After a brief period on the top of the charts, Gary Numan was a figure of scorn for many years. But now, rediscovered by a new generation, he's happier and more self-confident than ever before, he tells Brian Boyd.
FOR A good deal of its time in the literary spotlight two years ago, Mark Haddon's enthralling novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was outselling the latest Harry Potter. The book is narrated by a young man with Asperger's syndrome and sheds necessary and informative light on a little-known autism spectrum disorder. People with Asperger's are clinically defined (although not everyone accepts the definition) as having difficulties with social and communication skills but having above normal intelligence.
As more and more information about Asperger's becomes available, there is now a school of thought that there is not, and should not be, a "cure" for the syndrome. The point being made is that there is no such thing as an "ideal" or "normal" brain configuration and therefore any deviation from the standard should not be considered in any way pathological. One of the leading researchers in the field, Simon Baron-Cohen, argues cogently that Asperger's should never be described in terms of a "disability" but only in terms of a "difference".
Gary Numan, who has what he refers to as "a mild form" of Asperger's, has no time for this argument.
"I used to think I was a really sociable person, but other people then pointed out to me that this wasn't the case at all," he says. "When I was younger, I wasn't fully aware of Asperger's or what it meant. All the time, though, I was annoying people and offending people without realising it. I had strange obsessions and fixations, but then I thought everyone did.
"Even at the height of my fame people thought there was something a bit different about me because I was really terrified of meeting new people and I hated to be in a crowd. I couldn't make small talk, I couldn't be in a group."
"I really thought I was an easy-going person, but then people would point things out to me. Like when a friend would visit and halfway through the conversation I would just pick up a magazine and start reading it, totally ignoring the person who was there. It was made clear to me that I was rude, I was ignoring people and I was making offensive gestures. When I found out I had a form of Asperger's, it all started to make sense.
"I do think it is 'fixable' - if that is a word - and I wouldn't agree with what you were just saying about the new school of thought on the syndrome. Since my diagnosis, I am much easier to be around. I'm not upsetting people so much. I'm a much better person."
By a "much better person", Numan is also referring to how he has long since reconciled himself to the way his massive fame in the early 1980s precipitously gave way to decades in the wilderness and widescale derision from music fans and critics alike. But a slow rehabilitation of his early work over the last few years has unearthed a number of figures who are now vocal in championing his musical brilliance and influence. The Killers, David Bowie (eventually), The Prodigy, Damon Albarn, The Foo Fighters, Afrika Bambaataa, Beck, Sugababes and Marilyn Manson are all, figuratively speaking, fan club members.
Numan's rise was quicker than his fall. He became the first real synthesiser star with the universal success of Are "Friends" Electric?, which went to No 1 for four weeks and sold a million copies. Cars soon followed, and the albums from this time (Replica, The Pleasure Principle and Telekon) brought the austere looking, white-make-up-clad man with lyrics about aliens and robots a dizzying degree of fame. It was like punk had never happened and there was some bizarre laboratory mishap where an Essex version of Kraftwerk had been unleashed on the charts.
At the very height of his fame, Numan had been booked to do the Kenny Everett show. But when he turned up for the recording one of the other musical guests, David Bowie, had him thrown off the set.
"I just couldn't believe Bowie was doing this," he says now. "I was a huge fan of his and when I was younger used to get into scraps at school for sticking up for him. It was so upsetting to me. . . . It was only a while ago, though, that I read that he thought I'd made some of the best music in British history, so that's all changed now. But there was a time when people were embarrassed to ask for my records in a shop. I never had the right image and never said the right things. I used to speak about how I was a Thatcherite. I didn't deal with fame very well. I was a bit arrogant." He believes that it was the very particularity of both his image and his music that caused the problems.
"Contrary to popular belief, I wasn't a Kraftwerk fan. I was always more into Bowie and Bolan and I really liked that style thing they had going on. Remember, there was always guitar, bass and drums in my music; it wasn't just pure synth. The band I modelled myself on was the original line-up of Ultravox, when John Foxx was the lead singer.
"I arrived at a time when electronic music was very, very new. I was at the sharp end of that movement. The media didn't like me, but the public did. The public had gone for something before the press did, so in that sense I snuck in through the side door. Are "Friends" Electric? was No 1 for four weeks but it was only after three weeks that BBC Radio 1 would play it. There was all this stuff from DJs and the media that this wasn't 'real' music. There were calls from the Musicians Union to get me banned - apparently I was responsible for putting real musicians out of work."
"With my image, it was a case of a synth guy never being a very good front man. You stick on an electric guitar and it works, but that doesn't happen with the synth. I had to think of something so I came up with the Gary Numan look. People still think it was a worked-out cold, Teutonic look, but I looked that way because I was always unbelievably frightened. And the unsmiling look comes from me being really self-conscious about my big front teeth. I couldn't smile because of my teeth."
Numan's unlikely stardom couldn't and wouldn't last. He retired from touring as early as 1981 with a three-night series of live spectaculars at Wembley Arena. His subsequent albums bombed. He soon became little more than a curio, a three-hit wonder who had withered on the vine of '80s electro-pop.
It was a good 15 years before there were any signs of a musical rehabilitation. It began when Numan was asked to a joint interview with Afrika Bambaataa. "It came as a total shock to me when he said in the interview that me and Kraftwerk were the building blocks of hip-hop. I found this theory fascinating, just as it was fascinating to learn that someone like Bambaataa was listening to me."
In 1997, the very well received Random tribute album was released. Acts included Moloko, Damon Albarn and Saint Etienne. But the biggest surprise for Numan was the number of other musicians - Beck, Marilyn Manson, Foo Fighters - who said they would have been thrilled to contribute to Random if they had known about it.
"I really didn't have any sense that I was regarded as an influential figure. I was stunned when Damon Albarn and the others came out and said such nice things. During my time at the top I simply wasn't liked by anyone and a lot of very hurtful things were written about me. Later on I was really chuffed to hear heavier types of bands such as Nine Inch Nails talk about my work.
"The Random album was such a compliment, especially because there were a lot impressive and innovative musicians on the album.It now seems that a broad spectrum of people took something from the music."
He was further sampled by dance acts Basement Jaxx and Armand Van Helden, and pop act Sugababes brought his Are "Friends" Electric? back to the top of the charts under the guise of Freak Like Me. "That was the first time I had been played on BBC Radio 1 since 1982," he says. "I actually believed that they didn't know it was my song and that I could have ruined it for Sugababes by opening my mouth."
He's happier now that music is a hobby and not a career. Still releasing an album every few years, Numan has now ditched any sense of pop from his sound and couldn't care less about radio play or chart placings.The new material is "heavier and darker," he says, and not a million miles away from the electro-industrial textures of a Nine Inch Nails.
Numan is one of the main attractions at this year's Electric Picnic, and he knows his fan base well enough to be aware that he won't be allowed to play only new material. "So many people from my era are just on a retro trip and that doesn't interest me. But I also know what songs people have come to hear, so the set list now is about 70 per cent new material and 30 per cent old."
He's a lot more approachable these days. "I'm much easier to access now. I meet the fans after the show and everything . . don't run myself as an exclusive commodity anymore."
Gary Numan plays the Electric Picnic in Stradbally Estate, Co Laois, on September 2nd
