thought their production was better than mine. I just thought the sonic range of their songs were better than mine. I really looked to them as being the best of what we wanted to do in the early days.
Zero: What did you think of the Foo Fighters cover of "Down in the Park"?
GN: I thought it was really cool, that and what Marilyn Manson did, because they both did the same song, but they did it very different. I think the Foo Fighters thing started this whole current wave of coverage at the moment for Gary Newman [sic - shame!] songs. It kind of started with them. When it first happened I was just jumping up and down. For me it was just a cool thing, ya know?
Zero: No one forgot about you, huh?
GN: Well I think they had up until then, and then with those two, because they're so big, and then people like Beck were doing them live, and Courtney Love was doing something live, so it just escalated. It really has made a big difference.
Zero: Where's your favorite place to play in the States?
GN: Oh, fuck man, I've not played here for sixteen years. I can't remember. I'm getting a better reaction here, and more people, believe it or not, than I get in England, and that was the last thing I expected. [Dos dedos, merry Englishmen!]
Zero: Did you miss the touring for all those years?
GN: Well, I was touring in Britain every year, so I'm actually a seasoned veteran of touring.
Zero: How's the new record doing?
GN: I don't know about sales-wise, but certainly from the reviews point of view, it's been doing pretty well.
Zero: Where do you live?
GN: I'm about an hour's drive northeast of London. I'm right in the country, in the middle of nowhere. The prices of houses out here are so cheap.
Zero: Cheap here?!? [!?!]
GN: Yeah, I could have bought a mansion for what my house is worth.
Zero [and me]: It's not cheap in the Bay Area.
GN: No, it's not. Well, the one place I was looking was around Washington, D.C., so I guess that's a bit different.
Zero: Do you want to live over here?
GN: Me and my wife have talked about it quite a lot. I lived in Los Angeles for a while in '81 or '82 for about six or seven months. I loved it! [They're wankers! Sorry, NorCal reflex, please ignore.]
Zero: How was it doing Saturday Night Live back in the '80s?
GN: It was brilliant. I'd only been famous for about ten minutes. In England everything was really new and scary, and then you're on a TV show and you're playing live, and you're not even miming live, you're playing live. Just before we go on they say, "You know, this goes out to 50 billion people [sic?!]." That's the last thing you want to hear. It was just so exciting. Nobody knew me, and on the way back from there, everybody knew me. I couldn't go into a truck stop in the middle of nowhere where people hadn't seen it, and it changed everything. And some of the people that were on it, I look back now, and they're like legendary, these people.
Zero: Was John Belushi on SNL back then?
GN: Yeah, I think so, yeah. Gilda Radner was on it. It was brilliant, man.
Zero: Were you on Top of the Pops too?
GN: Yeah. I've done that a few times. That was a new experience too.
Zero: You don't play live on there, do you?
GN: No, you mime. Sometimes they transmit it live, but you still mime it.
Zero: Do you get a lot of people going to the shows who just want to hear "Cars"?
GN: Well, I honestly couldn't tell you. We actually get a better reaction from "Down in the Park." We do "Cars" right in the beginning. I think it is the third song in. So, I'm not dismissing it, I don't want to sort of say "here it is, take it, let's get it out of the way." But I'm kind of saying that.- Lee Malone
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