Gary Numan |
However, a decade's worth of dark, yet powerful gothic synth-rock excursions has seen him slowly claw his way back into the spotlight. A belated 6 years on from his acclaimed y2k comeback album, Pure, Numan returns with Jagged. |
Gary Numan: Sorry, I’m sucking a cough sweet so that’s why I sound a bit funny. Got a cold have you? Oh, a stinker for about a month. Everyone seems to have it at the moment. Yeah I know, fucking hell, it won’t go away! Actually I’ve got a good cure for that, have you ever heard of this stuff called Echinacea? No. Go down the health food shop, it’s a herbal remedy – it's a really good boost for your immune system. Oh, all right I’ll give that a try, nothing else has worked. Ok, so let’s go right back to the early days, prior to the formation of Tubeway Army, when you were maybe 16 or 17 years old what sort of music were you listening to at the time? I was a massive T-Rex fan for most of my young life and then I got into David Bowie after that, but I didn’t get into him until after he finished the whole Ziggy Stardust thing so I kind of missed out on the best bit. At the time, was there any electronic music around that acted as an impetus for you? Not at those times, I don’t really remember who was around too much but I would imagine people like Yes or Rick Wakeman, the kind of thing that was all pompous and grandios 2000-note-per-second synth solos and I just didn’t see anything in it at all. So my only exposure to synthesisers, apart from a tiny little bit of Kraftwerk, which I didn’t fully grasp at the time - although I did like it, was all that prog-rock stuff really, which turned me completely away from it, I saw nothing in it whatsoever. They used synthesisers in the same way you would play a guitar. Yeah, completely. It wasn’t about sound and building up atmospheres, it was all about instead of having a guitar sound we’ll have Rick going [makes funny noise] and dressing like a wizard, which didn’t really work for me. You’ve often related the story of when you first discovered a synthesiser that was left over in a studio, have you ever wondered how your career would have turned if you hadn’t found that Minimoog? Yeah, many times [Laughs]. What sort of direction do you think you would have taken? Would you have carried on with the punk stuff, because sooner or later you would have obviously fallen across synthesisers? It’s difficult to say really. The punk thing for me was only a means to an end anyway; I only did it to get a contract in the first place. The only punk band I ever really liked was the Sex Pistols and they weren’t even a typical punk band really cos most punk bands were a thousand miles an hour and The Sex Pistols were more medium tempo. Where I’d have gone is so hard to say, I honestly don’t know – I know it wouldn’t have been punk, and without the onslaught of keyboards that I got into then it would have been a guitar-based thing. There were lots of opportunities to do interesting things with guitars; I don’t think it had to be synthesisers so hopefully I’d have come up with something. People have played Are ‘Friends’ Electric? on guitar only, in fact I’ve heard a better version coming out soon actually by a man that’s just died – it’s on Cooking Vinyl. Is it good? It was good actually, it’s surprising that he could get away with it; I’d always though of it as a keyboard-only tune and didn’t think it would work any other way. So it might have been that I could have come up with a similar way of songwriting by sticking with the guitar, but I doubt it. I really do think that stumbling across that synthesiser was the thing that made it all possible for me and even without that my chances of success were gonna be minimal. They were fucking minimal with it, but even more minimal without it. I suppose somebody like The Human League would have come along and been the first to actually popularise synth music, and maybe you would have seen that and tried your hand? It could well be, it really could. My actual favourite synth band at that time would have been Ultravox, before Midge Ure – the John Foxx original band. I thought they were brilliant, they were like a blueprint for me to do what I was doing – I just wanted to sound like Ultravox. And of course after the massive success that you did have… in fact I actually went to one of your concerts – I think it was at Wembley Arena in 1981. I was only about 12 or 13 at the time. Can you actually remember that far back, the atmosphere of that gig? Oh, yeah, yeah, easy. Those particular shows were my supposed retirement shows; I genuinely felt at the time that was going to be the end of it, which didn’t last long, but the way I felt at the time about all the things that had happened in the previous two years – the getting famous and the way I reacted quite badly to that - for me it was a