STEVE HILLIER – Musician (Dubstar). TERRE THAEMLITZ – Musician. NASH THE SLASH – Musician. MICK KARN – Musician and former member of Japan/ Rain Tree Crow. BERYL WEBB – Gary’s mother. NICK SMITH – Studio engineer. RRUSSELL BELL – Musician and former member of the Gary Numan band. TONY WEBB – Gary’s manager and father. AFRIKA BAMBAATAA – Musician. STEVE MALINS – Gary Numan PR and biographer. CONNIE FILAPELLO – Former press agent for Japan. JESS LIDYARD – Gary’s uncle and original Tubeway Army drummer. MICHAEL GIUHEN – Musician. STEVE WEBBON – Beggars Banquet Records.
GARY NUMAN: Dance was very much a studio album. At the time I thought the career was possibly coming to an end. I was very bewildered by the things that had happened to me since becoming successful. Blackmail, death threats, a weirdo on every corner (or so it seemed), Love lost, all that kind of thing. The thing to bear in mind is that I went through a massive change of life between those Telekon and Dance sessions. Telekon was my first, and very early, reactions to becoming famous. Dance was written after I'd had a short while to get used to it although, as it turned out, I was more confused then than perhaps at any other time of my life. I can't think of many bigger changes that someone can go through than the onslaught of fame from nothing. For a while I was one of the biggest selling artists in the world, that brings with it pressure that's just impossible to convey, especially as most creative people have a hint of instability running through them to begin with. I took it all very badly, reacted strangely, coped with it like a spoilt and frightened child. When I realised what was so amazing about it, it was too late and I have tried unsuccessfully to recapture it ever since. I think the radical change that those two albums, and others, are witness to is what made them so interesting. I can remember feeling that way, I can remember everything that was important to me about those days, I just can't remember the lyrics.
GARY NUMAN: I think Dance was definitely a pretty strange album for a pop star to make in 1981; it hardly followed the accepted path of staying safe and fine tuning your public image and sound. I’ve always said though that me and pop music just accidentally collided for a brief moment. The Dance album is when we began to part and go our separate ways.
GARY NUMAN: I didn’t consciously set out to write a dreamier album, I wanted to use a dance backbeat you could tap your foot to. People said at the time that you couldn’t dance to my music but they were wrong, at the Wembley shows people were dancing. The music on Dance wasn’t disco as such but you could definitely move to the music, there were less synths and more in the way of rhythms and textures.
GARY NUMAN: The album had been along the right lines of what I originally wanted but in the end was just far too strange. I thought ideas wise it was all there but there was far too much free expression. It’s a really weird, odd little album. This was also where we started introducing jazz into it, bringing fretless bass in.
STEVE HILLIER: Dance was my favourite album for years because I loved the whole atmosphere of it.
GARY NUMAN: For this album I tended to write songs around the way the players played, so they dictated the style of the songs I was writing. The albums melancholy mood is more due to the reasons that made me want to say goodbye at Wembley rather than the Wembley farewell itself.
GARY NUMAN: The image was virtually the opposite of what I was doing before, I remember I saw the life story of Howard Hughes on TV and thought that he looked terrific; I was tired of looking like an extra from Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. I got the gangster suit that I wore on the cover from a place in Staines called Robert Tracey’s.
GARY NUMAN: The reason for Paul's absence was due to his increasing drug dependency. I always said to Paul that every other bass player was just filling in time until Paul could get it together again and re-join.
GARY NUMAN: A less hard, more danceable approach seemed to me the natural way to go next. I decided my vocals would carry my identity anyway, so the more I could change the sound into a dancing beat, the better.
GARY NUMAN: Dance was a very non commercial album which did not please Beggars Banquet at all when they first heard it. I've had bad reviews ever since my first single “That's Too Bad” so I saw no reason to change anything after Telekon. In fact Telekon was one of the few albums to get a good review in a music paper not that that means very much. I've always tried to put things out that were what I wanted. It's just that for a while I didn't know what I wanted although that applies more to the early 90's than to the early 80's.
