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A RECORDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Volumes One through Eleven copyright, Numan Music Ltd. 1986 -
1994 |
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[Music: "Are 'Friends'
Electric"] |
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PG: |
Gary Numan was born March
8, 1958, in Chiswick [and Hammersmith] Hospital, London. He is now twenty-eight, a self-made
millionaire with a long list of hit records that spans more than seven
years. He is one of rock music's
most innovative superstars. The
loyalty of his fans, almost fanatical at times, is remarkable, and yet the
music press has attacked him more viciously and more consistently than
practically any other performer in British rock history. He is one of the business's most
enduring and outstanding artists, one of those rare occurrences, a
phenomenon. This is his story,
in his own words. |
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PG: |
Did you enjoy school? |
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GN: |
Junior school was all right. I was fairly bright, so I used to get
on fairly well with the work; that was no problem, mathematics and that kind
of thing in particular. But it
wasn't until I got to the second or third year-"ish"—
or the grammar school . . . See
the problem then was, women reared their ugly head [laughter] . . . |
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PG: |
What? At grammar school? |
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GN: |
. . . pardon the
expression. Yeah, a mixed
school. And so, then you start
to show off. Unfortunately, with
children, the way of being, I suppose, grown-up, if you like, is to
misbehave. Which, when you look back at it, is stupid, but at the time that's
the way you are, isn't it: the more you misbehave the more the girls think
you're great, the more you enjoy their attention, if you like. And it was at that point that I
started to get involved in that kind of behavior. Unfortunately, from that point on, I loved it. Yeah, it was great fun. I used to go to school even if I was
ill, because I used to have a real lot of fun at school. Work was no problem: you just didn't do it. But at the grammar school, the
punishment was detention. And,
if you didn't go, they'd just give you some more, so you didn't go to that. And I'm not saying that was clever; I'm
saying that was silly. But at
the time, there was nothing to stop you. You could simply do what you wanted. And there was very little they could
do about it. I think, as a child
you don't see the point of it.
You don't see the use of it until later in life. I remember, I used to see my
relatives getting shirts for Christmas. And I couldn't believe it: how could they want a shirt when I was getting a train
set? [laughter]
I couldn't understand it, and they said, "Oh, as soon as you get older,
you have different values and things." But school seems to come at a wrong time for a child. It seems to come at a time when he
least appreciates it and least wants it, which is the very thing he does need most of all but he
hasn't quite got into the mind to accept it, which is a shame. |
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PG: |
What sort of boy were you
at school, at that grammar school? |
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GN: |
I was bright enough. When I went there I went straight
into the A stream, into the alpha classes, so, academically, when I arrived
there I was highly recommended, I suppose. But because of the behavior problem, the work
suffered. And at one
point—the third year—I had to do the third year twice because,
they said, I hadn't gotten to a high enough standard to go on to the fourth
year. Which was a bit of an
embarrassment, but I turned that into being a,"Look at me; look at how
tough I am; I've got to do a third year twice." And it was very, very stupid. Looking back on it now, I regret it
enormously. I regret that I
can't hold, sort of, conversations with people about historic subjects or
geography. Do you play Trivial
Pursuit? |
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PG: |
No, I haven't yet. |
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GN: |
Well, I've played Trivial Pursuit with
people who worked hard at school, and it's damned embarrassing, because they
blitz you with it completely. [laughter] And I know nothing.
That is entirely down to the fact that I didn't behave at school. I don't think I was particularly
popular with the teachers, obviously, because I was disruptive. In fact, when I got expelled from the
grammar school eventually, it said on my report that I was a disturbing
influence on the rest of the school.
And that was purely because of my behavior. And at the time it was something that I was certainly
proud of, and something that, looking back on now, I'm extremely ashamed of. |
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PG: |
What about your character? Obviously you sound as though you had
a very strong character as a young boy, to stand up against a teacher. Was that because of you, the person,
or because of the system at the school, which lacked that punishment you
spoke of? |
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GN: |
It certainly was because the school lacked
any kind of method or means of stopping me from doing it. And if there had been things like
caning, like there was at the school I went to afterwards, then you would
have certainly seen a change in my attitude. I'd have knuckled down a bit. |
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PG: |
What about home at that time, Gary? How did you behave at home? |
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GN: |
Like an angel. No problem at home whatsoever. |
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PG: |
Why was that? |
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GN: |
Because I respect me father and me
mum. Still do, obviously. I thought that everything me dad said
was right. I was very aware that
he was bigger than me and stronger than me and was very much in charge of
what was going on. And if I
misbehaved I knew I would get punishment and that he would back it up, and he
would see it through. And so,
there was something to be feared but in a way that commanded respect, which
school didn't have, at all. It
was quite the opposite: there
was no respect for teachers; they made silly threats; and we all
knew—well, certainly I did—that they couldn't back them up. And so, not only did you take no
notice of their threats, but you lost respect for the person giving them
because you knew it was hot air.
And as I child, if you see that sort of thing and you see that
weakness, then you exploit it.
And that's exactly what I did. |
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[Music: "Are 'Friends'
Electric"] |
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PG: |
Looking back over those years, could you
see yourself, in different circumstances, as being a boy who would have the sort of ability to study and to
get on academically, if it was a different environment? |
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GN: |
If it were standing for something I could
see point to and that I wanted to have.
Like now, if I were at school now with my attitude now, then I would
study very, very hard and try to get as many qualifications as I could. But bearing in mind now, I've proved
myself, if you like. I've become
successful in various ways, so I know longer have to show off to impress. |
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PG: |
Didn't even cross your mind at that time,
that, with no O levels—not even one O level—that that would sort
of affect you finding a job when you eventually left school? |
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GN: |
I possibly would have done. When I first went to school, the
grammar school, I was very keen on being a pilot—more so than being a
rock-n-roll star, and that was sort of something that was being a pipedream
in the back of my mind. All I
really wanted to be was a pilot.
An airline pilot. We had
a careers talk at school, where it was explained to us that the percentage of
people that become pilots is extremely small. Almost as impossible not winning the polls. Now, it turns out, that advice was
quite wrong, actually, and quite incorrect in almost every aspect of it: the figures that they quoted; the
difficulty of it. It is difficult, and it is hard, but it was
nowhere near the way they explained it to me. And because of that advice, I gave up there and then, that
very morning, on becoming a pilot, and decided, Oh! If I'm going to do
anything I might as well be a pop star.
At least for that
you don't have to be intelligent in terms of having O levels in geography and
math, and stuff like that. You
need to be a bit suss [i.e., savvy; street smart intelligence], perhaps, and
have certain skills perhaps, but you don't need a school curriculum and
qualifications. And so, the
incentive to work at school just went out the window. As quickly as that, it had gone. So, the whole reason for me being at
school, the school destroyed in one morning with some stupid advice about the
very thing that I had chosen to do.
Which is unforgivable, really.
To train people to become sort of Ford workers at Dagenham is wrong,
not because you shouldn't be a Ford worker at Dagenham—because it's
very necessary and vital—but it lowers your horizons perhaps a little
bit. If that's all you're aiming
for, then that isn't so good. If
you're aiming for higher than that and you get that far, then that's
fine. But if that's all you want
to achieve . . . I just personally think that it should be more than
that. School should instill more
ambition in people than that, and they don't. I think that they train the masses for the masses, you know, for those kinds of
jobs. And I think that's wrong. |
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PG: |
You mentioned that your school lacked
discipline. Do you think schools
should be strict with discipline? |
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GN: |
Yeah. Yeah. |
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PG: |
What sort of discipline, would you say,
would be the right thing for young children? |
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GN: |
If I misbehaved, I would be sent to the
Headmaster. First of
all—or the Deputy Headmaster—first of all, I was very, very
frightened of him, but slowly but surely I realized that all he did was
shout. And it was no big
deal. And to go back to the
class and say, "I had to go see Deputy Headmaster this morning,"
was almost like getting a medal.
Headmaster detention was the biggest thing you could get. You had to stay behind for an hour, I
think it was, on a Tuesday night.
And if you think that's the most serious thing that they can
do—you know, big deal.
Well what does that matter to a sixteen-year-old boy? So what if you didn't go? So they give it to you again, next
week, and if you didn't go you'd get it for the next two weeks. And so you didn't go to them
either. And that's all they
could do. And so, what kind of
deterrent is that to misbehaving?
That's nothing. It
certainly doesn't promote any kind of discipline in school, and if there's
indiscipline in school, you're certainly not going to start knuckling down
and learning your lessons or learning.
And what good is that?
You're going to have a load of people coming out who have no respect
for authority whatsoever, no education whatsoever. |
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PG: |
What do you think then would have affected
you? What sort of discipline would have disciplined you? |
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GN: |
When I was getting caned . . . When I . .
. You see, the school I went to after grammar school was called Stanwell
Secondary School, and they had caning.
And that came as a shocker.
I got caned on my first day there, because I went in there now being
"the big lad" being expelled from grammar school and [thinking]
"what a little toughie I am", and I misbehaved and they went, whack!
So that was it. [laughter] Learned me lesson. |
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PG: |
Stopped you in your tracks. |
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GN: |
[laughter] That shut me up well and truly. Very embarrassing, and it hurt. And so you learn very early on, you
misbehave in this school and you're going to get hurt. |
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PG: |
And it worked? |
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GN: |
Yeah, it worked. I mean, I didn't turn into an angel, but I certainly
picked my time and place to misbehave.
I still didn't have any faith in the school education system as such,
because, at this point, I wanted to be a rock-n-roll star; I had no need for
qualifications. I think it's
important to instill into children a sense of respect—not just for any elder, but a sense of respect for
authority. Whether you agree
with it or not, it can do you, and you have to learn that. You have to learn that if you do
something wrong, something will happen to you because of it, or probably will happen to you because of it. I can't see much more they can
do. I certainly don't believe in
. . . [laughter] You
couldn't hang 'em. [laughter]
Things like that. |
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[Music: "Noise Noise"] |
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GN: |
[continued] The school system at the moment appears
to be failing. Which it is; now
there's all this big talk about it.
