The Premier Hits
(BBL 2007 CD)
© 1996 Beggar's Banquet

In the '90s there's already been too much hype about too many revivals. It seems that every artist who has ever had a hit is dug up by rabid fans in the media who push, cajole and gush until their hero receives a critical pat on the back or returns to the charts.

In Gary Numan's case his idiosyncratic and occasionally inspired songs deserve a fresh listen but hopefully free from any teeth grinding angst or ridiculous claims from his obsessive fanbase. This album is a chance to enjoy some of his best songs and read the story of an imperfect and, in some ways, improbable pop star - a tale of fame, dreams, lightshows, guns, Ferraris, art, trash, crashing aeroplanes, stunts, dodgy haircuts, girls, pop, money, Moog synthesizers, imagination, introspection, ego, alter egos, paranoia, cult status and Max Factor 28 panstick.

Numan has never been on firm, 'authentic' ground as a songwriter. Whereas the likes of Oasis and Paul Weller slot into a classic pop lineage, Gary Webb (he took on the Numan stage name just in time for the first Tubeway Army album, inspired by a plumber in the yellow pages called Neumann) was not a fan of '50s or '60s pop music. As a child the flash of The Shadows' guitars catching the spotlight on a TV show excited his imagination but the sounds didn't make much of an impression. In the early '70s he latched onto Bowie (circa Ziggy Stardust), Marc Bolan and to a lesser extent Lou Reed, Roxy Music and Mott the Hoople. Once again the 'flash' of glam was attractive but, more subtly, the freakish personas and individualistic music of these artists struct a chord with this doleful introvert. He'd been writing short stories since the age of four and as he took his material more seriously he started to flesh out his lyrics with ideas stolen from sci-fi magazines and authors like Philip K. Dick and William Burroughs. The surreal scene setting, bizarre characters and futuristic themes of these novels offered oblique, 'otherworldly' locations for him to express his own feelings. Although David Bowie stole freely from the same sources, Numan created his own unique style. Bowie's synthetic chill and monotone on albums like Low is a combination of restrained passion and cocaine-fuelled paranoia but Numan has none of his ironic, layered detachment. Like Bolan, he's in love with the idea of being a 'popstar' but he sings with all the frailties of a boiler-suited Morrissey. These qualities were already in evidence in the pop-punk of early Tubeway Army who signed to Beggars Banquet in 1977.

As a punk he was a complete fake but he adopted the image to get a deal and work out what he wanted to do next. Not that he was alone. By the time Tubeway Army trod the boards of punk clubs like The Vortex and The Roxy most of the initial idealism of the movement had long since vanished but few people were ready to own up to the fact. In retrospect some of the early three minute Tubeway songs like "That's Too Bad" and "Bombers" stand up well against many of their contemporaries because of their pop suss and the urgency of recording over 20 songs in a couple of days. It was at one of these frantic sessions that Numan stumbled across his first synthesizer. He certainly wasn't the first to fall in love with the Moog's fat, burbling analogue sound but his approach was original. Brian Eno had briefly enjoyed fame in Roxy Music as a fully-fledged low-tech star but he had long since moved into more experimental territory with his mixture of studio strategies and DIY instinct. Apart from their one-off 'novelty' hit "Autobahn", Kraftwerk's exploration of flawless, machine-made pop hadn't made much impression on the High Street and even David Bowie was seen to be retreating to more esoteric ground with his Eno-produced Low and Heroes. Furthermore these were well-established innovators rather than a 20-year-old from west London who was signed to a small indie label.

Numan was virtually alone in seeing the possibility of a 'synthesizer star' and, much to the critics' anguish, he achieved success almost overnight. In late 1978 Beggars Banquet released Tubeway Army's self-titled debut, mixing electronics with post-punk guitars and solid, no-frills drumming by Gary's uncle Jess Lidyard. The only other member of the band at this stage was Gary's best friend, bassist Paul Gardiner (who died of a heroin overdose in 1984) but their record label refused to let Numan take on solo status just yet. Although the post-punk electronica of Tubeway Army was briefly championed by Radio One DJ John Peel, Numan was in a hurry to get back into the studio. He recorded Replicas in three days at Gooseberry Studios in London, utilising a stark synthetic sound for most of the tracks, punctuated with more guitar-dominated songs like "It Must Have Been Years" and "You Are In My Vision". The album's first single, "Down In The Park," announced his radical change of direction but no one believed that the alienated, rhythmical drone of the follow-up, "Are 'Friends' Electric?", would elbow its way past the likes of ELO and Blondie to the number one slot. Within weeks, Numan was posing on Top Of The Pops in harsh white light, bringing a touch of showbiz camp to the clipped, motorik repetitiveness of the song. From that moment on he was simultaneously branded 'hero' and 'villain'.

When "Cars" and The Pleasure Principle album both topped the charts in autumn '79, he put together a complete package of song, promo video and aloof solo stage image which would act as a catalyst on a new wave of suburban no-hopers who achieved fame through their own synth pop styles. In some cases, like Depeche Mode, Numan's success encouraged them to switch from guitars to keyboards. In others, like The Human League, OMD and Soft Cell, he opened up the market both in the UK and the States where "Cars" was a hit in 1980, long before the second English Invasion in the early '80s. Nevertheless, his detractors continued to attack him as 'pretentious' and 'bombastic'. This was a little unfair as his mixture of neon-tubed futurist chic and pansticked android posing were born out of a strange combination of shyness and a passionate commitment to showmanship. He was often freakishly wooden on stage, an articulate but unworldly young man shoved in front of sold-out auditoriums through his own success. Over the next two years, Numan scored more hits including Top Ten singles "We Are Glass" and "I Die: You Die," as well as a third successive number one album, Telekon, which featured an increasingly opulent sound built out of synths, piano, strings and guitar. Then he announced his intention to give up live performances and made a melodramatic, emotional exit with three lavish Wembley Arena shows in 1981. These farewell appearances effectively ended his reign as a multi-million selling 'popstar' and he took time out to enjoy the rags-to-riches trappings of money, Ferraris, sponsored racing cars and, of course, his own aircraft. In any case, The Human League, Duran Duran and Adam Ant were now topping the charts and terrified of becoming a 'has been', Numan resolved to experiment in the studio without the pressure of trying to write hits or material he would have to perform live.