TERRE THAEMLITZ: I used to wear the trilby hat from Dance with rhinestone jewellery, broaches and the metallic blue and silver make-up on my face. You could say that I was the local freak. So much of what I do now musically is rooted in listening to Gary Numan records as an adolescent but I also enjoyed the visual aspect. I copied my favourite superstar.
GARY NUMAN: I was only interested in making an album of music that was trying to do things that I hadn’t done before. I was experimenting and you can’t really experiment safely in such a competitive environment. Waiting around the corner was another crowd of musicians waiting to fill the electro pop shoes that I had unknowingly stepped out of. Whatever, I loved the album, I thought it took my music to a new level and I was very proud of it.
GARY NUMAN: To this day I can’t accept that the lack of sales for that album was because of the music. It was one of the best, most adventurous things I’ve ever done, I’m sure of that. I worked hard on it.
GARY NUMAN: My then girlfriends ex husband actually drove across my garden and attacked me with a bunch of roses, it was the day before the album cover photo sessions too, he made a right mess of my lawn as I remember!
“SLOWCAR TO CHINA” Never performed live.
GARY NUMAN: I really love that track. I would say that “Slowcar To China” has remained one of my favourites on the album; I don’t listen to it very often so I tend to pick up on different things each time.
TERRE THAEMLITZ: “Slowcar To China” highlighted Numan’s growing awareness that his alienation from "the things he overheard" about himself in the media was related to a process of alienation in his own modus operandi which was "best left unheard.”
GARY NUMAN: This song had the drums in the background, the rhythm was underlying with everything else working around it. Rhythm can be a very subtle thing.
MICK KARN: This was the last track I did with Gary on the Dance album. Gary was standing talking to someone else and not really paying attention to what I did and I was standing there feeling a bit stupid, so I asked the engineer to play me the song really quietly and record what I was going to play. He did and when the song finished, the machine broke and I just walked out of the studio and never went back. I never even heard what I played until much later so it surprised me that Gary chose to leave all the mistakes in.
“NIGHT TALK” Debut live performance: 2004 March weekenders.
GARY NUMAN: I think Paul felt I could play that particular style of bass a little better than he could. Personally I doubt it but that’s what he wanted.
“A SUBWAY CALLED YOU” Never performed live.
MICK KARN: We spent a day at least just getting the right drum sound and there was this poor drummer sitting there with Gary standing over him directing him when to hit the cymbals, when to hit what. I thought it was just a run through but when he’d finished he said ‘ok, that’s it’, and there was this poor drummer struggling to pay attention to him and he never even got a second chance.
GARY NUMAN: I would hazard a guess, with such a title, that “A Subway Called You” was about some kind of weird sex.
TERRE THAEMLITZ: Throughout my teens I had an admittedly obsessive relationship with Numan's lyrics, spending hours at a time analyzing and rewriting them, trying to map the sexual innuendoes and literary references which never seemed to coalesce into a single image. It was an obsession which led to my parents confiscating my records out of misguided concern for my mental well-being.
MICK KARN: At the time this one was my favourite but he just turned it into a poppy tune at the end.
“CRY THE CLOCK SAID” Debut live performance: 1981 “The Farewell Concerts.”
GARY NUMAN: The Dance album had a slightly self indulgent feel to it all the way through so I was quite happy to let the “Cry The Clock Said” song have such a long intro. I don't think I had any special concept behind it other than that's how it felt it should go at the time. A long, slow build up. It was concerned, as much of my early stuff was, with people that I had felt had let me down. I can't remember much more. I'd forgotten that Nash The Slash was even on it.
NASH THE SLASH: I had a great time working with Gary Numan. We did two tours together, and I played on a couple of tracks on the Dance album.
“SHE’S GOT CLAWS” Debut live performance: 1981 “The Farewell Concerts.” Released as a single in August 1981.
GARY NUMAN: I remember being very pleased when “She’s Got Claws” shot into the charts.
GARY NUMAN: “She’s Got Claws” was the most obvious single from the album, I wanted to get into fretless, funk playing which Paul, by his own admission, couldn’t do at all, he had his own style. Paul at this time had also become quite ill; he had both a drug problem and a marriage problem which made his behaviour a little bit erratic, I carried on paying him for years even though he wasn’t actually working for us.