The standards for school children reading are far lower than they've
been in years, and the discipline must have a part in it. If you don't make children learn,
they won't. Because children
don't want to learn particularly, apart from the odd one here and there. |
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[continue music: "Noise Noise"] |
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PG: |
Did any of the teachers, Gary, in your
opinion have a particular style of teaching which seemed to encourage a lack
of discipline? |
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GN: |
We had one teacher in secondary school,
Staines Secondary School, whose lesson was . . . who would open a book. She would then read from it. We would then have to write down what
she read, although she was reading it from the book, and then read it. And I said to her once, "Why
don't you just make us read the book?
Why are we writing it down?
You're spending forty minutes of the day, making us write something
down—which is really
rotten, spending forty minutes writing down dictation; it's the worst kind of
lesson you can have—when it's there in the book!? What's the point? Why don't you let us read the book
and then discuss what the book says?
It's far more of an adult way of doing it, for a start, because we
were then actively involved in discussing it. It's nowhere near as boring as it is." But she would have none of it. She said, "No. This is the way I choose to
teach." So, straight away
I'm up in arms about that. So I
must have spent ninety-nine percent of those lessons locked in the back room.
[laughter] Because I
used to get sent to the back. |
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PG: |
Is it true that you had to get psychiatric
help, Gary? |
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GN: |
Not exactly. I was sent by the school to a psychologist, because I used
to have fairly violent outbursts at times. Used to get into little rages. Basically, I was just sort of highly strung at that time
because I was growing. My local
one [psychologist] was Staines.
He said there wasn't much they could do for me; he didn't know what it
was. So he sent me to St.
Thomas's in London, where I went to a woman doctor. She didn't really know what it was; she seemed to think it
had something to do with the family, which obviously was ridiculous. She prescribed a drug called Nardil,
and a drug called Valium, which everyone knows about. I was on that for a year, which is
quite a serious drug to anybody, let alone a young boy of that age. I don't drink alcohol at all. Now, when my friends are going out
and making themselves get drunk and making themselves like it, I was on these
tablets, so I couldn't. I
couldn't drink on these tablets.
That was probably the main reason for me not being a drinker now. I never have been. I don't like it. I still don't. They didn't cure it; it was never
cured at all. And I'm still a
little bit like that; I still sometimes have these little outbursts for no
apparent reason. And it really
is just, as things build up on top of me, I find it very hard to forget about
it and for it to disappear overnight like most people can. And with me it just builds and builds
and builds. Until, in the end,
even tiniest little thing sends me over the top and I lose my temper with it. But which is very embarrassing,
because you appear to be overreacting in a big way to a very trivial thing,
but it's the fact that it builds up and I can't unwind—I can't do that
the way most people can. That's
been a constant problem, really.
Obviously, in this business, you are under a lot of strain and for a
lot of the time. And then it
does become a bit of a problem. [laughter] When you overreact in certain ways, it
can be quite embarrassing. |
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PG: |
Don't you think today, though, that a
drink now and again would help the situation, or a cigarette? |
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GN: |
I've never felt any need for it. I don't think that being drunk is
particularly impressive. I don't
think it makes you a man because you can drink ten pints and somebody else
can drink five. I think that's
ridiculous viewpoint of it. I
remember at school I used to watch my school friends smoking sneakily in the
corner, and they would like sticking it in the side of their mouth like Clint
Eastwood did, and pull it out, and . . . I used to think that they looked
like silly little boys trying to be like men. And I felt embarrassed for them, so I certainly never
wanted to become a part of that.
And drinking to a degree, although I had the drug scene, I couldn't
get into it for a similar reason.
Obviously, the lads going out to the pubs and trying to impress people
because they were trying to make their bellies grow. [laughter] Amazing, isn't it. Why would people want to do
that? What does it prove? It proves nothing. That has nothing to do with courage
or bravery, or any of the things that I associate with being a man, at
all. It's foolish. |
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PG: |
You mentioned earlier on about the school
not preparing you for the real world.
Did you leave school unprepared for the world outside? |
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GN: |
Yeah, very unprepared for it—in a
number of ways, really. First of
all, managing finance. I had no
idea even how to write out a cheque.
School is there, not just to teach you about English and Geography and
Science; it's there to prepare you for what you're going to be doing, real
terms: when you walk out of
school, you're going to get a job; you've got to know all about tax; you've
got to know how to manage your money; or various things to do with mortgages,
perhaps (though that's possibly in the future for most people); renting
places; even things like car mechanics.
Everyone's going to buy a car; nobody knows how to mend one if it goes
wrong. That's practical
experience in preparing you for the real world. I mean, it's far more probably interesting than learning
about rock strata or about anywhere in Afghanistan, which may be of value but
it's not exactly of practical value as a simple thing like car mechanics or
banks—how to get on with banks and what they can do and what their
things are and what various interest rates mean, or whatever. That sort of thing is far more
useful, and are things that I had no idea about whatsoever. |
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PG: |
So, what did you do after leaving Stanwell
Secondary School? |
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GN: |
I went to Brooklands Technical College in
Weybridge, partly because I was very ashamed of letting me dad down because
of the high hopes he'd had for me, partly because I didn't have a whole lot
else to do, really. I had no job
to go to. When I went to the
college I didn't have a bad behavior type problem. I had started to grow out of that a little bit. Women were a growing problem at this
time, even more so than before.
I was sixteen by now. I
had to do about five 0 level courses; I had to do English literature, English
language, Mathematics, Sociology, and Music (just as a general course). And, bit by bit, for various reasons,
I stopped attending the lectures as often as I should have done. For various reasons. Some of them justified, some of them
a bit silly. Music was the only
one I really stayed interested in.
I started to take these lecturers, and at one point they gave us this
thing where we had to go home and write us a piece in four parts. So I wrote this one, thought it
sounded extremely nice, sent it back in, and they said, "No, you can't
have that." And I said,
"What was wrong with it, "you know, "since it sounds right to
me?" And they said,
"It doesn't matter what it sounds like; it's written down
wrong." And that finished
me and music, because, to me, music is only about what it sounds like. That's all that matters. I don't care where the idea comes
from, who did it first, who did it last, who did it best. If it sounds good, then it's worthy
something, as far as I'm concerned.
And I can take that to, like, quite extreme points of view with what
I'm doing now. But at that
particular point, that in itself was wrong. It didn't matter what it sounded like, which I though was
ridiculous. And so I stopped
getting into music there and then.
So in, I suppose, about two months, I'd virtually knocked all of the
subjects on the head. I didn't
leave there as such; I just stopped going. The college eventually wrote a letter to the house,
saying, where was I?
And that's how my dad found out about it. [laughter] Didn't go down very well. |
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[Music: "Stormtrooper In Drag"] |
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PG: |
Tony Webb is Gary Numan's father, and he's
managed Gary's career since the end of 1979. I asked him how he felt about Gary's disappointing school
record. |
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TW: |
Well, I was very, very upset, because I'd
always felt that the education was important, and Gary was very bright. And I'd always believed that he'd end
up with at least a few A levels.
He went to grammar school when he was eleven, and up until that point
he'd done very, very well at school.
And then it all went wrong.
And he didn't seem to apply himself. He fell foul of all the teachers, seemed to get in lots of
trouble although at home he was still almost a perfect son, you know. So it all seemed rather strange. But he obviously had a problem with
school, and, at the end of the day, I was asked to go down. And eventually, after some trouble,
they actually asked to remove him from the grammar school, which was very,
very upsetting. He went back to
an ordinary school for a year, where I thought things might get better but
they didn't. He then finished up
by going to day college as a last desperate effort to get something
academically. And, after he had
been there for several months, I again heard from the headmaster and found
that, in actual fact, he had not been attending. And at that point I'd finally gave up the ghost and pulled
him out and sent him off to work. |
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PG: |
So now, you've left college. Had you started writing any songs at
this time? |
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GN: |
I was writing lots, actually, at this
time. In fact, I wrote one
called "Friends", which ended up being on the first album, I
believe. |
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[Music: "Friends"] |
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PG: |
Had you started working by now? |
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GN: |
I worked for a company putting air
conditioning into buildings in London.
The main one I did was put air conditioning into a big bank in Southey
Street, I think it was.. I had a
big row with one of the men I was working with, which ended up in a fight,
unfortunately. He had a long
metal rod, and he was trying to hold it in one hand and saw it with a hacksaw
with the other. [laughter]
And he just kept turning it, so I said, "That won't work. [laughter] I know I'm new at the job, but I'm
fairly sure you'll have to put that thing in a vice." And he said something to me which
annoyed me, so I called him . . . I called him something. And he thumped me. [laughter] So I hit him with the hacksaw, and that
was the end of that job. So that
one was finished. I've worked .
. . What did I do after? I can't remember. I went . . . I think I started at an
airfreight company. That's
right. Called, "United
Marine" or something like that.
Just an import-export company in airfreight. And I did that for a while. By now I'd started to write an awful lot, mainly just I
suppose you'd call it poetry. I
guess I didn't intend it to be poetry; to me it was just writing. It was just words that I would try to
add to music later on if I mixed music that worked with it. I started to write tunes, quite
seriously now. And that was my
main hobby. I didn't go out, I
didn't do anything, I just stayed at home, wrote stuff on a guitar. And I spent most of the time at this
office, when we weren't working, just writing as I did. It wasn't a particularly busy
company. I eventually had a big
row there and I had to leave there.
I'd learned to drive by this time. I went to another airfreight company after that, which is
the worst job I ever had in my life.
It was called Mercury.
They were the nastiest people.
You can't believe how stupid men get when they work in an office, and
how petty they get: "That's
my stapler";
"that's my
pen"; "your desk is two inches closer to mine than it should
be." I'd dyed my hair at
this point, dyed it blond. They
wouldn't let me go out to the pub with them. They wouldn't let me go anywhere with them anymore. I was completely excluded from
anything they did because the said I was an embarrassment to them. Which is fair enough; it's not
exactly the sort of thing your so-called mates do anyway, is it. One even threatened to smash up me car
unless I dyed it back to normal again; he was a big fat bloke, sitting there
smiling. |
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PG: |
Why did you dye your hair, Gary? Because you weren't sort of a
rock-star/pop-star at this stage, were you. |
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GN: |
No.