hugely emotional thing. First of all, my ultimate dream was to play at Wembley, so to be there and then to realise that I’m not gonna ever be there again was really emotional. When the gigs were finished I remember walking back out onto the stage on my own when everyone had gone home and stood at the front thinking “what the fuck have I done?” and not really sure it was the right thing to do. Just really young, really overwhelmed by everything that had happened, doing my best to get on top of it and just doing a really bad job of it. If I’d have just kept me mouth shout and done the gigs, taken a break to get used to fame without the spotlight on me and then come back at my own pace, it would have been a far more mature thing to do have done, but of course I wasn’t. You weren’t mature. I was just an overgrown kid really. I was still living at home when I did Wembley, with me mum [Laughs]. I can’t remember for sure, but yeah, unworldly to a ridiculous degree. Can you describe the actual feeling of going on the stage and seeing 10,000 fans in front of you – can it be put into words? The easiest way probably for people to understand it is if you can imagine what it must be like to be a small god. Not the big one [laughs]. Just a little one that’s kind of idolised in your own little part of the galaxy. I can’t imagine how else to describe it to people, you’re talking about a massive amount of people – the car park outside was full of coaches that have come from all over Europe and they’ve all come because of you, and that makes you feel very special. Pressure comes with it obviously, but as soon as you walk out on the stage, just by you being there the place erupts and it’s deafening, absolutely deafening – the noise can overpower the biggest PA systems. It’s just an amazing thing to have experienced, y’know I loved it, absolutely loved it. And I think it was that more than anything on the night that made me think, why did I not wanna do this anymore? The power? I guess it is a kind of a power, but I wouldn’t expect to say, “turn to your neighbour and stab them” and they’d all do it. It’s not a power in that you can actually manipulate people’s decisions, but it’s certainly a power that you can use to arouse a load of good emotions and enthusiasm in people that perhaps they wouldn’t get anywhere else. You also had a low point towards the late eighties when the albums weren’t particularly selling well and you had quite a few financial problems. I was wondering if you could explain how the pressure at the time manifested itself? Well you’ve got a career that’s going down the toilet fairly badly, and it’s obviously being done with everybody being aware of it – so you’re publicly failing on an international scale, which is pretty demoralising. Luckily I’ve never been one for a big ego and things like that so I suffered less with that than I think a lot of other people would have done, but nonetheless it’s battering and you mentally have to be unbelievably resilient to live through it without coming out of it unscathed. But when you say mentally resilent, was it the financial pressure or people making comments? Everytime you pick up a review or read anything about it it’s all pretty negative and taking the piss; calling you “has-been this, has-been that“, and the opportunities that start to come your way are only to do with playing old songs, they don’t wanna hear any new stuff any more and you’re generally just written off as being "over". I think the resilience part of it for me comes from the fact that am I eternally optimistic, I always have been. If I have car crash, as soon as I get out the wreckage and make sure I’m ok, I‘m thinking, “fucking great, insurance money – I’ll get a better car”. I am able to turn the worst situation either into a strong feeling of vengeance or revenge – which is a huge driving force to be honest – or just able to see the good that might come out of it. I’ve always been like that, I’m knocked back at the most for maybe a day, no matter how horrible something is – the exception to that was losing the baby, that was different – that took much longer to get over, but even so, I was still able to take from that the fact that it wasn't meant to happen and we’ll just try again and we will be lucky in the future. And I’ve thought about that about the career, when it was at its absolute lowest and we were selling no tickets to gigs really, the records were selling so badly that they weren’t even making enough money to pay for the recording of them and we were desperately in debt – throughout all of that, I was quietly confident in the back of my mind that if I could just hang on for long enough things would turn around. I never believed for a moment that we were going to be down forever. It’s interesting you say that because you’ve often said you have a lack of