MICK KARN: I’ve always wanted to record a song completely spontaneously without having heard it at all, just to see what would happen and I did that on this track. This was the first song I did with Gary and it was the first time I’ve played spontaneously and it made me want to do the rest of the album. With the sax riff I was just waiting for that part of the song to come up and while I was waiting I was just playing around with the sax. Gary actually kept that take as the riff. He kept everything, even the tuning up at the beginning.
GARY NUMAN: Mick’s style was entirely different to anything I’d done before and once again it helped me to move on and change the style of music I was doing. It was something I was pleased about and encouraged. Sadly, Karn and I fell out badly not long after making the record. Dance doesn’t have the best of memories for me, I don’t think about these sessions much at all anymore.
MICK KARN This was the first track we did together. He gave me very rough keyboards (which was the melody) and once my bass line was on, for the most part he’d change his mind and say ‘oh I really like that melody’ and change his singing.
AFRIKA BAMBAATAA: I bought Dance with “She’s Got Claws” on it. That’s the album where he’s looking cool in the trilby hat in-front of a wall of purple neon tubes.
“CRASH” Debut live performance: 1982 “The “I, Assassin” U.S. Tour.”
STEVE MALINS: On “Crash” fame and his stable relationship had been exposed as frauds, deepening Gary’s natural sense of uncertainty and doubt.
“BOYS LIKE ME” Debut live performance: 1982 “The “I, Assassin” U.S. Tour.”
GARY NUMAN: It was about a woman that I met in a club who also happened to know the woman who tried to blackmail me, as in the song “We Take Mystery (To Bed).” She then started playing a few little games of her own. The name doesn't have that good a memory for me but it wasn't that big a deal one way or the other. She was just someone who tried to play head games. To be honest on Dance every song was about the kiss and tell situation that happened to me.
GARY NUMAN: Some of the lyrics relate to that relationship but much of it is as much to do with why I felt more exposed to certain things, because of fame, that encouraged those kinds of relationships in the first place.
GARY NUMAN: In “Boys Like Me” Connie Filapello was speaking Italian. She is saying, "I am hassled too; I have my own problems, etc etc.” She was the press agent for the band Japan. Also in the song, Zara was someone who tried to play head games. At the time I had no idea what she was saying but it definitely had a strong effect on everyone in the studio.
CONNIE FILAPELLO: In the song I think I was saying “I’m angry too so leave me alone and stop bothering me.” I was very flattered to be asked to help out.
“STORIES” Debut live performance: 1980 “The Teletour.”
GARY NUMAN: I think I wrote this a few months after Telekon was finished. It wasn't written for Telekon though. I was originally going to release it as just a B-side.
“MY BROTHERS TIME” Never performed live.
GARY NUMAN: I can think of at least three different relationships that Dance touches on. It certainly wasn’t an album about one person. It also looked at my place in the music business, at new fashions in music, at my disposability, many things.
STEVE MALINS: The song suggests that an era has passed and that Gary was in the process of forgetting his past life in order to move on.
MICK KARN: This was my favourite; it was the only one on the record that’s still got a bit of feeling left in it. In this he completely changed his melody to fit in with my bass line.
“YOU ARE YOU ARE” Never performed live.
GARY NUMAN: Nash the Slash, who plays on this track, was always an interesting man to be around.
“MORAL” Debut live performance: 1981 “The Farewell Concerts.”
GARY NUMAN: In some ways it's a continuation. “Moral” was just another version of 'Metal' but with new lyrics. Matthew's mother was the woman also referred to as D.E.B. in the song “We Take Mystery (To Bed)” so both songs were connected. Much of the Dance and I, Assassin albums were about her and people like her. There was no special reason why I re-wrote “Metal” as “Moral,” I just wanted to see how it would turn out.
JESS LIDYARD: “Moral” was one of the tracks on Dance that I recorded. Gary only gave me the easy bits though. It was one of the last things I did with Gary; I actually left the music business completely in 1988.
STEVE WEBBON: We also have an extended version of “Moral” which was found on the original masters to Dance, it is 1:45 longer than the original.
“FACE TO FACE” Never performed live. Recorded in January 1980 at Rock City Shepperton.