On his next album, Dance, he explored sparser, more ambient textures and varied percussion. This was a natural direction for him to take as Numan's flair for rhythm runs through all his albums, inspiring Electro, Hip Hop and Techno artists to sample his work through the '80s and '90s. However for all his private idealism about creating a completely fresh sound album by album and his prolific output (Dance was his fifth album in three years), the press weren't ready to encourage a millionaire in a Bogart-styled trilby - his latest image. The gangster headwear partly acted as another disguise designed to cover the scars of a recent hair transplant but the sight of Oxfam-suited clones wandering down the High Street was too much for the cynics to take! His last albums for Beggars Banquet, I, Assassin ('82) and Warriors ('83), continued to move into fluid funk styles and he had more chart success with "Music For Chameleons," "We Take Mystery" and "Warriors". Nevertheless the woh-oh choruses and mumbled verses of these albums were definitely an acquired taste. Most casual observers knew little about Numan's new releases but were certainly aware of his activities away from the pop scene, in particular his adventures as a pilot. A much-publicised round-the-world solo flight in his own plane was initially aborted when he was arrested in India on suspicion of spying. Although he eventually achieved his ambition the newspapers had lost interest and his return home was hardly acknowledged. He did, however, appear on the Nine O'Clock News after an emergency landing on a road due to engine failure and his bad luck continued when he was charged with carrying an offensive weapon after queueing up at a hamburger stall with an American baseball bat.

Numan increasingly became a recluse, ready to face intruders with a harpoon gun in his bedroom. During a six-month stay in Hollywood he joined a local gun club and splashed out on two combat rifles, a repeating shotgun (a la Steve McQueen in The Getaway) and a nine millimetre, semi-automatic Baretta pistol. It was a fad, but stories about him standing up in bed, naked but for his socks, in order to salute the queen added to an image of a patriotic, war-mongering weirdo with a taste for aggro. By supporting the Falklands War and declaring his admiration for Margaret Thatcher he also set himself up as a Tory jingoist. Actually if you caught Numan on another day he could just as easily be accused of pinko communism, he's never used his music as a political soapbox and when it comes to the crunch he doesn't bother to vote for any party. Even those who appreciated Numan's outspoken honesty in the middle of a music industry which talked a more left-wing political game than it practised - this was the mid-'80s - wished he'd displayed more tact and his sense of isolation increased.

The next decade witnessed a gradual decline in his sales as he preached to the converted, releasing a new album nearly every year on his own label and touring every autumn. Musically the likes of Berserker, The Fury, Strange Charm, Automatic (with Bill Sharpe from Shakatak), Metal Rhythm and Outland (the latter two released through IRS Records) combined bright, forward-looking pop with bizarre songwriting, vocal and production habits which can make a song seem original one day and infuriatingly 'cultish' the next. Although they continued to chart, in or just outside the Top 40, they had more affinity with the glam-slamming funk of Prince and Janet Jackson than the British music scene and his career was clearly in a rut. To most people he'd become a clownish ex-pop star, more famous for his flying exploits as an aerobatic display pilot than for his music. When '92s Machine & Soul album followed the usual pattern and stalled at number 42 in the charts, Numan believed his career was at an all-time low.

Yet only three years later the musical climate had changed in his favour for the first time in over a decade. His mixture of comic-book escapism, electronic pop and bizarre introspection is inspiring Techno, Ambient and Trip Hop re-mixes, pop covers, passionate re-workings by other inward-looking writers and a core of gay fans who encouraged him to play a one-off gay night at London's Astoria in 1994. Timed with this cultural backflip, Numan's most recent album, Sacrifice, is a return to the electronic chill of his earlier work and at 37, he's promising to take this route as far as he can through further instrumental and pop records. Let's hope he's a little better understood from now on. Not a genius or a loser but a prolific, instinctive songwriter with a Captain Scarlet haircut and an unfortunate gift for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. After a career spanning 18 years and over 20 albums it's enough to know that he's still enthusiastic about pop music and has the same motivation and principles he always had. Few established artists can fairly claim that.

- Steve Malins


Track Listings
# Song Title RealAudio
1 Cars (Premier Mix) 03:42 28K G2
2 I Die: You Die 03:44 28K G2
3 Are 'Friends' Electric? 05:22 28K G2
4 Down In The Park 04:23 28K G2
5 We Are Glass 04:46 28K G2
6 Bombers (Single Version) 03:54 28K G2
7 We Take Mystery (To Bed) (Single Version) 03:42 28K G2
8 She's Got Claws 04:57 28K G2
9 Complex 03:12 28K G2
10 Music For Chameleons (Single Version) 03:42 28K G2
11 That's Too Bad (Single Version) 03:21 28K G2
12 This Wreckage 05:24 28K G2
13 Warriors (Single Version) 04:09 28K G2
14 Love Needs No Disguise 04:38 28K G2
15 White Boys And Heroes (Single Version) 03:33 28K G2
16 Sister Surprise (Single Version) 05:01 28K G2
17 Stormtrooper In Drag 04:53 28K G2
18 Cars (Original Version) 03:54 28K G2

This Album Appears Courtesy Beggar's Banquet.
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