Gary Numan is in the UK this week with the Intruder tour about to start in Cardiff, Wales.
Numan is touring following the release of his new album ‘Intruder’ which has earned him his best reviews in decades. Gary had his first number one album with ‘Replicas’ in 1979 and the hit song ‘Are Friends Electric’. ‘The Pleasure Principle’ in 1980 was another number one and contained the hits ‘Cars’. “To be truthful there was so much going on. I hadn’t been doing this all that long then, so much was going on and it all went ballistic,” Gary tells Noise11.com.
By 1983 the hits started to fry up. “I was pretty overwhelmed by the whole thing really,” he says. “I probably didn’t give it enough thought for what was required at the time. It was just part of the whole blur going on”.
Gary made the decision to just walk away. “Part of the reason I got out of it for awhile was to get my feet back on the ground again,” he says. “I tried to grasp what had happened and tried to control it a bit more. It felt as if you were being pulled in a thousand different directions and none of them were to do with me. I didn’t like it, it wasn’t what I expected, the fame/success thing and I thought the best thing I could do was to back out of it”.
That led to years of self-discovery. “You try and find a better way of what’s going on. You try to find a better way of navigating through the good and the bad of it. Just grow up really. I was really young and really immature, and I’ve got Asperger’s which just added to the whole shit anyway. I thought the best thing to do was just get out of it. Come back in a year or three or whatever and be a little bit more in control of it, a little bit wiser and able to navigate your way thought it”.
Gary’s fame period was not a good time for him. “When all that was going on I was bouncing off the walls. I certainly don’t have a great memory of then and I certainly don’t remember how I felt about certain things that were going on. I executed it very badly. I made this big thing about it … I’m going to get out, I’m going to retire. That was the childish part of me, I think. The decision to back away was a really sensible thing to do in the midst of all that chaos. It fucked my career up to be honest. Its taken me 40 years to even look like I might get back to that point. It was a massive mistake the way I handled it but a very important thing to have done none-the-less to keep me together and keep me as a decent person”.
After the UK Gary Numan will tour Europe starting in The Netherlands on 26 May and then return to the USA for show starting in California on 31 August.
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