CEDRIC SHARPLEY – Musician and former Gary Numan band member. RRUSSELL BELL – Musician and former Gary Numan band member. The late DICK MORRISSEY – Musician. BILL NELSON – Musician and former member of BeBop Deluxe. NICK SMITH – Studio engineer. AFRIKA BAMBAATAA – Musician. STEVE MALINS – Gary Numan PR and biographer. STEVE WEBBON – Beggars Banquet Records.
GARY NUMAN: I was no longer the golden boy of the record company and I found I now had to fight for my releases.
GARY NUMAN: At the beginning I had a little electric piano synth, an amplifier and a drum machine and I wrote the whole Warriors album on them and recorded it onto a cassette. I knew Warriors had to re-establish my career and re-confirm what I was as a person. I’d had a year off so it was time to go back to my old habits again; music and touring. I felt I could handle things better- I’d grown up in the pop world and there was no pressure anymore. NICK SMITH: Gary turned up at the studio with his notepad and a Linn drum, which he used to programme some of the original rhythms.
GARY NUMAN: I used a Linn drum machine quite a lot to write with. Luckily the digital drum didn’t sound too electronic, unlike the older Roland designs. The Linn drum has a distinctive sound like a good old drum-kit should.
NICK SMITH: We had the old Dramatis line-up back (Cedric Sharpley, Chris Payne, and RRussell Bell). They all came back for this album. I don’t know whether getting the old guys back was a sign of Gary having a new direction in mind or that he was confused about which direction to go in. The biggest change was that Gary had agreed to get in a co-producer-Bill Nelson, the ex Bebop Deluxe guitarist. Gary had had outside pressure put on him to lean in a more commercial pop style, I’m sure it was the record company who suggested that he use a producer. Bill came in but I thought it was a very strange thing because Gary has always run Gary Numan one hundred percent. For him to suddenly hand over the reigns to someone else must have been incredibly hard.
RRUSSELL BELL: We also got in a new bassist to replace Pino Palladino, an American bloke called Joe Hubbard. He was a very good player although his heart was in jazz. The choice of people was quite limited because there was hardly anyone in the same league as Pino Palladino.
GARY NUMAN: We got all these great jazz musicians on the album and there was little old me in the middle of it all on the electronic side. It’s almost like electro-funk-jazz. One thing that happened was that I started listening to jazz for the first time. I met Joe Hubbard, the bass-player, and his stuff was the first jazz I'd heard that had some sort of form to it. The other jazz I'd listened to just seemed to be solos and self-indulgent stuff, but his material had the same degree of technical skill and was actually composed of songs; things you could actually sing along to. I listened to a lot of Dick Morrissey’s music too, and that's why Warriors has such a jazzy feel to it.
GARY NUMAN: Warriors was my first flirting with a producer and what he did was very good. As a rule I don't like working with producers. I have my own vision and I don't like people to mess with it. Sometimes I've been forced to work with others and sometimes I felt the need to but, in the main, I prefer to be on my own. The biggest problem with record companies is that, despite all the bullshit and the crawly bum licking that goes on, they very rarely believe enough in the artist to leave him or her alone and just let them get on with it. I hate the political dance that goes on as soon as a record company gets involved. I need their power but I really don't need their opinions. I hate the way an album is watered down, diluted to appease the opinions from everyone that has one from the top man to the door man. They say a truly great album is a masterpiece of compromise but that's bollocks. How much more interesting and varied the music biz would be if we were all allowed to make what we wanted to make, mistakes and all. What I learnt early was that you can be as precious as you like in the studio when you’re making the music, you can think it’s the best thing that has ever been but the second you walk out the studio door to the rest of the world it’s just another f***ing piece of the product.
BILL NELSON: Gary asked me to do it, and I thought it'd be a challenge. He was under pressure from his record company at the time to use a producer, which he'd never done before. He was at a real watershed in his career and I think he knew that this LP was really crucial. It was very hard for him to relinquish control though, and I wouldn't say our working together had been entirely harmonious – I wasn’t used to someone who worked in such an obsessive way. If I was temperamental I would have probably walked out. I mean, I didn't have to do it, but I understood Gary was worried that if he did something too different it might alienate the hard core fans who've been with him all the way. He was aware that he needed to progress, not just for commercial reasons, but for himself - he's just had to take the gamble.
RRUSSELL BELL: The Bill Nelson thing was an interesting experiment; he played. some nice guitar on the record. We got him on the E-bow a couple of times.
GARY NUMAN: It wasn’t until I’d met people like Joe Hubbard and Dick Morrissey that I began to see how I could add jazz elements into what I was doing. I didn’t intend to move away from synthesisers but at the same time I wasn’t exactly waving a banner for them, I wasn’t going to stick with synth’s just because I was known for them. I thought by mixing the two together it would bring the synthesiser to a wider audience.
NICK SMITH: Gary also played a lot of guitar on the record, the big chords and stuff.
GARY NUMAN: I really started to get into the sax and I discovered Dick Morrissey, who played the intro to one of my favourite Peter Gabriel records “I Don’t Remember”, and had also recorded with Vangelis for the Blade Runner soundtrack.
The late DICK MORRISSEY: Gary wasn’t quite my first experience of electronic music because I’d worked with Vangelis. I didn’t really change my style of playing when I was with Gary; I just enjoyed myself, playing along naturally. I loved working with a fairly unconventional musician like Gary because I’m also self taught.
NICK SMITH: I’d just done an album with Morrissey/ Mullen and I think initially it was just another session for him. But Dick discovered he was really into what Gary was doing and developed a lot of respect for Gary. It worked well and they played together for several years. Dick’s a very nice, quiet, unassuming guy and Gary really liked that about him. Anyone who did get too big for their boots in the studio, it was always a case of, “thank you, goodnight.” It really didn’t matter who they were.
