THE PRINCIPAL PLEASURE OF BEING GARY NUMAN

Gary Numan is a nice guy. Seriously. And what I want to know—and what he wants to know, too, though he’s probably too polite to ask—is why do people pick on him?

Anyone who noticed Gary Numan’s U.S. television debut on Saturday Night Live probably couldn’t help laughing a little. While the lyrics to “Praying To The Aliens” flashed onscreen, character-generated under what appeared to be the most characterless performer ever seen, Numan croaked to some long-lost Rodan soundtrack and sane viewers either scratched their heads or laughed. There was no middle ground.

Personally, Gary Numan makes me laugh. Not because I think he and his music are stupid; I really don’t think he’s any more stupid than tongue-in-cheek odes to rock lobotomies or, for that matter, rock lobsters. Not because he and his stage demeanor resemble David Bowie circa Station To Station straight down to the stage lighting, though I’m sure young Gary will deny this to his dying day. And not because I’ve seen two prepubescent girls pick up his “Cars” 45 at a record store and imitate the Numan croak, laughing all the way to the cash register.

Gary Numan makes me laugh because he is a very young person who has made lots of money doing what he wants to do, all the while being perceived as a threat by misguided critics who don’t really seem to get the point. The point? Says Gary: “We are not gods/We are not men/We are not making claims/We are only boys.”

Point One: Gary Numan, plain and simply, is not a big deal.

Facts: Gary Numan sells lots of records in England. His three albums, Tubeu/ay Army, Replicas and The Pleasure Principle, have made him one of the most conspicuous “faces” in British rock since David Bowie gave up Ziggy Stardust for Alladin Sane. The immediate success of “Are‘Friends’Electric?” and, subsequently, “Cars” satisfied fans but riled critics who, as always, perceived anyone who could rise to fame so fast as a charlatan, a huckster out for dollars while starving artists were out for art.

The backlash syndrome never hit anybody so hard as it hit Gary Numan. Numan was a blatant imitator; not only was he dismissed as a Bowie-clone, but, critics said, he managed to merge the worst of Brian Eno, Ultravox—in short, anybody who was “hip” but sold considerably fewer records—in the most simplistic and elementary fashion imaginable. While real artists like Eno, latter-day Bowie and Talking Heads toiled endlessly for art’s sake, selling respectably but never really crossing over massively into the pop charts, Numan’s watered-down pap was simplistic enough for even the dullest of minds. Which was why, they said, he sold so many records. When posing was the biggest sin of all, Gary Numan was the poseur exemplified.

In a garish Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge, Gary Numan sits in a hotel room, talking to thi^ CREEM writer hesitantly. He’s just finished his Motor City debut at the Royal Oak Music Theatre and, judging by the audience’s reaction, was more successful than anticipated. His dealings with the press in the past, he says, haven’t been to his best advantage. He’s not quite sure how to react to this interview. In England, he says, he plans to stop giving press interviews—except to television and radio where they “can’t rewrite or change” what he says. “In America,” he confides, “I’m a bit over a barrel at the moment, because I’m not big enough to do that.”

While we speak, a bodyguard hovers in the hotel room. I mention that his songs seem to suggest a slightly paranoid personality, and Numan agrees. I ask him if his paranoia is the reason his bodyguard stays in the hotel room while we speak. Slightly ill at ease, he nods. I assure him I won’t punch him in the face, we both laugh, and the bodyguard asks if either of us would like a soft drink. He soon leaves.

Point Two: By his own admission, Gary Numan is a paranoid person.

Do you think you and your music suggest or stand for any sort of future you envision?

“I’m not standing for anything,” Gary Numan says. “I’m not even that interested in the future, really. I just wrote about it because it was the most interesting thing at the time. It was the only thing I had in mind at the time.”

Really?

“Most of the songs on The Pleasure Principle are about me and not really about the future at all. Replicas was the futurist album, and that’s the one that broke in England. The Pleasure Principle has three songs on it which are futurist, and the rest revolve around me and various things I’ve noticed. But those aren’t futurist at all.”

I bring up “Observer,” from that album, interesting for its lyric: “/ could wait here for a lifetime/Watching you, and thinking alivays/I could observe you all.

Is “Observer” a song that revolves around you?

He nods.

Wouldn’t you agree that that song has a slightly voyeuristic, sexual overtone?

