As Buzz’s review details, synthpop elder statesman Gary Numan is in especially dystopian mood on new album Intruder – and who can blame him, really. Carl Marsh finds out more while checking out Gaz’s furniture on the quiet.
Zoom is a nifty little thing, but the only thing that lets it down is that it doesn’t do a big reveal of the famous person you are about to interview: they just appear. Accordingly, I find Gary Numan sitting on a vast, elegant sofa under a very grand piece of artwork. He informs me this room, at the top of his three-floor house in Los Angeles, is his and wife Gemma’s “little hideaway as it’s the only place where we haven’t got kids and dogs”. With pleasantries out of the way, 20 minutes to chat and new album Intruder out, high time to discuss it.
This new album seems very much to be a follow on from its predecessor, 2017’s Savage.
Well, it has that same climate change core to it. The last one went in a direction where you could put yourself 100 or 200 years from now and how people would have to be to survive, should climate change not be sorted out. So Savage was very much a science fiction idea based on an unlikely but possible future. The new one is like “if the Earth could speak, how would it feel?” but is still talking about climate change.
Am I correct in saying that one of your daughters set the wheels in motion for Intruder?
My youngest daughter Echo wrote a poem called Earth a few years back, when she was 11 and when I was just beginning to get ideas together for the album. The poem was about what the Earth was speaking, effectively: how upset it was, and how it was trying to talk to the other planets and tell them how sad it was. It was brilliant, really lovely and touching – it showed a lot of understanding of the bigger issues that the grownups are talking about, and it had a lot of empathy.
It planted a seed where that could be an avenue for an album – but my worry was, could I find a dozen ways of saying essentially the same thing? Which is what [Intruder] is. That didn’t turn out to be a problem at all, it was easier than I thought. But that’s where it came from. If Echo hadn’t written that poem, I’m not sure Intruder would have been what it is in terms of subject.
Are you able to recollect when all of your interest in the topic of climate change started?
I’ve been aware of it for a very long time, but choosing to start making albums about it – that was never actually meant to be a thing on Savage. The album before that, Splinter, had done quite well – it was the first album that I’d got in the charts for decades, and it was all brilliant. And I was absolutely terrified about what I was going to do to follow that up. I was really worried that I wouldn’t be able to repeat it.
How bad were those worries?
I was full of anxiety about it, and I kept delaying it. I wrote one song, which was really about how frightened I was, which I just talked about. And then I didn’t know what to do. I was so scared of fucking it up and putting the career backwards, but I was writing a book, called Ruin. The book was never finished, but was about what, essentially, Savage became – these future tribal societies and the things they do, based on a climate change apocalypse.
And so I just borrowed some ideas from that book and wrote a couple of songs with this climate change core to them. And that’s when Trump came along and started talking about climate change being a hoax and all that. I was horrified, and that’s when it became a much bigger thing for me and something that I wanted to write more about: it was a reaction to the ignorance that I was hearing from Trump and the people around him.
You’ve now got Biden. Are you hopeful that he will make a difference?
With Biden coming in, things are looking a little more hopeful and positive. There is that feeling that for all of the world leaders’ agreement that it is a problem, what’s being done doesn’t back up what they’re saying. And because I’m aware of it now and I’ve got more involved with it because of the last album, I feel more connected to it as an issue.
All I’m trying to do with Intruder is add my little voice. I’m under no illusions that I have any big sway over anything as my voice is very, very small. I don’t sell many albums, you know, I’m not Taylor Swift or all these people with a huge audience. Nonetheless, if I can just add another tiny drop to that conversation or create, like, a bit of spike there, that just keeps it in people’s minds. You know, if you’re going to write about something, you might as well write about something that’s important for everybody.
Intruder is out now on BMG. Info: www.garynuman.com
words CARL MARSH