The “shit” album that nearly saw Gary Numan walk away from music altogether: “Wasn’t the right way to do it”
Gary Numan wasn’t the first UK synthpop act, but he was certainly the first star.
Initially fronting a more conventional punk group, a chance encounter with a Minimoog at Cambridge’s Spaceward studios would set a foundational course for the rest of his career. Utilising the synthesiser with greater sonic presence for the Tubeway Army band’s sophomore Replicas, the electronic tonalities and heavy polyphonic washes from later hardware would succinctly score Numan’s lyrical obsessions with strange futurescapes and dystopian visions.
It’d prove a chart winner too. While the likes of a pre-Dare Human League, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, and an early Ultravox! under John Foxx’s captaincy were pioneering the synthpop path towards its explosive peak in the early 1980s, Numan found himself pulled past all his peers toward a UK number one with the fuzzy ‘Are “Friends” Electric?’, turning heads with his staid automaton shtick on BBC’s flagship Top of the Pops. Dropping the band name and cutting follow-up The Pleasure Principle under the Numan moniker, and an even bigger hit would be had with ‘Cars’ that year, helping spearhead the imminent Second British Invasion.
Yet, time wasn’t kind to synthpop. After the pop moment’s sequenced peak around 1981, swiftly, much of the original electronic wave had lapsed into irrelevance and diluted its sound, destined from then on to play the dreaded retro circuit. While Depeche Mode was conquering the world, The Human League had changed hands and pursued a trite glossy soul traipse with ‘Human’, Heaven 17 were circling aimlessly in artificial disco rehashes, and OMD began to chase utterly moribund digital pap collages from 1984’s Junk Culture, a far cry from the dazzling heights only a year previously.
Numan was hit hardest, however. Never able to capture his striking primacy from his 1979-1980 output, as the decade rolled along, the popcraft grew less inspired, the fantasy escapism ever more silly, and a seriously creative deadend looked set to swallow up Numan for good. While hinting at his future angst on 1988’s Metal Rhythm, it would take his 11th LP effort to hit his artistic nadir and the road to renewal.
Dropped in 1992, Machine + Soul pursued a programmed funk direction more inspired by Prince than Kraftwerk, a desperate attempt to chase commercial fortunes and falling flatter for it. Smattered with shoehorned backing dancers, chintzy piano tinkling, and tinny guitar stabs, the whole affair sounded wilted, confused, and missing anything resembling character. Numan spoke to journalist Nick Pollard in 2011 about his “really shit album”, adding, “I’ll regret for the rest of my life. I realised that what I’d been doing wasn’t the right way to do it. I took a bit of time out and really thought through everything. Even whether I wanted to leave the music business”.
The lowest ebbs can often sling a life jacket. In the pits of his career crisis, an exposure to Nine Inch Nails’ industrial attack pointed to a whole new aggressive terrain for Numan to sink his teeth into. Unconcerned with pop appeal or commercial favour, Numan decided to cut 1994’s Sacrifice, a deep dive into a more personal, brooding, and dramatic darkwave affair. Facing the most consequential pivot since discovering the mystical Minimoog all those years ago, Numan charted a course that would serve his basic on-stage aesthetic and songwriting approach to this day.
Despite future artistic satisfaction and a boost in critical standing, Numan has never been coy about his Machine + Soul misfire. “Nothing was right… That music, those clothes, that haircut,” he lamented in 1993. “Imagine falling off a ship in the ocean, knowing if you stop swimming, you’re finished. That’s what I was doing then. I was trying not to die.”