I weren't. |
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27:37 |
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PG: |
I mean, you weren't even in a band, were
you, at this stage? |
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GN: |
I was in a lot of little
mates-getting-together, but I certainly wasn't going out gigging. If I thought of it, no. By this time I had started to play
music with other people, in your rooms and around. You might have done a few things up at the local youth
club or something. I really
can't remember too much, but I certainly wasn't out in a proper band
gigging. No. Nothing like that. Why I dyed my hair? I can't remember. I think at the time I had some big
conviction that it was "freedom of the individual" and that I was
going to do what I wanted to do.
And, more, I was making a point because it looked good. I think, which is what a lot of
people do it for now. They look
different purely for the sake of looking different rather than it looking
good. That's fine if that's what
you're into and you want to put up with all of the abuse and the violence
that comes with it. And it does
come with it. You know, I do
think those people are quite brave.
I do sometimes think their reasons are misguided, as mine were. You're doing it to prove a
point. It's foolish, doing it
for a sort of good reason is something else entirely. |
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PG: |
What sort of work were you doing at this
company? You mentioned an
office; you were working in an office at this time. |
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GN: |
Oh.
I simply imported airfreight.
There was a company I worked with that imported flares and fire
extinguishers. So they came in
from America on a plane, then they go into a Customs shed. I have to write out the form that
clears them through Customs; I give that form to Customs, and then the stuff
has been imported into the country.
The client can come pick it up.
I am the middleman, the agent. |
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PG: |
So really, you didn't get in contact with
the public. There were no effect
of customers objecting to your hair.
It was purely, they didn't like . . . |
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GN: |
Oh yeah. The customers never saw you; you were a voice on the
phone. They were purely the
folks in the office who for some reason didn't like it. |
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PG: |
Obviously then you didn't enjoy that kind
of work. |
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GN: |
I wasn't very good at it either. [laughter] I was rubbish, actually. It didn't help because the blokes I
was working with didn't tell me what it was I was supposed to be doing. The way you do it is, you walk in and
the blokes there who explain to you how the job works, advise you,
"Slowly but surely you'll get to know it better." You get more and more clients, where
you widen your knowledge of the subject. And that didn't happen to me because nobody would talk to
me. And they would deliberately
give me the wrong information so that my goods all keep getting impounded by
Customs. And if you do that too
many times then your goods are automatically impounded by Customs because
you're considered to be possibly into bribery or whatever—you know, to
illegally import things. And so
that just caused me nothing but grief and aggravation. |
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PG: |
When you were working there, Gary, did you
see that kind of work as long-term, or just as a filler, until your music
took off? |
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GN: |
I saw every job as a filler,
completely. When after that job,
I tried a small driving job
[i.e., A and B Cars, Ashford, Middlesex]; I would deliver goods around
the place. Again, I saw it very
much as a just-for-now job.
After that, I worked for a company called W.H. Smiths, the book
company. I had a great time,
actually. Smashing people. All of those people were in
transit. All of them. They were coming in on their way to
somewhere else, and the turnover of staff was enormous. The money was quite good. But it was a great bunch of
blokes. Most of the blokes,
because maybe they were in transit, they seemed to have an adventurous spirit
about them. And a lot of them
went over across to Europe for the whole summer, busking [i.e., street
performing]. One of them wanted
to be . . . He was actually a pilot, so I got into flying because of one of
the blokes there. I was ever so
impressed that this bloke could actually fly airplanes, so I said,
"Christ!" So I made a
new life of it. He used to have
to wear Hushpuppies, which I really scorned at the time. [laughter] Anyone who wore Hushpuppies was nowhere.
[laughter] But when I
found out he could fly a plane, I thought he was the business. All the people there were, not
knowledge people or intelligent people necessarily, but just very interesting
people that were not content to just have a particular job and stay there for
the rest of their lives. They
didn't want to be famous or anything in particular, but they wanted to be out
and doing something different while they weren't there, such as traveling or
whatever it was. It was
good. I enjoyed it there very
much. In fact, I worked there
until the day my first single came out.
I worked right up until that day, and I didn't leave work until that
my first single was released. |
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[Music: "That's Too Bad"] |
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PG: |
Were you in a band during this period? |
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GN: |
Yeah, it was Tubeway Army. And it was leading up to that period
that I was involved the Mean Street situation. |
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PG: |
Before you move on to that, one important
question: Were you ever on the
dole? |
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GN: |
Yeah. |
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PG: |
Because there are a lot of people getting
the impression that Gary Numan sort of has gone from job to job to job and
then stardom just sort of fell into your lap with no unemployment. How did you feel when you were on the
dole? Were you one of these sort
of "getting back at society" unemployed youngsters? |
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GN: |
No!
I wasn't getting back at anyone.
I thought it was quite nice that they'd give me money for not doing
anything, actually. I didn't
resent anybody for it. It was
slightly different then, because there were jobs available. Actually, I had a very, very nice man
. . . I went to see a man at the Job Place[ment Services]. He had you sign on and then he sent
you up to Job Center. And he
said, "What do you want to do?" He had a great sense of humor. So I said, "I want to be a rock-n-roll star. I want to be famous." And he said [laughter], "We haven't got any vacancies for
rock-n-roll stars." [laughter] That's what he said.
I thought, Nice man, this! And he was great, and he let me have
about six months off. And I
said, "What I'll do is I'll, . . . I'm going to advertise, and I going
to do auditions and join bands, and I'll find a working band." And he said, "Fine." And for the next six months he let me
do whatever I wanted. He didn't
send me off to any interviews or anything. And he really sort of, like, backed me and he let go out
and do it, which is great. I
don't know who he is now; he's gone.
Smashing man, though. And
it was because of that, I was allowed the privilege (if you can call it a
privilege) of getting money—getting the dole money, as well as whatever
else I could earn from being in these little bands, and could work and could
gain experience and get my writing together without having to work nine to
five at the same time. Which
often prevents you from doing what you have to do when you're in a band, to
try to make it, because you have to travel to places and you have to leave
and you have to get there, and often your van will break down and you don't
get back until the next afternoon.
That's the way it is when you first trying it out, you know? Everything's difficult. And the money's certainly a
problem. I imagine he was quite
a big help in the fact that I made it, really—that I had those six
months. |
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PG: |
Looking back to the early days, what sort
of bands did you join? What were
the sorts of bands you joined first of all? |
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GN: |
First of all I joined bands that did
British Legions and social clubs.
And we'd be doing songs like "Route 66", and the old
[Rolling] Stones stuff:
"Tie a Yellow Ribbon 'Round the Old Oak Tree". Dreadful, horrible stuff! The only reason I got in to some of
those bands is because my Dad had bought me a good guitar. And so, they let me in because I had
good gear. When they had heard
me, they'd send me out the back and tell me I'd been turned down. I can't say it was a good experience
because I hardly learned stagecraft.
And even then it was an interesting time. |
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PG: |
Looking back to those days, Gary, what do
you think your reasons were for choosing music as a career? I mean, it's an industry which is
fraught with all sorts of dangers and loopholes and contracts and . . . What
made you steer towards music as a career? |
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GN: |
Well, first of all, the loopholes are
problems involved in it. You
don't really get to know about it until you're in it and they happen. So you're only aware—or
certainly I was only aware—of the good side of it: the money; the girls; the glamorous
life with the big houses; the flashy cars. And everything I saw about it, it just seemed great to
me. Everything about it seemed
great. |
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PG: |
How did playing weddings and British
Legions fit in with being a rock-n-roll star? |
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GN: |
I didn't know how to get involved in it,
to be a rock-n-roll star. I just
thought, if you joined a band, you played around a bit, and then somebody
discovered you and you became famous.
I was fifteen, sixteen, when I first started doing this. And, yeah, I really was that
na•ve. That's how I thought you
did it. And then it slowly
dawned on me that playing British Legions—I could play British Legions
until the cows came home. I
wasn't going to get famous. And
I certainly wasn't going to get famous for doing "Route 66" and
"Satisfaction" and "Tie a Yellow Ribbon." So I decided then that I really ought
to start concentrating then on me own songs, I needed to start working a
different area at different clubs, I needed to started bringing myself to an
audience where the people that could make you famous were, where the pressmen
were, where the A & R men [i.e., "Artists & Repertoire"
people who look for, and sign up, the "next big thing"] were. The A & R men don't go to British
Legions; they go to the Marquee, and places like that: the London clubs and various clubs
around the country. But it did
take some time for that to dawn on me, really. |
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PG: |
Now, you joined a band called Mean
Street. And was that your first
serious attempt to get somewhere? |
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GN: |
Yeah, I didn't join Mean Street. I sort of started it. Actually, I bought the drummer [i.e.,
Kenny Bishop] his kit. I showed
the bass player [i.e., Henry Sabini] how to play bass guitar; I in fact
borrowed my Uncle Gerald's bass guitar.
(Gerald was on the drums in "Are 'Friends' Electric?") And there was another bloke coming in
as the lead guitarist [i.e., Neville Nixon]. Turned out, he was a cocaine addict, which is why he was
always late. Horrible person. |
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PG: |
It must be partly depressing for you to be
involved in that sort of environment with such a goal ahead of you to reach. |
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GN: |
It was great at the time! See, they were all my friends, at the
time. And I was writing the
songs because nobody else wrote any.
And it was good. We did
two or three gigs and the name changed every single time. In fact, they weren't called Mean
Street until after they had gotten rid of me. And then, all of a sudden, the ego started to rear its
head. And the band started
saying things like, "You're doing everything. Why are you doing everything? Why are you singing and writing the songs?" [And I
said,] "Because none of you want to do anything and in the six months
we've been together none of you have written any songs." That's why. You see, if you want to go out and do a gig, you've got to
play songs. I said, "You
haven't written anything. What
do you want me to do?" I
said, "All right, then. We
won't do any of my songs. We'll
do all yours. So go and get
them." And they didn't;
they didn't have any songs. But
they couldn't quite qualify that.