confidence in the studio sometimes but obviously there was enough confidence there to believe you will make it back? Funnily enough, it’s not confidence in what I’m doing it’s just confidence that things are gonna work out for some reason. I actually don’t have a lot of confidence in what I do; I still don’t to this day. I don’t make an album and put it out and expect people to like it, I’m generally happy and it cheers me up no end when a good review comes in or I get emails from fans saying that they’ve really liked – it picks me up like you wouldn’t believe. So I’m not sitting back full of confidence thinking “I am that good therefore it’s all going to happen for me again”, It was much more childish than that – I’m sitting there thinking, “I’ve absolutely no idea what I’ve got to offer but I’m sure its going to work out for the best cos life will be fuckin’ horrible if it doesn’t, and I don’t believe life is going to be fuckin’ horrible”. In the face of all realistic options, I’m still sitting there with the most childish one - thinking it’s all going to be fine, but it keeps my spirits up. Sure, but you’ve been very influential, not only to particular artists but your influence has been generic. If you speak to a lot of techno and hip-hop artists or the whole electronica scene, so many artists have said they’re influenced by Kraftwerk and Gary Numan, so why do you think you should be so self-depreciative of your early music? Yeah, I’m grateful for that I really am – it’s just that when I’m making it I don’t sit back in the studio when I’ve finished the song thinking “this is so great, everyone’s gonna love it”. I sit there thinking, I love it, but I don’t necessarily think that anyone else is going to. I kind of assume Gemma [his wife] will, and even that’s not guaranteed – but beyond that I’m an absolute blank – I have no expectations whatsoever, I have lots of hopes and lots of ambition but no expectations that people are going to like it. I want it to stay like that, I don’t wanna make stuff and think I’m God’s gift to music, I hate people that are like that. So I am happy being humble little me to be honest, because it suits me and it always means that I’m not disappointed too much. When people don’t like it, and there’s been plenty of that over the years, I don’t get crushed by it. You say that, but after you wrote massively popular albums such as The Pleasure Principle, then you were writing Telekon – you must have known at the time it was gonna be great? I thought We Are Glass and I Die:You Die were pretty good, but then again I didn’t put them on the album. I thought they were reasonably good singles and I had a good chance with those but what did I pick? [Despairing voice] …I just, I always pick the wrong singles I know that for sure – I’m probably going to do it again now. Is it your fault, or label inteference? No, it was me really. In those days when things were going much better nobody interfered with me at all because I was too big, too successful, so they would bend over backwards and do whatever I wanted. But you need someone to say “that’s rubbish Numan - that was a really bad decision and you’ll regret that”, but you get that more when things are starting to go bad and all of a sudden everyone knows what you should have been doing all along. So they weren’t always the right decisions, although I think Cars obviously was. Was This Wreckage a single? A rubbish decision that. I loved that particular album but I think something like Remind Me To Smile might have made a better choice? Absolutely, there you go. It would have done much better, ponderous old thing should never have been a single – you should have told me? Well, I was only 13 at the time Gary. [Laughs]. I could have written you a letter but I doubt you’d have paid much attention. [Laughs] No, probably not. |
"I am able to turn the worst situation either into a strong feeling of vengeance or revenge – which is a huge driving force to be honest." |
True, but it wasn’t just that song - you wrote a whole album of songs? Yeah, it was more than that. It’s a way to keep myself in check and never let the success I’ve had take over. And the fact that people say that I’m influential and do lots of covers… I mean it would be easy to get really big headed with that and start to think I’m something special and I don’t want to be like that, so I constantly remind myself, "don’t ever forget that your entire career is based on a shitty bum note that you didn’t play very well". I probably mention it too many times actually and I am going to try to stop doing that - it probably annoys the fans. Ok, so why did it take 6 years to record a follow up to Pure? Well, the first year or so was spent promoting Pure, so I didn’t really get down to anything at all – and I found the Pure album really difficult to make and I wanted a big