In 1979, Gary Numan rose to the top of the British charts with his first eponymous breakout hit, the robotic, unworldly “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”, even managing a small amount of U.S. airplay.

But on his following album, The Pleasure Principle, Numan crafted an almost perfect concoction of originality, using nothing but synthesizers, a trance-like gaze and a sound that has forever marked him as one of the godfathers of electronica.

To celebrate the recent re-issue and 30th anniversary of The Pleasure Principle, Gary Numan is launching a North American fall tour, “The Pleasure Principle 2010 Tour.”

Opening Oct. 17 in Orlando at The Firestone, the iconic Numan will perform in its entirety the album that climbed into the Top 20 on the U.S. charts 30 years ago and the single “Cars” into the U.S. Top 10. The shows will feature material spanning across Numan’s career, including tracks from “Exile,” “Pure,” “Jagged” and his forthcoming album “Splinter,” which is currently being recorded.
 
For his 2010 fall tour starting in mid-October, fans will be able to catch him in 15 markets including Orlando, Atlanta, Washington D.C. and Boston.

The Pleasure Principle made Numan an international solo star upon its release in 1979, the album a cascading melody of sound waves of early electronica in the era of rock and disco-dominated music in America. The album pioneered electronic pop music on a new, worldwide scale built around icy synthesizers without guitars or conventional song structures. The tracks from The Pleasure Principle even gave birth to new musical movements in the U.S. over the next decade, including hip-hop, industrial and techno. 

Since then, numerous artist from a variety of genres began taking samples from Numan, including Dr. Dre, Timbaland, The Neptunes, Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails, The Sugarbabes and the Basement Jaxx.

Numan’s pioneering influence continues and his innovation persists as material from later work push the ever-changing lanes of music, as “Cars” and Numan’s endless innovation keep fans stable for days – 30 years later.

REAX spoke with Numan, 52, while he was preparing for the tour in Orlando.
REAX: Hey, I’ve been a huge fan since ’79, the older and newer material. I was thrilled to hear you’re going back to The Pleasure Principle. I was 15 when I bought the album and it still rocks. The tours in the last 10 to 15 years have been geared to your newer albums which are harder industrial, guitar-based sounds. What made you want to switch back to an album is which predominantly driven by analog synthesizers, besides the fact the album turns 30?
Gary Numan: The album turning 30, well, that was a starting point. Maybe two or three years ago in England, people started asking about doing The Pleasure Principle. I thought I’d do one show in Manchester. I’m not really a big fan of that kind of thing, even on a 30th anniversary. Last year we went on to do a lot of stuff with Nine Inch Nails on tour and Trent (Reznor) was introducing me each night talking about the Pleasure Principle and how it influenced him and Nine Inch Nails. We did two or three songs from Pleasure Principle each night. I said, “I have such a huge chip on my shoulder about doing nostalgia type things in the past.” I tended to turn the eye the other way. I did very little old stuff at all. I’ve never been proud or comfortable with my own back catalogue. And, um, seeing the reaction to that music in the Nine Inch Nails shows and hearing what Trent said about it and then just taking an interest in what other people said about it, I just thought, “I think I’m being stupid.” It’s a very valued anniversary to be celebrating. The album seems to have a very good shelf life. From my point of view, where I feel particularly safe, is that it’s (the album) only 45, 50 minutes long, if you include all the B sides. The first half of the show is the Pleasure Principle, then the second 40 minutes is predominantly new stuff, or recent stuff and two or three songs we haven’t even released yet. It gives me the opportunity sort of to play my career in a back-to-back kind of way so you can see the transition from what I was doing to where I am now, so that made me more comfortable, or more comfortable, I suppose, doing that kind of a thing. Once I got used to doing those songs, it stopped being quite so sort of nostalgic and it ended up being something I did very often and figured I do again.

REAX: I’ve noticed in the shows that I’ve seen, you always throw in a couple of songs off Pleasure Principle and it always seems to get the crowd going. I would figure a whole set of that would really go off, wouldn’t it?
GN: Well, I hope so (laughs). We’ll find out soon.