Bearing in mind that, up until that point, I had just been one of the
lads in this crowd of people, and very much one of the lesser important ones,
if you like—in any group of people you have your big ring leaders and
the blokes who think they're in charge of it all, and they say where you're
going to go that night. And I
was just one of the blokes at the back.
And all of a sudden I started to become a little bit more
important. And we're talking
about a very, very minor level here.
But within the group I had to become more important; I started to
become the main one. I was the
main bloke in the band and the band did become the main thing of that group
of people; they followed it around everywhere. It started becoming the main talking point. And so, all of a sudden, I started to
become a little bit too important within it, which is hard to understand
because it was really just such a tiny level and I was ever so surprised that
such a thing could happen amongst friends. But they decided in my absence that they had to get me out
of it because I was too much of a dominating influence, if you like. And then that's what they did. One day I turned up to pick them up
and they had gone without me—because I used to be the Joe-idiot that
used to drive them everywhere in my car for nothing. They just used me a bit, really, I
suppose. |
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PG: |
How did you feel about that, being used? |
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GN: |
Well, I didn't realize it too much until
this thing happened, you know, when I picked them up. I went to pick them up, they weren't
there, so I went to the club where we were supposed to be going, and nobody would
talk to me, not one single person. I went up to them and said, "Oh, hello. I thought I was supposed to be
picking you up." And they
said, "Yeah, well . . ." And they walked off. That was that. Not a word. Not a nothing.
Even the girlfriend. Even
the girlfriend wouldn't talk.
And it obviously had been planned for some time, this dissent, if you
like, amongst them all. And I
really couldn't understand it at all.
I mean, I'd never been braggy about it. I was far from confident about what I was doing. I was far from confident about the songs. The only reason we were going out
doing those sort of songs is because they had been saying that we should,
because they liked them. In
fact, most of those songs are what ended up being on the first album. |
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[Music: "My Shadow In Vain" live] |
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GN: |
[continued] Anyway, that was how I was taken out of
the band, and then they went on to be called Mean Street. They did about two or three gigs and
then faded into obscurity. |
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PG: |
How supportive were your family during
this period, Gary? |
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GN: |
Hundred percent. Couldn't have been more so. In fact, it was a lecture from my dad that really got me
off my backside and got me to start doing, sort of joining these British Legion
bands even eventually. He would
say to me things like, "What you gonna do?" And I would say, "I'm going to
be a famous rock-n-roll star, dad." |
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2:034 |
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PG: |
Did he take you seriously? |
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GN: |
I don't know. I think there had come a point—and I can remember
clearly—when he said, "Ah good. That'd be nice, wouldn't it." And then one day he turned on me and
he said—really inciting me—he said, "You're just going to @#
%! You've done nothing. You're blowing out school. You're blowing out college. You haven't got a job. You're doing nothing. You're sitting on your ass doing
nothing. All you ever do is talk
about it and dream about it. You
aren't going to do nothing.
You're a waste of time."
And he said he was sick of it.
Now it really came as a shock and a jolt to my system, and I got of my
back. So the very next day I
started advertising and doing something about it. And I think within a couple of weeks, I was in a band and
working. And then, my dad,
bearing in mind my dad was just a working class bloke and a normal working
class man—he worked at British Airways as a lorry driver, or so I'm
told—he bought me a really, really lovely guitar. It was a lot of money in those days,
a real lot of money, for like a month's wage at that point. A nice amplifier. He bought me the gear I needed to go
out and start playing. And he's
been like that throughout. He
bought me a P.A. system, a van, all with the pretense of me paying him back,
but he never took any money back for it. I lived in the house virtually for nothing. |
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PG: |
Did your mother work at this time? |
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GN: |
Yeah, I think she was working, yeah. Yes, she was, that's right. She was working for a manufacturer
doing tele-sales. And again, me
Mum was right behind us all the way.
And she used to dye my hair for me, cut my hair for me. |
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PG: |
Some people say you come from sort of a
privileged background, and in the fact that your parents are very close, your
family unit is very close. Most
people don't have that sort of background. And, how do you think you would have fared, looking at it
from the outside, if you came from a sort of background where they weren't
supportive and they were nagging you to get a job all the time? |
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GN: |
I would imagine it would have been far
more difficult. I certainly
wouldn't have had the financial backing of my dad if I had come from that
kind of a family. I had my period
on the dole, but that was quite late on. And I had started to be around bands at this time. So, I was working, but I certainly
hadn't done anything as far as career-wise in a job, as far as that's
concerned. I hadn't gone to a
good job to try to further myself.
I'd just been doing drifting kind of jobs. But without their support, I don't know if I would have
made it or not. It certainly
would have been more difficult.
My dad, for example, paid for the studio session that got me the
contract. The songs that came
from that, I took around and eventually got the contract with Beggars
[Banquet]. |
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[Music: "The Dream Police"] |
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44:24 |
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PG: |
I asked Tony Webb what on Earth made him
invest his life savings when Gary never even had a recording contract. Did he believe at that time that Gary
would one day be such a huge success? |
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TW: |
Well, first of all, I never thought about
it as investing my life savings.
Gary, my oldest son, just left school, and he could have gone into all
sorts of things. And he chose to
go into music. I was fortunate
enough to have saved up a few thousand pounds, with a bit of luck. And Gary needed bits and pieces: he needed a guitar, amps, and a P.A.,
and various bits and pieces like that.
And so, I helped him by buying them, the same as I would have done if
he had wanted to be a car mechanic.
and he wanted tools or whatever else. So I never even thought about it in terms of
"investing." And I
didn't think about it in terms of my life savings. I wasn't that old, that I had to worry about, "That's
got to last me the rest of my life." And so, I didn't look at it like
that. And I certainly never ever
thought about success or otherwise, because none of that meant anything at
that particular time. It was
just Gary wanting to play music, wanting a guitar, and—you know, you
don't think of that in terms of some superstar later on down the years. |
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PG: |
So, at that time, you didn't even consider
that he might be the huge success that he is today? |
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TW: |
No.
Never ever, even thought about it. Never occurred to any of us, I don't think. Probably with Gary, not much more. |
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[Music: "Please Listen To the Sirens"] |
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PG: |
How did Tubeway Army start? |
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GN: |
Well, after the Mean Street incident . . .
In fact, when I left them it was called "Riot". They were called
"Stiletto", "Riot" and "Heroin". Quite heavy metal names, really. After that, I thought, Well, I didn't
think much of that. Which seemed
to be the problem of becoming the front piece of the band. It seemed to attract quite a lot of
hostility. So I thought, well,
what I'd do is . . . Well, I do need a lot of experience, and I do think that
what I'm doing, in terms of being in this kind of a band, is right. I'd just join a band, work in the
background a little bit, get experience, and then maybe being a little bit
more knowledgeable about it I'd make some moves and start to move forward
again. Having learned my craft,
too, by now, I was starting to think a little more clearly, and slightly more
adult. |
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PG: |
And more calculated, too. |
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GN: |
Oh yeah, very. But, as you can see, not all goes as planned. I was in a band called The Lasers;
they had a job for the lead guitarist. [I] joined them; turned out to be Paul
Gardiner and another couple of blokes [i.e., Wayne Kerr (pseudonym), rhythm
guitarist, and friend]. I got on
with Paul straight off. I picked him up and he took me to where the audition
was, and on the way there we were sort of chatting away. Smashing bloke—lots of similar
interests and things. So, by the
time we got to the audition, he was sort of an ally. Paul had been doing the singing up
till that point in the band.
Anyway, did the audition.
Some other people came in, did their auditions. I don't think the other two blokes
were particularly keen on me.
One man yelled, "Hardly should have bothered"[?].
I did have good gear that my dad had bought me, so that was a
factor. But Paul was very keen
on me being in. And, apparently,
Paul said later on, talking to me about the things I wanted, not things I
had, he thought that there was something in it. He didn't want me in the band for my guitar prowess, which
wasn't that good really. He
could see something else in me.
We started to play some numbers but in rehearsal Paul was doing the
singing. Which is okay; he can
sing all right. You know. Bit of a strain on some notes. So I said, "Do you eventually
want to be doing your own stuff?"
Because I was very impressed with being in a band that was at least doing
their own material, even if it wasn't mine. And they said, "Yeah, we want to, but we haven't got
any." And I said,
"Well I've got this tape with some songs I wrote for this other group,
and, if you want to, you can start doing some of them, and it would be a
start to us having our own repertoire.
So I played them the tape, and what happened was that they just
started doing all of those songs.
They'd rather do all of these . . . Paul said, "You'd better do
the singing because I can't do anything like that." And he wasn't that interested in
being the front man; never was.
He was quite happy just to be there playing his bass. So within a week I was back to square
one again, singing at the front, writing songs. Then I said, "You ever notice that the punk bands are
all called 'The . . .' and something?" And he said, "Yeah." "We're all called The Lasers. Why not call ourselves something
other than 'The' something."
And he said, "What do you suggest?" So I said, "I just happen to
have here a whole selection of names [laughter] which you might be interested
in." So he picked
"Tubeway Army." In
fact, at one particular point I didn't want to call it "Tubeway
Army." I wanted to call it
just "Tubeway." But
"Tubeway" bores or something.
So that's how it came to be called "Tubeway Army". The first bill we ever did was on the
same bill as Mean Street; it called all sorts of arguments and
disruptions. They were actually
annoyed that I hadn't told them I was in a band, as if I owed them
anything! As if I had to tell
them anything! I don't like
them. [laughter] |
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PG: |
[laughter] No, I gathered that! |
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GN: |
I don't like the memory. It was diabolical, what they
did. It really was. And then to have the cheek to tell me
I had betrayed them for not telling them I was in a band. I couldn't believe that kind of
hatred. |
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PG: |
Apart from having left you in the lurch? |
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GN: |
Yeah. Anyway, we blew them apart, because they were not very
good at all. The man out in the
club apparently thought it was a big laugh to put us on the same night and
not say anything. Yeah, so he
was all in on it. He thought is
was great fun. So he knew this
gig was coming. And we practiced
and practiced and practiced. And
it was good on the night. The
main band was called The Saints.
