When I got Gary Numan on the phone in mid-September, the 52-year-old electronic-pop pioneer was on his first family vacation outside England. He and his wife were staying in a rented house in Kissimmee, Florida, with their three children, ages seven, five, and three, and the family was preparing for a trip to Disney World. The kids were already riled up—I could hear them in the background. “They’re just horrible little things,” Numan said, laughing. “They spend more time in trouble than they do having fun.”
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Numan has continued to release albums regularly for the past 30 years, and lately he’s started using distorted guitars and aggressive rhythms that belong not to the late 70s but to a post-Nine Inch Nails world. He has two records in progress now, both of which he hopes will see the light of day next year: Dead Son Rising is a mix of new songs and material that didn’t fit on his previous release, 2006’s Jagged, and Splinter is all new. At Metro on Tuesday he’ll play The Pleasure Principle in its entirety, then fill out the set with highlights from throughout his career.
I was quite young and I just wanted to prove a point. I wanted to go into a studio because people were saying Tubeway Army and Replicas wasn’t real music, that it was made by machines. I sort of got a little offended with that. So I wanted to make an album that didn’t have guitars in it, just to prove that you could make an album that sounded well-rounded sonically—just to show that it could be done. The people around me at the time, the record company and so on, were actually quite helpful. I think the whole electronic thing at that point had really kind of exploded. The only regret I’ve got is I don’t think that I should have been reacting to what people were saying. I should have just done exactly what I wanted to do. But nonetheless I’m still quite proud of it.
But there’d be no Trent Reznor without Gary Numan.
My plan was to work on two albums side by side. Quite often when you write an album, there are a number of songs that just don’t quite fit the direction that you wanted the album to have. What’s happened is I’ve done a little bit on both, and nothing’s really getting finished. So I’ve had to abandon the idea slightly, and all the emphasis now is on Splinter. Soon as that one is done, then I’ll get back on Dead Son Rising. Hopefully next year I will have two albums out at some point, which will partly make up for the five years since my last one.
For many years now you’ve believed you may have Asperger’s syndrome. As a musician who travels frequently—who has to deal with unfamiliar people and disruptions of routine on the road—how have you adjusted to that?