old break before I started again. The idea of starting a new album almost felt like I’d much rather climb Mount Everest in a t-shirt - massively daunting. And then I got involved in the whole Artful [Records] thing, I mean I made a really good start on the album, I wrote 25-30 songs in a fairly short space of time – and then we had lots of problems with the label. Then Gemma got pregnant with Raven, and I didn’t want to miss any of that. It wasn’t up until early 2005 that I really did have a consistent period where nothing else was going on that was gonna stop me, the record company problems were all over and I was just able to get on with it. [Gary has a small coughing fit]. Fucking hell. Get some Manuka Honey Gary. What? Manuka Honey, you literally eat it out of the jar – it's anti-bacterial. How do you know all this stuff? I just picked it up off the Internet, but I tried it and it works. I could so do with that. Are you concerned that, what with the delay between Pure and Jagged, you might have lost some of the impetus that was built up by the success of Pure? Well yeah, I think I probably lost of all it. As far as I’m concerned I’m pretty much starting again to be honest – that’s how it feels. Whether that’s true or not I’ll wait and see, I might be totally surprised. I am surprised at how much media interest I’m getting; I really didn’t expect that much. The reviews generally have been pretty good, I think the Uncut one’s not so cool, and we’re having problems getting Q to review it at all, but everyyhing else has been really positive, four star reviews. The overseas stuff has been equally fantastic, I must have done about a dozen interviews in Germany, and I really did think I would be scratching to get one or two because of this loss of momentum. What I should have done with the last one was jump on it with both hands and ride off into the distance and really try to do something with it, but what do I do, just sit on my arse for 5 years doing nothing. There were reasons for it, but I’m doing myself no favours. But your reputation and history is probably beneficial in that respect. It seems to be; I’m just finding that out now. But how that’s going to relate to people buying it – there was people buying Pure that had never bought a Gary Numan album before. I’ve probably lost most of the new fans that I got 5 or 6 years ago and I’ll either have to find them again or get a load of new ones. You should be more optimistic, I mean I bought the new Kate Bush album and it was the first one she’s done for 13 years. It’s absolutely brilliant, and I was always going to wait for it – there’s plenty of other music to listen to in the meantime. Really? But then again you might buy a lot of stuff - that might be different from somebody that only ever bought one album. Pure was a while back and they might have liked it, but since then there’s another 25 new bands in Kerrang each week. Again, I really do hope I’m wrong, but there will never be a gap like this again. How important was Ade Fenton’s role in the production of the album? Vital, absolutely brilliant. I did a song with Andy Gray, I did another 4 or 5 with Rob and Monty [Sulpher], and I did another one with Monty on his own. So the album was more than half way through when I started to get problems and realised that I needed another change of producer. There was never any personal grievances, we get on brilliantly, but when you’re waiting 3 months to get a song back, you realise it’s going to take 4 years! I was confident I would get it ready by August and I found out that one of them was going on tour for 3 weeks, so there was a little bit of not quite knowing where I stood, it felt like I was quite low on the priority scale at one point. So I decided that it wasn’t working out for various reasons, so I went with Ade on a one-song trial, I gave him a song called Scanner - and when that came back it was brilliant. I’d always wanted the album to be more electronic than Pure, I wanted it to be heavy and dark still but I didn’t think I could progress anymore if Jagged stayed as a guitar-dominated album. When Ade came along it was exactly what I wanted, it was really aggressive and dynamic, very electronic. I didn’t want to try and mix what he was doing with what had been done before – so I decided to keep Andy, Rob and Monti’s versions of the songs for alternative versions of the album, they’re all gonna come out this year so people can decide for themselves. Ade was brilliant, he was really easy to work with, he just had a ridiculous flow of ideas – it almost became a problem. I’d send him a song that had 15-20 parts and he’d send like 50 back, there was so much going on it was going to take me a month to learn what he’d done and it made mixing a nightmare. So we had quite a lot of work to do to smooth the differences between us, but