You may remember them.
They were an Australian band that was quite big at that time. And we were at the bottom of the
bill. We went up and did our
bit, you know. And then came
"Mean Street" [the song].
Rent a crowd. [?] [laughter]
Did all right. Good night. I liked that. But it did cause some eruptions, and
some feelings were aired that night.
It was good. |
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[Music: "Mean Street"] |
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PG: |
When you joined The Lasers, was it your
intention to take over the band? |
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GN: |
No.
Not at all. Not in the
slightest. I was quite
content. I wanted to be in a
band that was doing its own material, and that was the reason I suggested
doing my songs, not because I
wanted to become the front of it.
I wanted to stay at the back, because of the problem I'd had with Mean
Street, because I'd been at the front, and the jealousies that had been
involved with it. And so I
didn't want anything more of it.
I wanted to gain experience; I didn't want to keep having arguments
with people. Because, as soon as
I detect any ill feelings behind the scenes I'd rather just pull out and
leave it. |
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PG: |
Who were the original line-up of Tubeway
Army? Was it, sort of, The
Lasers now become Tubeway Army? |
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GN: |
That's right. I can't remember the name of the other two lads. It was me and Paul. [laughter] I
can't remember their names even.
Honestly, it's a shame.
The reason that they left—or that me and Paul left them—was that, we had a gig coming
up. We were only doing like one
about every fortnight, so, nothing important. We had something coming up, which to us at the time was
quite important. We had a
practice planned. And one of the
lads, who had been in charge of the band before I traveled along, just
canceled it, just like that. So
I got a bit annoyed about this, and I said, "You can't cancel this. It's important for us. We need the practice." He said, "Well, I didn't have
any money. It was two quid and I
couldn't afford it." So I
said, "You really should have spoken to us. There are four of us in it, and it's important for all of
us. And if it was only two quid
I would have given you two quid, just so we could have had the practice. Then a few more things were said, and
it became obvious that it was happening again, you know. Because I had gone to the front then. So I said to Paul, I said, "I've
had enough of this. I'm
off." And I was a little
bit childish; I said, "It's my name. I'm going to take the name with me." [laughter] And Paul said, "No, I've had enough
too, so I'll come with you."
Me and Paul, then, were like inseparable, until he died, really. |
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PG: |
I remember you told me about an incident
that happened while you were traveling over the Hammersmith Flyover,
actually, and looked down over the Hammersmith Odeon, and the conversation
you had with Paul. Do you
remember that? |
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GN: |
Yeah. Yeah. It was
coming back from that gig, actually.
It was the first one that happened. You know, the Hammersmith Flyover goes past the
Hammersmith Odeon. Well that to
me was always like the best gig in the world. If you had played Hammersmith Odeon, you'd made it. That was success. We always used to say . . . "One
day." That was it, you
see: "One day." And it got to be a little
pattern. And we'd always say
every time we went past it, "One day." That we'd be there. |
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PG: |
I remember Paul telling me that he
believed you as well when you said, "One day." He really believed because you said
it, it would definitely happen.
And it was amazing when it did happen. |
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GN: |
I really got no idea why he had so much
faith. I don't think I was doing
anything then to make somebody think that I could actually do it. |
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PG: |
The Lasers now have turned into Tubeway
Army, and Tubeway Army now have become Paul Gardiner and Gary
Webb—still—now.
Isn't it still Gary Webb now? |
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GN: |
Yes.
I used to call myself "Gary Valerian" then, because I wanted
to be "spacey". [laughter] Oh, what a stupid name. It didn't last long. I got it from a packet of [?]; it means "flowering herb",
I think. |
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PG: |
Now, it was you and Paul as Tubeway
Army. What happens next? |
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GN: |
I think initially after those two left,
Gerald [Jess Lidyard] joined the band.
He joined for the first time at that point. |
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PG: |
Can you remember your first gig of the
three of you now playing together? |
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GN: |
Oh!
I think it was The Roxy again, the same place as the other one. But I can't remember for sure. And the other thing happening at this
time was, my brother, John—he was about twelve, I think—and he'd
written a song called "Lucky"—at twelve years old, and we
used to do it in the band. We
used to go up and play, and he used to get up on stage and sing it, with his
little leather jacket and swastikas on . . . [laughter] and safety pins, and all that rubbish. [laughter] |
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PG: |
Called, Johnny Silver. |
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GN: |
Johnny Silver, yeah! He used to get on stage and
sing. We expected that punks
were supposed to be big and hard and mean and tough. And you get all these punks there
that have amazing haircuts and pins all over the place—and it was
great, this little kid, they used to really like him and support this little
boy coming up on stage. They
weren't horrible people at all, really.
It was nice. It was a
good time. |
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[Music in background: "This Is My Life"] |
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10:19 |
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PG: |
Why did you play punk? |
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GN: |
To get a contract. I didn't like it especially. It was quite an interesting
time. And some of the music was
horrible. Basically, people
couldn't play very well; the music was extremely simple. Not particularly inventive. It was crazier than anything in real
life. The most crazy thing about
it was the image and the hype around it. Certainly wasn't the music. But the thing was, everybody was signing a punk band. Everybody. To get a contract. |
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PG: |
What were the early gigs like? |
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GN: |
Horrible, really. |
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PG: |
I mean, did the crowd enjoy it? |
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GN: |
There was a period when, if you were a
punk band, then they enjoyed it, because it was "hip" to like a
punk band, and then it had become more and more for the masses, if you
like. Well, then the select club
people had started to become a little bit difficult. It was very violent at times. There were some quite nasty
incidents. In fact, the last gig
I ever did was at a pub in Acton [i.e., The White Hart Pub], and . . .
Remember The Skids? A band
called The Skids? With Richard
Jobson and the guy from Big Country, Stuart Adamson, was in it. Well, they were supporting us. But I think that was a mix-up on the
bill; it should have been the other way around. Somebody wrote the poster wrong! [laughter] Ha! So there was a horrible fight
there. And I really thought then
that this is ridiculous. I'm
just going out on stage and do my time. [sotto voce] It had nothing to do
with me whatsoever.
There's nothing anyone could do anymore anyway, so . . . |
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PG: |
Were you nervous? |
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GN: |
Yeah, I used to hate it. I used to feel physically sick before
going on stage, to twenty people sometimes. I absolutely hated it. I found it far more nervous going on then. Then again, I was very new to
it. And I was playing to an
audience which was far from converted, and was extremely violent—which
was about two inches away from my face. [laughter] Which is a problem in its own
right. And now, we can go on
with ten thousand . . . We did a live thing in America with fifty million
people. Live. |
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PG: |
We've established why Gerald joined . . . |
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GN: |
Yeah, whenever I didn't have a drummer,
Gerald would come in. We had gigs
up and coming, so Gerald filled in for us until we could get in another
drummer. Which we did
eventually. He was a chap called
Bob Simons. He was a real
Genesis fan, as I remember. He
didn't play on the first single but was on the sleeve of the first
single. I think Gerald actually
played on the first single.
Gerald played on many other records then he didn't get on the sleeve
for. Bob was all right. |
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PG: |
Why did he actually join three times, your
Uncle Gerald? |
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GN: |
Well, because I kept getting rid of
people. [laughter] I
just would turn to Gerald and say, " Come on out. We need you." |
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PG: |
"We need you again . . ." |
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GN: |
Yeah. |
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PG: |
What about your first recordings? How did they come about? |
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GN: |
The very, very first one I did was in a
little little garage-studio in Trodham.
I believe it was called Sal Siffey. She had a bloke who built it in this garage; I think his
name was just a four-track thing, but it might have been eight[-track]. I can't remember. Gerald went with me. We did four songs, one of which ended
up being on the first album.
That was my first introduction to it. My first "proper" recording session was in a
placed called Spaceward, in Cambridge, where I learned an awful lot from the
people there. A person called
Mike Kemp, in particular, was great.
He was pretty sick to death of punk bands falling in and falling out,
because that was the cheapest industry in the country at that time. Sixteen-track were mainly home-built,
and my dad paid for it. We did
"That's Too Bad", a song called "That's Too Bad",
"Oh! Didn't I Say", and another one, which I forget the name of. |
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[Music: "That's Too Bad"] |
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PG: |
What was it like, being in the studio for
the first time? |
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GN: |
To me it was great. I even used to put on my special
clothes to go there. It was an
event for me. It was a very
special event. Right up until
about 1981 and 1982. It was only
then, when I bought my own studio, that I started to get a bit blasŽ about
it. I've always felt that you
often feel the way you dress, which is why I'm probably so image
conscious. I've always found
that was important, so thought I ought to go into the studio looking a
certain way, to help create the atmosphere of what I was going to be doing. |
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PG: |
Was it easy getting your recording
contract? |
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GN: |
Well it took a lot of time to get, and
there wasn't a whole lot of bargaining done with Beggars [Banquet] when we
eventually arrived there. I
believe the only reason Beggars took us is because my dad had bought us a van
and a P.A. system and we had our own gear. And we'd already recorded the songs. They didn't have to do it. So they had to put out virtually no
money. To be fair to them, at
the time they say that they couldn't afford to take on another band at that
time, which, I know, from my own experience, a new label is actually
stretched financially to promote new bands, because they only take so many,
you see? And so, because we had
all this gear—again thanks entirely to my dad, who had now spent his
life savings on this equipment, which is unbelievable, really, when you think
of it. Just working class bloke
who spent about twenty odd years of his life working to get this little bit
of money, and then because his son wants to be famous . . . I don't think my
dad felt really, sort of, in his heart of hearts that I would make it as a
big success. |
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PG: |
Why Beggars Banquet? |
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GN: |
They're the only one who would take us. |
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PG: |
[laughter] In a nutshell. |
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GN: |
Yeah. We tried for a long time. We went running after label after label after label. I did it initially myself and then I
just lost heart. But Paul carried on going. And they just kept turning us down all over the
place. If somebody doesn't pick
up on it straight away then I dump it.