REAX: You’ll obviously have some Gen Y and beyond generation children of the kids that were grooving to TPP when it first came out on this tour. What are you doing to make the show true to the original sounds and aura of TPP while still keeping the shows and sounds hip to a generation weaned on sequencers, samplers and computer-generated music? Are you using much analog equipment?
GN: Not much, really. One of the things we did before we did the Pleasure Principle in the UK was spent a lot of time doing our own programming; we’ve got certain synthesizers which are modern but constructed in a similar way to the early Minimoogs and Polymoogs. The idea of throwing Minimoogs and very early generation synthesizers is very scary, from my point of view. They were very unreliable.

REAX: I have a Moog Prodigy, so I know what you’re talking about. I use it out a lot and it’s in the repair shop a lot.
GN: Yeah, when we first toured in 79 and even 98, they were an absolute nightmare, even then. There’s a man I met during the Nine Inch Nails shows in England who supplied a Polymoog for Trent and me to play when he played in London. It was great seeing him again. He had two decks and they didn’t last one song. That’s how bad they are. I spoke to him about it. He’s actually done a whole series of programs and exercises to recreate all sorts of the sounds. He went off and programmed the Pleasure Principle specifically for the Virus synthesizer, which we use most of the time. It’s absolutely amazing. We used all that programming in the UK version of the tour. It’s just brilliant. We brought up the original recordings of… Pleasure Principle stuff and re-did it. You should see which one you think is real. You absolutely couldn’t tell.

REAX: Back in 79, TPP brought a sound not familiar to many US radio listeners’ ears. Although “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” Charted in the UK, most mainstream US radio listeners were listening to the likes of Van Halen, REO Speedwagon and post-disco pop like Tommy Tutone around then. Why do you think the Pleasure Principle and “Cars” appealed to those listeners at a time when US top 40 music was pretty much dominated by mainstream, guitar based rock and pop? Were you surprised?
GN: Um, I can’t say, I’m not sure, really. I think sometimes there’s just a particular sound or that for some reason, is just familiar enough to get people into it and different enough to make other people feel like they should be into it. It has that brilliant combination of people who genuinely like it, or sort of feeling that they ought to say that they like it. I think it just is on the middle line somehow. There are moments when it’s very cool to have a particular album on your coffee table and your friends come around. It makes you look as if you’re on the cutting edge of music. I think for one brief moment that happened to me, where I was seen as if you knew anything about me you were cool with music and into new stuff and this is the album that you should be listening to. It was more about what people were saying about it, than the actual album itself. I think it was just very lucky.

REAX: Of all the tracks, were you surprised that “Cars” was the breakout on the album or did you have another song in mind?
GN: No, to me at the time, “Cars” seemed to me to be the one that was the most, um, immediate. I think the intro and the little bubbling noise then coming in with a groove, I think from a radio point of view. it had everything happening in the first 10 seconds.

REAX: You don’t burn out on playing it, do you?
GN: I have. For a long period in the UK I just didn’t play it at all, for gig after gig, year after year, I just wouldn’t touch it. I think that had more to do with my own insecurity, feeling I’d get overshadowed by it. The other thing about “Cars” is that it’s quite difficult to do live in a way because most of the vocal parts are in the first 60 seconds or so then you’ve got two or three minutes of what is essentially an instrumental. From a singer’s point of view, there’s not much but to stand there looking around.



REAX: Your band consisted of yourself, Chris Payne, Cedric Sharpley and Paul Gardiner. I know about Paul (died of a drug overdose); where are Chris and Cedric these days?
GN: I saw Chris last year when we did the Pleasure Principle show in the UK he came out and did a number of those shows with us, which was really good. He lives in France now; he’s an acupuncturist, puts needles in people. He still does music, he writes and plays in a folk band, I think, based in Cornwall. He eventually got married, got children and lives in France. Cedric, I don’t know about. I spoke to Chris about him and he seems to have just dropped off the radar a bit. I heard from him from time to time, I saw him about ’93, not very often. Chris has been to our house several times in the last couple of years, so it’s good actually. I lost touch with him completely for, I don’t know, 15 years, 20 years, a long time anyway. And then in more recent times we’ve sort of been slowly sort of finding each other again and hanging out

REAX: Is he (Chris Payne) as excited about it as you are, breaking out “The Pleasure Principle” again on tour again?
GN: I think Chris was particularly sort of glad I’m going back on tour with it again.