with any criticisms I had there was never a flash of ego from him whatsoever, he was working all hours, he gave up all his other work – and he’s very well paid I have to say, he’s quite a successful DJ, but he gave it all up and concentrated on the album. I will work up a song to a fairly finished degree, some more than others – so we’re talking about songs that with another couple days work I could actually release myself, fully produced, proper songs. I send them to him so he has a very good idea of where I want him to go and how I want him to sound, but his brief is simply to make it better, but sometimes in the course of making it better he pretty much got rid of everything that I’d done [laughs], which is a bit insuting but nonetheless he was free to do that, I gave him no restrictions whatsoever. And then all of that comes back to me, and then of course I’ve got the option of putting all my stuff back in again, which basically I did. So you end up with this merged, kind of ultimate version of his ideas and my ideas. We were never actually in the same room at the same time ever – but his contribution to it and the difference that he brought to it is was just great. I like the live drumming aspect on Jagged as well, because on Pure, although it’s a decent album, I felt some of the drums were a bit static? Funnily enough, there is live drumming on Pure but Monti’s live drums were then processed, sometimes it’s broken down into samples and looped that way - for timing and all that sort of thing. But they’re certainly not recorded in the same way as on the new one where a drummer’s sitting in the corner playing it and that’s your take. It seems to make the tracks flow a bit better as well, y’know? Yeah, I think that. You can just hear the skill of a drummer, which is always better than the skill of a programmer, so I’ll carry on using real drums for the foreseeable future. |
"I constantly remind myself, "don’t ever forget that your entire career is based on a shitty bum note that you didn’t play very well." |
I
heard in an interview you did recently that when you were recording
Are’Friends’Electric? you sort of hit a bum note and it turned
into the great song it was – but isn’t that how everybody writes music?
Oh yeah, but if you change it through a conscious
decision and it sounds better, that’s cool, but when you stumble across
it because you don’t play very well and hit a bum note and you think
that sounds better – that’s an accident. I was trying to explain how
I never got big headed because I knew that my whole success was based
on the fact that I hit a bum note, so I don’t take a lot of credit
for that. So when people talk about me being this sort of influential
person and all the rest of it, I think back to the fact of me sitting
there at that piano hitting a bum note and I think, “yeah alright”
[sarcastic].
Did you use that negativity as a motivational tool for recording the album? No that one no, I tend to use negativity often as a driving force, but not that one. Except for that lyric for the Pressure song, I’ve not really been able to make anything positive out of it, it’s just miserable and depressing, which is rare for me, I can normally turn a big lump of shit into gold dust. There’s something about it, something too close to home that’s just depressing and I just avoid it like the plague wherever possible. And also lyrically throughout Jagged, you’re banging on about God quite a bit, as usual…I didn’t mean to do that. You’re obviously not banking on going to heaven are you? [Laughs] Good job that; if I am I would be terrified. If there is a heaven I can’t imagine it’s a good place to be. If God is real and I am wrong then God would be the most terrifying creature that’s ever existed – evil. But there seems to be a contradiction in your lyrics, on the one hand you’re questioning God’s existance and on the other hand you validate it by talking about his inhumanity? When I’m doing that, I’m talking about it through the mind of people that believe. A lot of the songs talk about “I” and “me”, but it’s not always “me” that I’m talking about, although I nearly always write through the first person - so it’s a writing style that’s a bit confusing I guess. I absolutely do not believe in God, but if you are going to talk about it and get through to people that do believe in it then quite often you talk about it from the point of view of someone that does, therefore you give it a reality and you start to pick holes in the reality. And there’s a single coming out to promote the album? It’s looking likely to be the 24th April. I’ve written loads more songs, so when the single comes out I know the main track will be taken from the album but there will be another couple that won’t be. And you’re embarking on a tour of about 16 dates in the UK and 10 in Europe is that right? I’ve actually