And I just start on something else. I don't constantly try to work and work. Now, if I try to put out a single
nowadays and it doesn't sell particularly well, I'll go straight back in
again and do another one. And
some people, they don't give up on it.
They bring it out, take it out for a month or so, re-present it again
much later, have another try with it.
Until one by one they've slowly picked up on it and it becomes a
hit. I'm not like that. I can't . . . To me, once something
is done and it's out, it's out and it's finished. And if nobody wants it, I'll go write something else. |
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PG: |
So you were very good combination, really
then, weren't you, you and Paul? |
|
GN: |
At that time, yeah, Paul was really the
one who was going out and still trying to sell it. And he walked into a record shop one day and was chatting
to the bloke behind the desk—behind the counter— and the man said
that the company he worked for, which was Beggars Banquet Shops, they just
started their own little label.
And they had a couple of punk bands on it. And so Paul took it to them, went it up to Earls Court
[the original Beggars Banquet offices], and passed it on to Marty Mills and
Nick Austin. |
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PG: |
Because, isn't that the shop where they
had a studio in the basement? |
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GN: |
No, that was . . . They had one in Fulham
which had a rehearsal place in the basement. The one Paul went to, I think, was in Ealing, where Steve
Webbon worked. And Steve sort of
became a great friend later on and was very helpful later on. We just got to the main shop at that
time. And the main office
was in Earls Court. I believe
there were three shops then. In
fact, I helped them build another one in Richmond. I had to go in there and help them put the shelves in when
I wasn't famous so I thought it was a way to get signed. It was like a little family. It was great. Me and Paul used to trot out and go
out and build a shop. I don't
know if it's still there, but if anyone goes out to that shop in Richmond, I
built it. |
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PG: |
[laughter] Why do you think Beggars Banquet decided to sign Tubeway
Army? |
|
GN: |
I suppose . . . well, the answer is
simply, really. They saw what I
had done with the "That's Too Bad" single as being punk made
commercial. Not quite so anti in the lyric, and the fact that we could
play helped enormously, one of the first punk bands that actually played
properly. We weren't great
musicians but at least we could play in tune and we knew what a note
was. You know, when you sung the
note, you played. |
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PG: |
Now, you were working work at W.H. Smith's
at this time, weren't you? |
|
GN: |
[Yes.] |
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PG: |
Did you immediately stop working when you
were signed up by Beggars? |
|
GN: |
No, I worked. I think the single didn't come out until February the 10th,
'78. And I worked up until
then. The other thing about
Beggars: it wasn't until they
got us a gig at the place called the Vortex, which is in Wardour
Street—I think it's still down there—they'd come to see us live
in this gig. It was only third
on the bill to a reggae band called Murder On Deck. In fact, we were supporting Adam Ant there once, hey? Because Adam used to be quite big in
the clubs. It was when they saw
us live, or saw me on stage, that they decided to sign us up. And apparently they saw something
about the way I was on stage that they liked. They said I had a command of the audience, which is
ridiculous because there were only about three people there. [laughter] That's what they said. |
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PG: |
Why did you record a second punk single? |
|
GN: |
Because I wanted the record company to put
some money into it. Because my
dad had paid for the first one, and now I wanted them to commit some money,
because I knew that the punk so far wasn't what I actually intended to
do. And I didn't want to risk
losing a contract because they didn't have anything to lose by getting rid of
us. So, I knew that once they
started giving me stuff that I knew they hadn't signed me for, there would be
a temptation for them to let me go, to stop the contract and say, "No,
that's not what we wanted.
You'll either do what we want or you'll go." So, what I wanted: I wanted them to put some money into
us. So they had . . . Knowing
that they were very short of money, once they had made a financial commitment
they would be more inclined to stick with us and see it through than it would
be if they hadn't put any money into it, you see? I don't know if I was right or wrong. I mean, it worked, but they may have
had other reasons for it; I don't know.
So, that's why I did the "Bombers" single, to get them to
put some money into it, knowing that the third one, the stuff up and coming,
was going to be possibly a radical change, as they say. Because by now I had stumbled across
a synthesizer. |
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PG: |
And whose idea was it to use a producer on
that single? |
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GN: |
Theirs. A guy called Kenny Denton. Nice enough man. |
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PG: |
Did you welcome that decision, or . . . ? |
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GN: |
I can't remember what I thought about it
at the time. I don't think I was
particularly against it one way or another. Although I was thinking quite clearly about future plans,
I wasn't particularly bothered about whether I used a producer or not. You know, I don't have any memories
of being sort of very anti that at all. They took us to a great big studio in
Wembley, which I was quite impressed with. There was a line in the song about pulling needles from
the arms of junkies, because it kind of . . . a funny lyric. [laughter] And I remember Nick Austin saying,
"You can't have junkies.
Radio One won't play it."
So I had to change it to "nurses", I think. |
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PG: |
[laughter] |
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GN: |
Where the nurses are pulling needles from their
arms instead of junkies
pulling needles from their arms.
So, I was actually doing, not really what I was told to do, but sort
of listening. I wasn't quite so stubborn. The stubbornness followed a few months later when I
started to become quite convinced that what I was doing, particularly with
the synthesizers, was quite correct.
And I stopped listening to what people were saying an awful lot. |
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[Music: "Bombers"] |
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PG: |
Who were Sean Burke and Barry Benn? |
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GN: |
It was a three-piece: me on guitar, Paul on bass, probably
somebody on drums—Bob or Gerald [laughter], I can't remember. What I wanted to do, I didn't want to
have a band with two guitars in it, where two guitars were doing different
things. I simply wanted to make
what I was playing on the guitar more powerful. So I wanted another guitar to be doing exactly the same thing. And when it was time for a solo to
come, instead of me playing a solo we had a whole rhythm guitar, so I just
stopped; there would also be a guitar playing rhythm, so with the except of
solos I wanted it to be doing the same thing, a very powerful sound. Beggars Banquet always wanted me to
start doing duo guitar things, like one guitar doing one part and another
guitar doing another. Possibly
more musical, but not what I intended the other guitar to be for. But that's what Sean Burke was
brought in for, to be that other guitarist. He then brought in his mate on drums, because the drummer
I had must have gone by that time again. So he brought in his mate, called Barry. So now we had a split in the
camp: we had me and Paul on the
one hand, who was very keen to get away from the punk thing into the
electronic thing, Beggars Banquet not being happy with what we were doing at
all, either way, and Sean and Barry firmly entrenched in playing punk for the
rest of their lives, which obviously had no future to it whatsoever. It was purely fashion. And already by the time I'd joined it
was beginning to die. And the
big advances had gone, whatever . . . It was dying. And I could see, also quite clearly, that the demand was
for stars again. The anti-star
thing was over and it was dying.
We had a split in the camp.
And that went on for a while.
I stopped enjoying it. It
went on rather to seem like I . . . it was like presenting it for a bloody
exam, and they had to approve it.
Again, I left the band with Paul and took the name with me. Sean and Barry saw it as a sacking a
bit. It wasn't really. I just couldn't handle it the way it
was. And by this time I was also
thinking about going solo anyway, and not being in a band anymore. The reason I started in a band in the
first place was because I lacked confidence to go out on my own. And now I was beginning to build up
that confidence a bit. I now had
done two singles in the studio.
I started to work on a demo album, and I started to get a little bit
more confident about the way I was going and what I was going to be doing
about it. I was looking very
closely at the market where I was aiming, the audience (what the audience
wanted). I was just starting to
think a lot more clearly and accurately about what was going on. And I certainly saw no future in
punk. And I saw no future in
sticking with those two either. |
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PG: |
So you've now stopped gigging as a punk
band . . . |
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GN: |
More or less, yeah. |
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PG: |
And you're moving into electronics for
your first album. Why did you
move into electronics? |
|
GN: |
I stumbled across a synthesizer one day,
which is sort of fairly well known.
It was in Spaceward [Studios].
I went in to do a session.
There it was. I pressed
it. It made a very good
sound. It's quite possible that
it would have made a silly, tinny sound that I didn't enjoy, and I would have
not used synthesizers. See, it
was purely good fortune that the setting that had been left on it was one I
liked enormously, and also that it had been left behind at all. You know? Because it was waiting to be picked up from the session
before. It was enormously
powerful in its sound; it could blow a guitar off the stage. And I began to see an opening for a
completely new kind of music, played in a completely . . . new wave, if you
like. |
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PG: |
Now, Beggars had signed a punk band. Did they approve of this electronic
involvement in your music? |
|
GN: |
No.
They were ever so upset, couldn't see it at all. They wanted me to go out and do an
album of punk songs. And they
were very upset when I didn't.
But to their credit, they went with it and they gave it a try. But bearing in mind that the first
album I released was a demo album, I did it on a very, very cheap,
sixteen-track home-built studio, more or less, in three days. And album came out of it, so you
can't really expect it to be highly polished or anything like that. And it was my very first tentative
steps, full of flaws, but first steps into electronic music. |
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PG: |
Now, you joined Beggars Banquet as a punk
band, with the name "Valerian"; you're now calling yourself
"Gary Numan." |
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GN: |
Yeah, it went to "Numan" for the
first album. |
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PG: |
What made you change your name to
"Gary Numan"? |
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GN: |
I thought that "Valerian" was
extremely "poncey" [i.e., effeminate; snobby; or ostentatious], I
must admit. Having gotten over
that I wanted to do a spaceman bit, the name was obviously ridiculous. I wanted a name which was
conventional . . . See, Marc
Bolan had a brilliant name. It
was a relatively ordinary name to say, but when you call a pop star
"Bolan", the name becomes far more interesting. It was good. And it was spelled unusually. I mean, I used to look through the
phone book, and nobody spelled it like that. I thought, that's great. Double-prong name, Bolan. So I thought, I want something like this. Then there was Bowie.
Then there were a few other people who had done the same thing: fairly conventional names but which
took on a whole new meaning when put beside a celebrity, a rock star. I thought I wanted something very
similar to that, so I scoured the Yellow Pages in back of Beggars [Banquet's] offices
once, and came up with "Neumann"—Neumann Kitchen Appliances,
I think.