REAX: What’s it like 30 years later to have such a legion of fans, many who weren’t around or didn’t listen to you back then? How about legions of newer music stars – from hip-hop to goth — who’ve latched onto your sounds, I assume that’s flattering?
GN: Yes, very. It’s great to see the interest. When I’m sitting in the studio, with Pleasure Principle for example, I was absolutely worried sick that I wasn’t doing a good job of it and it could be better and would anyone remember these songs? I was riddled in doubt about everything that I was doing, really. I was enjoying it, but I had no confidence that it was anything other than just another album among the thousands out there. I was just hoping it would keep me going for a bit longer, just keep me around. Now, 30 years later…

REAX: It did more than that, obviously.
GN: Yeah, yeah. It’s funny, you’re not aware, obviously, at the time what these things might end up becoming. It’s just a bunch of songs that you’re trying to write, get down and record them. That’s all it is. It’s just a bunch that you’ve written over the last few months. It’s amazing how these things develop into something else completely over a period of time. To have the amount of people who have done covers of you and samples of you is great. We went to Universal in Orlando and we walk out in the car park and my little girl says, “Dad, that’s you!” and someone’s playing the Basement Jaxx song. And we walk out into the car park after the cinema and Gemma says, “Does that make you feel proud?” I said, “It does in a way, it just makes me feel honored.”

REAX: How did you decide to pick Orlando to open this tour, or did you pick it, who decided that?
GN: When the tour was booked, the actual order of it changed quite a few times. It wasn’t that there was a specific decision made to play there the first night, it just worked out that way.

REAX: Oh, I thought you were going to say how marvelous the central Florida music scene was or something like that.
GN: (Laughs)

REAX: You haven’t played Florida since the St. Petersburg show (1998) that I know of. Hopefully, the word will get out around the state from this interview. What can you tell folks that are reading this online to get them out to hear some classic Numan and what can they expect from this performance, the material, old and new?
GN: Well, the show is sort of a departure of what I’ve been doing. The first part of it is all Pleasure Principle and we work out way right through the album. We may or may not drop in a few new pieces in the middle or we may tag them on at the end. The first part of the show is relatively static, I don’t normally play keyboard.

REAX: I haven’t seen you play keyboards in a while.
GN: Before we did the Pleasure Principle stuff, I don’t think I played more than three songs on keyboard in the past 30 years. There are some songs from Pleasure Principle that we have not played since we did them in the studio. It’s a very varied system from what we normally do. When one song finishes, we just keep on going and then we move into a brand new song that hasn’t even be released yet. We’re trying to make the point that this is what we did then and this is what we do now. It’s a complete change.

REAX: So you’ll be covering all the tracks from “Pleasure Principle” and throwing in some new material as you can fit it in.
GN: We’ll do everything from Pleasure Principle and perhaps we’ll so some recent tunes or a couple of B sides. We didn’t have a lot singles from Pleasure Principle, so there’s not a lot of B sides to bring in. There’s 45 – 50 minutes of just non-stop “Pleasure Principle” stuff, which in some instances, is quite a gamble because like I said, it’s a lot more static; it’s just playing keyboards, playing songs very much as they were on the record. This is how we recorded them, this is what they were. But as I’ve grown up in the 30 years, I’m also showing this is what I’m doing now and that’s the way it ends. We also throw in one or two old songs in the second half, like “Down in the Park,” but most of it is this is where we are now. But for me, it’s quite a nice transition; it shows people where I was when I started and where I’ve come to in 30 years. In some respect, it’s a celebration of what 30 years means in time, not with just the album, but with the evolution I’ve gone through musically to get to where I am now, so that makes me feel a lot more comfortable, which is nostalgia, really.

REAX: So I reckon you’re excited about it overall and looking forward to hitting Orlando for that opening show?
GN: Yeah, I really am, actually. It’s just got a good vibe, a good feel to it. When we did it (Pleasure Principle) in the UK, I had a lot more fun with it than I expected to, not really being a big fan of nostalgia, I wasn’t looking forward to it. But I really got into it. It’s going to be nice to bring that out of the UK now and see what people make of it. I like being here (US) anyway. We’re trying to go through the immigration process at the moment and see if we can’t bring the whole family and move here.

REAX: I guess that should wrap it up then. I’m sure you want to get back on with your vacation. Have fun in Mickey world. Thanks Gary, I appreciate your time.
GN: Ok, thank you. Bye-bye, see you at the show then.