“No,” he says, confused. ' “A voyeurist isn’t looking, a voyeurist is being looked at. Isn’t that right?”

No, I say, that’s an exhibitionist.

“I thought a voyeurist...” he drifts, and his bodyguard speaks up: “Observes.”

“Yeah?” Numan asks. “Is it? I always thought a voyeurist had something to do with sex and exposing yourself. And I don’t do that, I tend to sit in a corner and merge with the walls. Become anonymous and watch people...”

Point Three: Gary Numan doesn’t have an especially large vocabulary.

Seven months earlier, at Detroit’s Masonic Auditorium, I’d asked Mick Jones of the Clash what he thought of Gary Numan.

He smirked.

“I think he looks like David Bowie...”

☆ ☆ ☆

I bring up the fact that he’s continually being accused of plagiarizing other performers, suggest that’s one of the reasons he’s having a rough time with the British press. I ask him what he thinks of those comparisons.

“Well,” Gary Numan says, “They’re just opinions, aren’t they? I think they’re very narrow minded. No more than that, really. To compare you with somebody else is just an easy way out of explaining something on its own terms. It seems like a cop-out for a writer or somebody else to instantly compare you to somebody else instead of actually trying to describe what you’re like, yourself.”

I wouldn't take a concept from anyone.

Would you consider yourself a minimalist?

He shakes his head. “Somebody once called my music minimalist and somebody else called it complex. It really depends on what they mean. You can give both names to it, depending on what side you’re looking at.”

This philosophy sounds vaguely familiar.

I ask Numan if he’s listened to Brian Eno.

“I did after I got told 1 sounded like him.”

Come on.

“Yeah,” he says. “Honest. Everybody told me I’d like Eno, but I never used to like Roxy Music so I never listened to him. And then somebody wrote that I was ripping off Eno, so I thought maybe he wasn’t doing what Roxy Music used to do. I know it sounds very narrowminded, but at the time, that’s what it was like for me.

“So I listened to Eno, and bought, I think, Before And After Science and didn’t like it much. And then I got Music For Films and thought that was brilliant. Then I listened to another one and it was absolutely awful—that’s Music For Airports. And then Another Green World and Taking Tiger Mountain, and I thought they were gbod.

TURN TO PAGE 58

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 32

“Eno tends to go from the direst shit imaginable to sheejr brilliance.”

☆ ☆ ☆

Numan’s bodyguard returns, bringing each of us a 7-Up and a plastic glass filled with ice cubes.

Already Numan seems, if nothing else, a much more open person than I’d expected, volunteering a lot more information than he really needs to. The time seems right to bring up a sensitive topic:

Didn’t I read somewhere in the British press that you said you “admired the order” of the Nazi regime?

Numan doesn’t get mad, tongue-tied or indifferent. He just shakes his head and looks downcast, haunted once more by some stray quote.

“No,” he says glumly. “What I said was that I thought the Nazis looked good. And the press went on from there. You can imagine the wankers that got hold of that.

“They don’tjike us over there, anyway. We’ve had bad press in all four papers every single week since the day we first got anywhere near the chart.” (

I ask him why.

“I haven’t got any idea at all. But when they found out that I mentioned the Nazis, they just took it from there and made up all sorts of stories.” Numan looks up at me. “And whether you like what the Nazis did or not, they did look good. They look terrifying. What they looked like impresses me^but what they did is another matter.”

Point Fouf: Sometimes Gary Numan says things that he regrets.

☆ ☆ ☆ S

We discuss music a little more, and Numan seems a true fan, singling out Can’s Tago Mago as an old favorite. I ask him about Kraftwerk.

“Yeah,” he nods, “I was interested in them because I’d heard them mentioned in the whole Berlin thing, when everybody discovered Germany. I really like the Man Machine and Trans-Europe Express albums, but I’m really not too keen on anything before that.”

Are you talking about Bowie and Eno’s discovering Germany?

“Yeah. But actually, I’m not too keen on the Bowie Low things. They’re very nice, but I’m not really interested in them—I can’t get much out of them, ideas-wise. I’m more interested in electronics that are playipg rhythms.”

Are you saying the reason you listen to other people’s music is to take things from it?

“Sure,” says Numan. “That’s one of the main reasons I listen to anything, or go to shows. It’s certainly one of the main reasons I read books, to get ideas from them.”