N-E-U-M-A-DOUBLE-N. Now
at this particular point David Bowie was doing his Berlin thing, so I
thought, Well, I can't really call myself "Neumann." Took the "E" off; took the "N" off; and
that's how "Numan" came:
a fairly conventional name spelled a little bit different, and there
you have it. |
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[Music: "Listen To the Sirens"] |
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PG: |
What was your relationship, then, Gary,
with Beggars Banquet at this time? |
|
GN: |
They weren't too pleased about getting the
electronic album. I did also do
a lot of other stuff which was purely guitar based, but that wasn't what I
gave them as being the album.
And I think that was the stuff that they later released as The
Plan. It was always a little bit strained with
Nick [Austin]. I used to get on
best with Marty [Mills], maybe because Marty was more diplomatic. |
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PG: |
Nick Austin was in partnership with Marty
Mills. |
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GN: |
Yeah. They were the two men who were running it. I don't know why. Nick was a very nice person. I just thought, maybe he didn't let
me get away with as much as Martin did. |
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PG: |
But on reflection, don't you think you
were asking a lot of Beggars Banquet at that time? |
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GN: |
Yeah! Yeah, I was.
But, I mean, that's why I only asked for singles. Because I knew what was going to be
used, and I knew what I was going to be giving them wasn't what they signed
me for. I'd hope that they would
see that I had a future. And, I
think, they did, because that's why they released the first electronic
album. And although that wasn't
exactly as great for as it was for the press, it wasn't sort of slapped in
the face. It was a good
reception for something like that.
If it wasn't slammed
into the ground, then there was obviously something there that was . . . an
interest. Which is why they then
let me go ahead with the Replicas
album and start to release electronic singles—because there were no
singles released from the first album at all. The singles didn't come until I started the second album,
the Replicas
album. |
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PG: |
Now, was it at this time that you decided definitely
to go solo? |
|
GN: |
Yeah, I was very keen to go off on my own
now. I didn't want to be part of
a band, mainly because I was convinced that the public at large were sorely
in need of, a) single-singing acts to be a star. All the bands that were there, the magazines and the
public were picking out the singers or the guitarists; they were picking out
one person and specializing on them.
There seemed to be little interest in featuring bands as a whole. But it seemed to me at the time that
what people were after, and what people were missing, was a single, singing
star, a new one. Not an old one
that was still going, but a new one, that would come out of the punk era,
that would come from it with that kind of rebellion, and something new but
not quite so anti everything else. That's why I wanted to go solo. Not because I wanted to get away from Paul, or anything
like that. No. Quite the opposite. Paul agreed. Paul thought that's the way it should
be as well. But Beggars Banquet
didn't want to lose the small following that the band had record
sales-wise. I don't know what
the first album had done; they only printed three thousand or five
thousand. But I think they were
sold. Which, for a small label,
is good. That fact that they
went on to do about a million around the world was . . . you know, you just
couldn't comprehend anything like that.
To sell five thousand albums was good. And they were very reluctant to
put out another real album without the Tubeway Army name on it. Because they were reluctant to lose
that small impetus which they had gained on that first album, which is quite
understandable. I understand it
more now than ever, having gotten my own label. |
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PG: |
And did you see that opening for a new
kind of star? Did you really see
that the time was right? |
|
GN: |
It seemed so to, yeah. Very much. Especially coming at the end of the punk thing. It seemed the perfect time for it. The music had been stale for a long
time. punk had come along,
turned the whole thing upside down and breathed a breath of fresh air into it
but hadn't put anything of any class out. And that was the only thing that was missing: the one big start to come out of it
that had seen it all going, learned all the lessons, and did something
different that was musically competent, and somewhat different to what had
been going on. punk was simply
badly played heavy metal without the posing. |
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PG: |
Was there a deliberate move to use
synthesizers as a new form of music to launch yourself? |
|
GN: |
The two sort of went hand in hand,
really. I first thought
synthesizers could help me enormously with the music I was doing, because
they had the sounds I wanted and had been missing without realizing what it
was I wanted. It's only when I
found the synthesizer, it was a sort of bit of, "Eureka! There it is. That's what I've been looking
for." There was that
element of it. There was also
the element of it that I could help synthesizers become . . . that the two
would go hand in hand. I was
very aware of the limitations of performing with a synthesizer, because it's
not particularly a visual instrument; it's not visual at all. In fact, the old ones, you dare not
move them. As soon as you moved
them, they went out of tune. [laughter] They were completely generations to them after that. |
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PG: |
We now get on to Replicas. Where did you actually record Replicas? |
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GN: |
A studio called . . . Gooseberry, I think
it was called. |
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31:46 |
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PG: |
Can you remember how long it took you to
record it? |
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GN: |
Yeah. Five days. |
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PG: |
Five days? |
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GN: |
Mmm. |
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PG: |
Looking back, did you expect that five-day
album to make you a star? |
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GN: |
No, not at all. The reason for doing Replicas was: for the first album I had started some kind of new music,
I was aware of that; I didn't think it was particularly good, but I knew that
I had started something new; with Replicas, I wanted to make it good. I wanted to start a new form of music
which lyrically was interesting and would have some kind of a class about
it. Now, looking back on it I
think it failed dismally. I
don't think it was a particularly good album at all. I think some of the songs were
okay. Very badly produced, because
I did it—not very well. Rough.
I wasn't very experienced at that sort of thing then. I wasn't a good player. I'm not a particularly good keyboard
player now. I certainly wasn't
then. I'd only been playing
keyboards for about nine months then, at the most. I never even touched a piano before. My mom bought me the piano that
started it all. She bought me an
old secondhand upright, which I started on at home, completely out of
tune. But I'd started to learn
how a keyboard worked, and how it went together. Went into the studio, hired a synthesizer that Beggars
lent me the money for, and did it.
I didn't dream that it would do what it did. I thought it might make me a small cult; I thought it
might make it possible for me to become well thought of in musical circles,
and interesting person. [laughter] That's what I had hoped from it. But, bearing in mind that, when I was doing that, I had
already started to write "Cars" and The Pleasure Principle album, and it was that one that I was quite confident could
actually do something. |
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PG: |
So it must have come quite as a shock to
you when, bmp!, Replicas . . . |
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GN: |
Well, first "Down In the Park"
had come out as a single, and that was a five-minutes long . . .
whatever. Long song. Didn't get any radio play, and it had
sold three or four times what they had sold before, and two or three times
what the album—the previous album—had sold. So Beggars Banquet, I would imagine,
were quite happy with this, really, because they had got an album done in
less than five days and cheap shit; it must have meant that they got their
money back and on that one single alone. And all of a sudden, something's happening here. This electronic thing is taking off. The single was quite well
received. It's probably the only
single that I ever got good reviews for in my life! |
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[Music: "Down In the Park"] |
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PG: |
How well did it sell, "Down In the
Park"? |
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GN: |
Let's see. I did ten thousand copies, but only in this country. I hadn't done anything around the
world at all. I don't even know
if I was released around the world at that time. It was just this country. And ten thousand is nothing. Really, in terms of being a successful act, it's
nothing. It's almost a drop in
the ocean. But when you've only
been doing [Number] 3's, and that kind of thing, and then over a period of
six months it gets an enormous jump . . . and I though, Ten thousand
people have been out and bought that!
It's ten times the
amount of people that used to be in my school. It seemed like an enormous figure to me, and I think
Beggars were very pleased about it, and were very encouraged by it. And then the album came out. Didn't do much: a few thousand. And then, out came, "Are
'Friends' Electric?" |
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PG: |
Before we move on to that, what is Replicas about? |
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GN: |
It was just an idea. It was . . . I used to read the
newspapers about violence and about the way things were going in the world,
and it was just a very young man's view of what might happen in so many
years' time. I didn't consider
it likely. Well, it was vaguely possible. It was just the most interesting thing that could
happen. The police force were no
longer men. They're cloned
machines. Have you seen the
film, The Terminator? This is interesting, because The
Terminator is exactly
what Replicas is
about. You've got an extremely
advanced machined with a cloned human skin. And that's what they were. That's what the machmen were: they were a super-elite police force, if you like,
unbelievably strong, virtually indestructible. The only way you could tell them was, the pupil of their
eye was different to ours. It
was a horizontal bar. |
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[Music: "The Machman"] |
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GN: |
[continued] There were men called "Grey
Men." The whole concept of
the album was, basically, the government decided they couldn't handle it
anymore and gave the running of the country to machines. Therefore, there would be in theory
no bias towards one class or another.
And the machines decided that the only thing that was wrong with it were
the people themselves. So they
thought they'd devise a way of getting rid of the people without the people
realizing it. So they invented a
thing called a Quota Test. The
men were called "Grey Men."
They would come around and . . . basically give you an I.Q. test. If you didn't come up to scratch you
were taken away and supposedly reeducated from the machine. What you were, in fact then, was just
gotten rid of. What people
didn't realize was that, every month when a Quota Test would come around, it
was more difficult than the one before.
So that, bit by bit, they'd get rid of all the people, like an hour
hand on a clock: so slow that
people wouldn't notice until it was too late. Anyway, that was the theory behind that. There were people called Crazies, who
had suspected what was going on and run. There was a curfew.
People were not allowed after nighttime. That again was done to control everything. There were machines . . . the song
"Down In the Park" was about that machines in the park; these
machines turned on with light sensors.
They turned on when the park got dark and there was no light, and they
were allowed to do anything they like.
They were all programmed for horrific crimes against people. See, if people were out at that time of night, the machines
would destroy them in all sorts of obscene ways. That was a deterrent to stop people coming out. And also, if you were caught by it,
you shouldn't have been there anyway, so you had no comeback against
them. So in theory there was
nothing wrong with the machines because you shouldn't have been out there in
the first place. There was more
things in that, involved. But
that was basically it. That was
the whole theme of the album. |
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PG: |
Were Beggars Banquet at that time keen for
you to return to live work immediately? |
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GN: |
Not quite. What happened was, "Are 'Friends' Electric?"
became a big hit, very luckily.
And a lot of people who I'll never know made certain decisions that
made it a hit. And making a
picture disc, for one. I never
knew who decided to do that, but it was because of that that it achieved what
it achieved and made it to Top Of the Pops.