lost count to be honest because it keeps changing, but it’s something like that yeah. We’re actually talking about going back to Europe in October and I am planning on doing this special sort of thing in November where we’re only going to play songs from Telekon. Can you tell me about that? I haven’t really finally decided on what’s going to happen yet, but the idea is… I’ve been increasingly concerned about that the fact that I know I concentrate on new stuff a lot and there’s an ever-decreasing amount of old stuff in the set. I don’t want to compromise that at all, but I’m also aware that it could be seen a little bit like sticking my two fingers up at some of the older fans and I really don’t want to do that, but I’ve got my own problems trying to keep the career moving forward and don’t want to get nostalgic, so it is a difficult situation. The answer that I’ve come up with, if it works, is just to do a long weekender; two, three or four gigs, where I just play songs from a particular album – and the first one I’m thinking about doing is for Telekon. So we’d do all the Telekon album, plus all the singles that come from it and all the b-sides associated with them. So it could be like 16 or 17 songs, and that would be the gig, and we’d do them in the original way as well, I won’t try to revamp them and do them in the modern Jagged style or Pure style, I’d do them as they were on the record. So you’re going to get the analogue gear back out? Well yeah, what I can find of it yeah. And would you get the old band members back out? No! Fuck that. [Laughs] Why not? Absolutely not, no interest in that at all. First of all, one of them’s dead, another one lives in France, Russell [Bell] I’ve not heard from in years and I think Cedric [Sharpley] hates the ground that I walk on. Why would he think that? I don’t know, never asked him. I think he was unhappy about not being in the band anymore. Since the last gig we ever did, he’s never ever spoken to me , not a word. I’ve had one or two emails from Chris Payne in the last 15 years, but these are not the people that I was closest to at the best of times. They were not my favourite band, yeah, we had a really cool time, but in between tours we never saw eachother, they weren’t like friends that I hung out with. Russell a little bit I guess, but I didn’t have a problem with anyone, it’s not like we were enemies either, there was never any rows or upsets at the tours but when the tour finished I wasn’t gonna see them again until we started rehearsing the year after. So they were more like just paid session players? Yeah, whereas this band that I have now, I love em’. They’re all like my closest friends and we see eachother all the time, we hang out together, we go on holidays together, it’s absolutely brilliant – it’s a lovely lovely atmosphere and I wouldn’t dream of ever playing live with the old band again. I’m not going to go that far down the nostalgia route for the fans. So you’re not going to put those leather jumpsuits back on again then? Nah [Laughs]. I’m not being silly about it, I’m not gonna sort of dye a red streak down me head and become the Gary Numan of 1980, I am what I am now. It’s a very clear signal that I’m trying to accommodate the fact that I’ve got fans from 25/30 years ago and some of them prefer older stuff and some of them prefer newer stuff, it’s a way of trying to keep everybody happy without selling out and comprimising my main ambition which is to push where am I now, because these are the albums I really wanna be playing now – but I do know its alienated a lot people, so by doing these retro gigs I can hopefully keep some people happy, because each year it will be a different album. Talking of the older stuff, will you be re-releasing some of the old concerts on DVD? Yeah, I had a meeting about that on Friday. The Wembley one is going to be the first of them, and we’re hoping to get that ready in time for those gigs in November, because it seems sensible that if you’re going to do a retro weekender, which is the Telekon album, the most suitable DVD to promote is actually the Wembley DVD. And they found a whole load of footage for a round the world flight that I did that was never ever seen, and they actually think they’ve got enough to put together a mini 30-minute documentary about that, which we could add to the Wembley video as well. And will there be any back stage stuff on the Wembley video? No, in those days you didn’t have DVDs and the concept of extra features just wasn’t done. An album was 40 minutes long, maximum, because that’s all you could get on vinyl, you did a video and you filmed the show. Remember, in those days it cost a billion squid to film one minute of video, so the idea of recording extra footage to give away was absolutely unthought of. So unless you were actually making a documentary