Then wouldn’t that tend to legitimize criticism that Gary Numan takes other people’s concepts and uses them for his own gain?

“No,” Numan says. “I wouldn’t take a concept from anyone. I’d take a word from a song, or a chord progression, and fit it in somewhere else, in a completely different key and progression, but in the same style. Or take a tiny, small thing from each person—the way everyone else does, but nobody seems to admit it these days. And I think that’s a shame, really. If I admire someone enough to take a bit from them, I’d like them and everyone else to know that I got it from them, not to deny it and say it’s all mine. It’s not only lying, it’s kicking people in the face when they’ve helped you out quite a bit.

“And when people in England are doing electronic things now, they swear blind that I’ve had nothing to do with it. And I’ve actually met a few of them and introduced them to electronic instruments, and when they’ve done interviews they deny having anything to do with me vyhatsoever.”

I mention I’d read an interview with John Foxx, former lead vocalist ,of Ultravox. Numan jumps on it.

“Yeah,” he says, as animated as I’m ever to see him during the session. “He’s the main one who springs to mind...”

Critics, I tell him, are writing that they’re worried Foxx will be accused of ripping off Gary Numan when actually it’s the other way around.

“What happened is, see, I used to like Ultravox. And when I started getting interviewed in England, the first question would always be ‘Who are you interested in mainly—David Bowie?’ And I’d always say hot really, that musically, it was Ultravox. And that really was Billy [Currie, violinist and keyboard player for Ultravox]. It was his use of the synthesizer that got me interested in it. It was more Billy than anything—and because of that, the whole John Foxx thing came up, because he was in Ultravox, too. I met him and introduced him to the Polymoog [synthesizer] and various things like that, and then when his album came out it had the Polymoog on it. And the next thing 1 know, people are accusing me of ripping off Jphn Foxx, even though my 'album came out before his.

“And the whole thing didn’t quite make sense to me anymore. That people were actually lying just so they could say that I wasn’t asgood as John Foxx,,that I’d ripped somebody else off. And when it gets to that stage, ,you begin to think that it’? more personal than anything else. Almost like they’ve got a vendetta. Two papers in England have actually written that they’re out to get us, which I was very surprised at. Sounds and Melody Maker, they’ve, both run things. One of them said ‘We hope it’s the beginning of his downfall,’ and the other one said ‘Maybe you did make it without our help, but we’re sure going to take you down a peg or two.’”

Point Five: Gary Numan needs friends. ☆ ☆ ☆

Gary Numan talks about crossing over from live performance to video. He plans to videotape his next album—much like Blondie have done with their Eat To The Beat—and, he says, begin his video career from there. Not with music, fye emphasizes, but through small vignettes, short stories 10 or 15 minutes long. Gary Numan directing. Gary Numan observing. They’ll go out on a mail-order basis for home videos.

And, I ask, when you begin your video career, do you plan to continue your music career?

“No,” he says. “Not really.”

Why not?

He looks at his glass, contemplating, then says quietly:

“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be...”

Why? What did you expect?

Numan looks up at me again. “What I expected was what I could have. But I tried it out and I didn’t enjoy it. All the glamorous nightclubs, fleshy women who’ll all love you for a minute...” He pauses/ “I didn’t like that...”

☆ ☆ ☆

“The latest thing that happened,” says Gary, “happened when a London daily paper wanted to speak with me. We figured that since we hadn’t done anythingthere for a long time, we ought to talk to them. They’re usually hot bitchy—we figured they’d be middle-of-the-road and keep the name going.

“The reporter asked me if I was bisexual, and I said no, I wasn’t at all, but that I’ve got nothing against it, it doesn’t worry me. And then it goes into print, and there’s this whole big article in the daily newspapers saying that I’m queer and that it gives me twice as many people to sleep with—all those sort of things as opposed to what I said. So as far as England goes now, they aren’t going to see me for years.”

Point Six: Gary Numan is not queer.

☆ ☆ ☆

BIG QUESTION: What kind of person is Gary Numan?

Sophisticated? A near-genius? A threat to the music business? A threat to music critics?

No. Gary Numan is just Gary Numan, 22 years old and normal, devoted son who’s just bought his father his first American car. Gary Numan’s idea of a good time is, quite seriously, driving around in his car. That’s what he told me, and I have no reason to disbelieve him. And you don’t either.

Final point: So what’s'the big deal, huh?