The man at The Top Of the Pops, who decided to have me that week instead of Simple
Minds—which was the other single that was moving a lot—whoever
that man was, I made it instead of Simple Minds at that time. It could have been the other way
around. I might not have made it
but for him. The song
itself (just to linger on that for a little bit) was an accident. I'd written the song, as it was
actually quite melodic. And one
day I was playing it before I recorded it, and hit a wrong note [sings], and it sound better as a completely
wrong note. An accident. It was that thing more than anything
which people remembered about the song.
So it was a whole series of accidents and unusual events that made the
song and me famous. |
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PG: |
You preferred at that time to wait and not
do live work, didn't you? |
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GN: |
Yeah. Well, Beggars Banquet at that time
had set up a club tour for me, which I was really annoyed about, first of all because they
hadn't asked. I didn't want to
do one. Now that it was obvious
that we were becoming famous, and extremely quickly, I thought, I'm not
going to go out and do a club tour.
People are only
going to see me as Gary Numan with an enormous light show, you know—the
best show in the world. And so I
was really annoyed about that, and me and Nicholas had a couple of stand-up
rows about it. I don't remember
Martin saying much about it one way or the other. But Nick was keen on me to go out and do a club tour, and
I was very, violently opposed to doing any such thing until the money came in
and I could do a proper concert tour with an enormous stage set. Because I wanted to be seen . . . I
only ever wanted to be seen as that. |
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PG: |
It was at this time you started auditions
for new members, wasn't it?
How'd that go? |
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GN: |
Actually, no. I started the auditions for the keyboard player in general
before "Are 'Friends' Electric?" was a hit. So, that was in the basement of the
Fulham Beggars shop. That was . . . Gerald was there with me. So he was the one picking the best
drummer. Or I'd just play
"'Friends' Electric?" or "Down In the Park" and they'd
just play along to it. Simple as
that, really. |
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PG: |
And that was Chris [Payne] and Ced's
[Cedric Sharpley's] audition? |
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GN: |
Yeah, Chris conned me. Chris had said . . . I advertised for
a keyboard synthesizer player, and he turned up and said he knew all about
keyboard synthesizers. [laughter]
And apparently he'd never seen one before in his life, which I finally found
out later. He turned out in
Wellington boots and a mustache, and his college scarf. A tremendous character. And there was another bloke [laughter], a Frenchman, who turned up. I needed too keyboard players,
see? Because I didn't intend to
play keyboards at that time on stage.
And then Chris turned up.
And he could play well.
He absolutely fooled me that he knew all about synthesizers, and the
fill and the added loops, and he knew all the things that go with
synthesizers. And he was
completely busking [i.e., acting like a wandering street musician] as he went
along, pretending that he knew what he was talking about. Cedric was obviously a brilliant
drummer from the moment he started.
Gerald was very impressed, so Cedric got the job. Only two keyboard players turned
up. So I was a bit stuck. [laughter] But I needed two, so I took them both,
because they could both play all right.
They could both play "Are 'Friends' Electric?", which is
about the easiest thing to play in the world. Anyway, Chris I really liked. The Frenchman I really couldn't understand at all. So anyway, we set up a
rehearsal. First rehearsal,
Chris turns up, could obviously play very well—no problem at all. He said he didn't know anything about
the Minimoog; he was used to a different kind of synth. So I showed him how the Minimoog
worked. He kept faking like this
for months, our Chris did. Until
he eventually learned it. And he
knows them far better than I do now.
But this Frenchman turned up, and, apparently, on the day he had
diarrhea and something else. And
every five minutes he kept disappearing off to the toilet and being sick from
both ends [laughter]
and coming back. And he had the
habit of playing the keyboard so that he would bend over and his eyes were
about three inches away from his fingers. "Down In the Park" is five notes, you know, the
main verse. It's the simplest
thing in the world to play, and he couldn't get it right, this bloke. This poor little Frenchman. That was the end of him. After that we had to go out and we
had to find another keyboard player.
And at that time, because I had been very . . . a sort of great
Ultravox fan, and Ultravox had just split up, I came across Billie
Currie. And he became the second
keyboard player. |
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PG: |
Did they—Chris, and Ced, and Gerald,
or yourself, any of you—realize literally that you were weeks away from "Are
'Friends' Electric?" and stardom? |
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GN: |
No, not really. Even when we did Old Grey Whistle Test we had no idea. I just saw it as . . . what I said earlier: making myself known at quite a low
level for doing something unusual and classy. And that was all I saw it as doing. I considered what I was doing to be
quite innovative. To be quite
new. I wasn't that modest about
it. But I certainly didn't think
it was particularly worthy of great fame at that point. As I say, I saw the next pop star
coming as being more commercially orientated, more chart orientated. |
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PG: |
So you didn't expect "Are 'Friends'
Electric?" to reach Number 1? |
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GN: |
No.
I didn't expect it to get anywhere. |
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[Music: "Are 'Friends' Electric?" live] |
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MENU
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[Music: ""Are 'Friends' Electric?""] |
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PG: |
On this, the second album of the series,
Gary talks about success and the enormous pressure that came with it, the
stage shows, the critics, and much, much more. I began by asking about his biggest hit single, "Are
'Friends' Electric?" and what, in his opinion, made it reach Number 1. |
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GN: |
I don't know. I don't understand it. I certainly think the way we presented ourselves on Top
Of the Pops was
enormously important. And I
insisted . . . well, I didn't insist.
Actually BBC were very helpful and they seemed almost pleased that I
was taking an interest in the lighting.
Because, when I went there, I said, "I don't want any of your
colored lights. I want all white
lights, for a start. Because I'm
going to be all in black, and I want a lot of white light coming up from the
floor." Uppers, rather than
all downers at the time. Because
I'd watched Top Of the Pops
for years, and everyone was the same that went on it: everyone looked the same. I wasn't keen on that. I just didn't want to look like
that. I wanted to stand out a
little bit. |
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PG: |
But weren't you aware that you were
actually talking to the BBC on your first Top Of the Pops, and then, there's you, Gary Numan, talking
about how they're going to control their lighting. Didn't that occur to you that this was the BBC? |
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GN: |
No, it didn't really. [laughter] No.
I was very, sort of, intimidated, I suppose, by the actual
performance, which is one of the main reasons I didn't smile. It wasn't part of the image. I was just very frightened and very
nervous. And that's why I didn't
smile. The people there were
very nice. We turned up; they
were very helpful. I said what I
wanted. Instead of saying,
"You can't talk to us like that.
We do this all the time," they said, "Oh, yeah. Great. That would look good, actually." And they were very nice about it and
very helpful. |
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PG: |
Of course, your first TV appearance
was—as Gary Numan of course—was on The Old Grey Whistle Test, wasn't it? |
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GN: |
Well, it was still Tubeway Army at that
point, but I was Gary Numan within Tubeway Army. Now I changed the name when I was my own person, but it
was . . . The band were still called Tubeway Army. We had one of Chris's friends on guitar who did that one
show, and I think he did Top Of the Pops the following day—because he did them one day after
the other—and I never saw him again. I don't know what happened to him. |
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PG: |
How did it feel, doing your first TV
appearance? |
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GN: |
I remember being very frightened. I remember rehearsing for days and
days and days. Every single
movement. It's taken a long time
for me to become at ease on stage.
In fact, now I can go on stage with no movement rehearsal whatsoever,
and just do it. And I've got a
large repertoire [laughter]
of rock star poses now that I can get away with it. But in the early days I used to practice a movement for
every line, and rehearse it. I wasn't
the slightest bit natural at all.
So when people said that I was very wooden on stage, at the time I was
very upset about it. I thought
it was very unfair, but they were quite right, I was: very wooden, very inexperienced on
stage. And I probably looked
every bit as ill at ease as they said I did. |
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PG: |
But that wasn't contrived then,
though. That was . . . fear,
wasn't it? |
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GN: |
Yeah. It was just the fear that, if I didn't plan how I was
going to move I wouldn't move.
See, I'd never been on stage without a guitar; always had a guitar, so
you had somewhere to put your arms, for a start. You didn't have to move because you only had a guitar, and
you had to stay to the mic because you were singing. Now all of a sudden I'm on live
television, I've got no guitar, I've got to do something with my arms, you
know? [laughter] |
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PG: |
Did you have a microphone . . . ? |
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GN: |
And a microphone on a stand, yeah. |
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PG: |
What was your view of Top Of the Pops, in the studio? I mean, obviously, you'd been watching it for weeks and
weeks—in fact, I should imagine, years before . . . |
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GN: |
Years. All my life.
Since it'd been on. |
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PG: |
And now you're there in the studio. Were you disillusioned? |
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GN: |
Nope. That in itself was a dream come true. Just being on it, to me, was
something I'd always dreamed of being.
I couldn't believe it. I
mean, you're talking, one week I wasn't doing anything, the next week I had
an Old Grey Whistle Test
and a Top Of the Pops. It's not quite as clear-cut as that, but basically that
is what happened. I was
nothing. I'd never done an
interview, never done anything at all in my life, and all of a sudden I have
an Old Grey Whistle Test
and I'm Top Of the Pops. It happened so quickly, it doesn't
actually sort of sink in too much at the time, the enormity of what's
happening and the opportunity that's there. |
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PG: |
Mmm.
Of course, the picture disc must have helped as well. |
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GN: |
Yeah, the picture disc got it to the lower
regions of the top sixty, the top seventy. And, at that time, Top Of the Pops were doing a thing called
"Breakers" [i.e., "Bubbling Under"] where they would play
one song from out of the chart that was showing significant movement. I don't think they do it
anymore. In fact, unless you're
in the top ten these days it's hard getting on it—which isn't good, by
the way. What happened was,
Simple Minds also had a similar kind of thing going on. And I had a picture disc; they
didn't. They were more unknown
than I was. They were just on a
big tour with Magazine—the band, Magazine. So, they had to pick one of us. They picked me.
So, the picture disc was enormously helpful in getting us to that
point. I mean, I wouldn't have
been there without it. |