GARY NUMAN: This song was accidentally issued again in 1983 as “Letters.” What happened was it was the first time that I had not attended a cut and unfortunately the man doing it confused the tapes and cut the wrong song.
BERYL WEBB: Gary’s engineer cut the track when he was on tour; it was taken from a master tape of a previously unreleased track that was in two parts. Because of a lack of time Gary wasn’t there and the mistake went through without being checked. Nobody else at the record company spotted the error and a phone call to Beggars Banquet by a fan was the first they knew about it.
“DANCE” Debut live performance: 2000 The Brixton Academy weekender.
GARY NUMAN: I've been amazed to discover that I did have some songs that were lost; sadly, long forgotten by me I’m afraid.
“EXHIBITION” Never performed live.
NICK SMITH: The one thing I remember about the early part of the 80’s working with Gary was how he would throw himself into different areas, including collaborations and production. One of the things we did together was an album by an Australian artist called James Frued, which Gary produced. Gary’s keyboard playing is very distinctive on the album and one track, The Numan penned “Exhibition” as well as “Stories” were originally included amongst the tracklist for the record before “Exhibition” eventually found its way on to the B-side of Gary’s 1981 single “She’s Got Claws” and “Stories” winding up on Dance. Gary also did a couple of tracks with Robert Palmer which was quite a strange thing for him to have done.
“I SING RAIN” (semi-instrumental) Never performed live.
“LOVE NEEDS NO DISGUISE” Debut live performance: 1983 “The Warriors Tour.” Released as a single in December 1981.
RRUSSELL BELL: A lot of people said we were using Gary cos we couldn’t make it on our own. Gary laid the vocal down in an hour and a half. He wanted a follow up single to “She’s Got Claws” so we simply decided to put the song out as a joint effort. Obviously we expected it to do better than our other one’s because Gary was on it. I certainly didn’t do us any harm.
GARY NUMAN: This was just the break they needed; I didn’t have anything to do with the writing of the song.
MICHAEL GIUHEN: It was me and Denis Haines that wrote the original backing track “Love Needs No Disguise.” I first saw Gary Numan on Top of the Pops in the spring of 1979, performing “Are “Friends” Electric?” The droning driving sound of the opening notes took my attention and inspired me to make electronic music myself.
GARY NUMAN: I’m not sure if it was a set-up or not, I just happened to turn up at the studio as the song was on, waiting for a vocal to be added, sounds like a massive co-incidence to me. I like the song though, smashing. RRUSSELL BELL: When Gary retired for a period after the '81 Wembley gigs, we, as his band, had some time on our hands. We signed a deal with Elton John'scompany, Rocket Records and recorded an album called For Future Reference. Gary popped down to visit us at Ridge Farm studios and liked a track we had just recorded called “Love Needs No Disguise.” Ironically, the lyrics I wrote for the song were about the time we had spent touring with Gary. As a band we got on so well together it’s unbelievable, I’ve never known a band that been so happy working together. I don’t think we had an argument for years which was almost embarrassingly odd. It wasn't really a Gary Numan project but Dramatis probably wouldn't have been signed if we hadn't been his band.
GARY NUMAN: Had a great time recording the video as I recall.
TONY WEBB: Beggars Banquet only agreed to release the track as a single if it was released on their own label.
RRUSSELL BELL: We were going to sing the song ourselves but when Gary visited the studio it seemed a fitting idea to let Gary have a go seeing as the song was about our happy memories of touring with him.
“STORMTROOPER IN DRAG” Debut live performance: 1994 “The Sacrifice Tour.” Released as a single in May 1981, single credited to bassist (the late) Paul Gardiner only.
GARY NUMAN: I think that’s a great song, very different to what I was doing at the time. I wrote the lyrics and some of the music but it was Paul’s foundation that was the heart of the song. I added a structure, arrangement, some playing, parts and production but without Paul’s original idea and guitar lines it would never have happened.
Below 1981 photo shoot and probably inspired by Gary’s new look. Gary was the subject of a British advert modelling clothes by former art student Steven linard. The collection below was a part of Steven’s acclaimed “Degree” collection.
GARY NUMAN
