Synth-pop superstar Gary Numan returns to Belfast this Saturday on the crest of a wave, exactly a year after the release of his 19th solo studio album Intruder – his second in a row to reach the heady heights of number two in the UK album charts.
When Savage (Songs from a Broken World) did the same in 2017, it became the Are “Friends” Electric star’s biggest hit since his late 70s/early 80s heyday, when Telekon became his third number one. Not bad for a veteran artist in his mid-sixties.
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“The fact that the last two albums have done so well, I'm extremely proud of that,” he told Belfast Live, speaking on Zoom from his home in California.
“Because they're not lightweight, middle-of-the-road, poppy records. They're heavy.”
To the general public, Numan remains most famous for his eerie sound and ghostly, android-like persona in the new wave era, when he became one of the first pop stars to really make it big using predominantly electronic instruments.
Songs like Are “Friends” Electric (with his band Tubeway Army), Cars and Metal helped to set a template for synth-pop, goth and industrial acts to follow. They did, too, as his songs have gone on to be covered by Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson and Fear Factory among dozens of others.
These days, he has settled into a new sound of his own – epic, widescreen electro-rock with grinding guitar riffs, big choruses and dystopian lyrics.
Intruder, like its predecessor, is lyrically preoccupied with climate change, but on this album Numan takes an unusual approach by looking at the subject from the point of view of a sentient earth.
It was inspired by his youngest daughter Echo (15), while his eldest Raven (18) and middle child Persia (16) both sing on the album.
“She wrote a poem called Earth, about the planet talking to the other planets in the solar system and explaining why she was so upset and unhappy because of all the terrible things people were doing to it,” he explained.
“It was really cute. She wrote it when she was 11 or 12, I think. So she's a young girl writing these things, but I just thought it was a really, really lovely way of talking about climate change and the damage that people do. And it was that idea that I took and broadened and turned into the album.”
Numan is refreshingly frank in explaining that he is much more energised by playing his newer material live than the old hits.
“I'm not even interested in yesterday, let alone 20, 30, 40 years ago,” he said. “I'm really f*cking not. I do Cars and Are “Friends” Electric because I feel like I have to. If I had absolutely free rein – if I was going to play a set of songs to people that had never, ever heard me – I wouldn't have them in it.
“And I'm not saying that I don't like them or I'm not proud of them, because I am. But I just think I've done 400 songs, and if you're only going to pay 20, I wouldn't include them in the 20 because I think I've got songs that are better than those.”
The star even went as far to drop Cars from the set many years ago, before eventually – begrudgingly – changing his mind.
“I just realised that that's just me being arrogant,” he confessed, “That's ridiculous, really, to not do that. But it does make certain parts of the set a little bit predictable.”
He’s more enthusiastic, then, talking about his new material, and the songs that have been going down best live on tour this year.
“On the American tour, the two that we did most apart from [the title track] Intruder was one called The Chosen, which is just a huge, storming, epic thing that goes down amazingly well, and one called The Gift, which is about covid,” he said.
“That's pretty epic as well, actually.
“So all of the Intruder stuff just went down brilliantly, and I brought a few things back in from the previous album Savage, as well. They are crowd favourites, even more than the originals.”
Numan’s initial heyday was intense but short – from the early 80s there was a steady decline until the mid-90s, when his Sacrifice album, though not a big seller, awakened something in him creatively.
“That was when I just went back to writing songs for the love of it again,” he said, “without trying to second-guess radio play and the press and all that sort of thing, and the music took a dramatic turn. It got darker, it got heavier, and I really enjoyed it again.”
It’s been a long, slow climb back to the top and Numan is rightly proud to be where he is now, playing edgy, intensely relevant hit albums to some of the biggest crowds of his career. He is living proof that it pays to stick to your guns and stay true to yourself – rather than living off past glories.
“I'm doing exactly what I want to do. I'm not compromising at all. And yet I'm having reasonable success with it.
“I've been able to get my career back to a really good level – be it record sales or touring. And I've not done that by reminding people that I wrote Cars in 1979.
“I've done it by pushing forward and thinking about what I'm doing next, rather than what I did before.”
Gary Numan plays the Ulster Hall in Belfast on Saturday May 21.
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