about a particular tour, which would involve more than just the gigs, that’s all we have. I don’t think there’s a minute of anything but the gig itself, but if there is and we can find it then I will definitely use it, but I’m absolutely convinced there’s nothing like it. And you also did one of the first ever videos didn’t you? Is that likely to be re-released on DVD I hope so, the problem is the originals have all been lost or stolen. With a lot of this stuff, Beggars Banquet stored it and then they sub-leased it out to other people so the masters just got lost, so it’s difficult to track a lot of this stuff down. We know we’ve got Wembley, from a laserdisc, so that is going to be the first, and while that’s going through the process we can try and track down the rest of them. I loved the images on the cover art for the first 3 albums, especially Replicas and The Pleasure Principle; do you have any unseen photos from those sessions Yeah, there are lots of photos from the sessions; again they’ve been put in boxes and put in the back of garages for 20-odd years and are pretty much in a rubbish state. When I was moving house a few weeks ago, I came across quite a lot of those things and they were in a shit state. They’ve been in the back of a wooden shed for the best part of 15 years, but it might be that we can go through and sort them out. The idea for the Wembley DVD that I thought was really cool was that we should make the Wembley programme the booklet for the DVD. But erm, yeah at every session you do take hundreds of photographs so they’re all there. So if they’re savable and I can salvage any of those then it would be good to use them again. So, for the future you’re busy promoting Jagged now, and you say we won’t have to wait as long for another album? No, I’m also doing an album at the moment with Andy Gray and I’m doing some guest vocals for Ade Fenton’s own album, which should be coming out later in the year. But the idea is to pretty much start with a new one as soon as these tours are finished. And there is any direction in the back of your mind that you’re thinking of going in? The first thing that pops into my head is just doing a better version of Jagged, but as time goes by sometimes you realise that’s not really acceptable and there would need to be a bigger move than that, and also as time goes by whatever vibe you were into is gone. If the next one is much closer to Jagged then I might have to make more of a conscious effort to make it different, then again I might not want to, I might be happy to do an improved version of Jagged. Because I’m very technology based, when new technology comes along, which is fairly often, that tends to lead you in different directions because it can do things and make sounds you haven’t used before. I’m on Pro Tools now anyway, so there’s an ongoing flow of new plug-ins coming in. And you have your two baby daughters as well; would you encourage them to go into the music business? Yeah, I mean I can help them through the downside of it; I mean I didn’t have anyone to help me - I just had to go and suffer through it and make my own mistakes. There’s certainly so many good things in it, I still think it’s the best job in the world. I can’t think of many people who have had much more experience than you, all the highs and lows? No, not really [Laughs]. Well, thanks for the chat, hope your cold gets better. Yeah, me too. I’m going to try your drugs soon! |
I
was looking at your microsite as well, and reading through some of
the lyrics on the album, which refer to some of the criticism you’ve
received from your own fans recently. How does that permeate into
your life? Well
nowhere near as much as the song would suggest, but when you write
songs you magnify things. It touches my life very very rarely, but
on those rare occasions when it does it bothers me hugely. I take
comfort in the fact that I’m pretty sure it’s about five people, then
the others just get dragged into it, but I think the core troublemakers
are only about 4 or 5 people, and it’s probably the same people that
bother Trent Reznor, in fact it’s probably the same bloke sitting
in a little flat in Grimsby somewhere typing out all this shit and
then sending the same email along to as many chatrooms as he can but
just changing the name of the artist and the album. So, I don’t actually
take it that seriously, what bothers me is when I see other fans that
I know have been really good fans for a long time getting involved
in it a little bit and that upsets me a lot, because I think they
should really know better. Most of these people have met me face to
face on many occasions and they know that I’m easy to talk to, I always
sign stuff after gigs; I’m actually a reasonably decent sort of bloke.Gary
Numan interview, Barcode 2006 ©
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