CEDRIC SHARPLEY: Dick Morrissey would play something straight off the cuff which would completely blow our heads off. In fact a lot of the recorded solos are first takes. He’s an extremely lyrical player who doesn’t do the obvious, technically correct things.
NICK SMITH: Dick Morrissey was a hundred percent into the music. He thought it was great because it was a challenge for him. He was a real jazzer and at the time a middle aged guy. So to be working with someone like Gary, it was just so different from anything he’d come across before. He was well into it and did some great stuff. Because they were from such different worlds they didn’t clash at all. Dick would listen to the track, get a vibe of it. Gary would suggest what he was wanted, and he did put over exactly what he wanted very effectively. Then Dick would jam to the track and we would record it. Gary would either get excited by it or he wouldn’t. Gary doesn’t like jazz music particularly but he did like the saxophone. We put a lot of effects on the saxophone playing, not every track, but a fair bit. Not to make it obscure but just to add to the sound.
GARY NUMAN: The saxophone gave me a new lease of life, Warriors was full of avant-garde jazz solos and I think it shows there’s no need to have a resistance to mixing conventional instruments and technology.
GARY NUMAN: At the time I thought the guitar in itself was no more interesting than it had ever been, what was interesting was the way you could integrate it with the new technology, which was what I tried to do.
RRUSSELL BELL: I loved working with Bill because he’s one of my favourite guitarists but he had a different idea of sound mixing to Gary. That’s why the clean, clinical Bill Nelson approach would have sounded quite odd. Bill mixed with great clarity, but Gary goes for power- more of a wall of sound with thunderous bottom end, always mixed at deafening volumes. I’d sometimes leave the studio with my ears ringing. Gary is so much in control in the studio there was always going to be problems.
RRUSSELL BELL: There was a lot more guitars on Warriors than the previous couple of albums. We still used lots of effects of course. Distortion, compression, flanging, phasing but still from a basic Marshall sound.
BILL NELSON: Gary and I had a very different way of working. I like to build songs out of different melody parts, all working off each other and going in opposite directions, Gary prefers to layer his songs in one direction so that he creates the kind of power he likes. I thought the tension created by our two approaches produced some really interesting results. We felt that we were really getting somewhere and producing something that was different for the both of us.
NICK SMITH: The three of us, Gary, Bill and myself had some great times during the six weeks we were together. I remember one day Bill buying a Porsche 911 in a Shepperton garage near the studio and we all jumped into our cars. Gary got into his Ferrari with our tape operator. While Bill and I went in my car. As we were going through Shepperton, we got pulled by the drug squad. They dragged Bill Nelson out, pushed him up against the wall, and got him to spread his legs, the works. Then they pulled Gary and me out, same deal. They didn’t find anything but it certainly gave us something to laugh about when we got back to the studio.
GARY NUMAN: To be with him in a room when he was playing was an honour. But sometimes it was really hard to persuade Bill to play the guitar because he was more interested in keyboards at the time. He did get the best out of RRussell though, I think RRussell’s playing on the album is the best he’s ever done.
CEDRIC SHARPLEY: Right from when I first started working with Gary we’ve mixed electronic percussion with natural, real time rhythms. Theres a bit of that on The Pleasure Principle, a lot more on Telekon, Dance and Warriors. Personally I’ve always enjoyed that mix of sound. I think they compliment each other extremely well. NICK SMITH: Gary’s always been the man in control, and in a way you daren’t suggest ideas to him. I must admit there were times during the making of the album when he wasn’t the easiest person to work with. He could fall into long silences and you didn’t know what he was thinking. But at the end of the day he was the one having the success and so, quite rightly, he was the one who was calling the tune. However, he didn’t get what he wanted from Bill. Later on during the making of the album they really started to fall out. Gary was Mr Jo Blunt, very focused on his own opinions and I think that did drive a wedge between them.
GARY NUMAN: Bill Nelson was also interesting in that it was amazing how badly we got on. I had been a great fan of Bill and Be Bop Deluxe for some time but when we finally worked together we were so different.
NICK SMITH: In the end Gary completely lost interest in the album, he would be outside playing pool with the band while Bill Nelson was working on stuff. Gary would come in a go “yeah, that’s fine” and then walk out again. From a selfish point of view I really missed Gary’s input. He used to drive me mad at time because I couldn’t see what he was trying to do until we’d finished the album’s but then it would all make sense. I had the greatest respect for him because nine times out of ten he would be right about his own stuff. So this was a tense situation and I was piggy in the middle. I wanted to be loyal to Gary but I liked Bill very much and I do think he’s a genius. It was a trying time and it led up to my reason why I left in the end, Warriors was the last album I worked on because I was torn terribly between the two. I used to think “I really don’t want to go to work today.” Bill took Gary in more poppy, upbeat direction, not so dark or hardcore. Gary hated it. Bill took away a cassette and went out of the door. I walked back into the control room and Gary said “right, wipe everything.” We didn’t get rid of everything but any ideas Gary didn’t like, he made us take them off, it took forever. Week after week. Basically he’d strip each song down and decide what he was going to use and what he was going to throw away. In some ways it was a relief to me because we were back as a working team but by that time I’d got fed up. After all that a significant amount of remixing went on. But I think the track listing would have been slightly different if we’d stuck with the Bill Nelson version of the album.
GARY NUMAN: Bill Nelson only did about half the original album really. I wrote a lot more material after he left.
RRUSSELL BELL: Gary wanted more bottom end so he remixed it basically. He put a lot of extra work in but in my memory most of the arrangements stayed roughly the same. Bill had made it into a pop record but I prefer the way Gary mixed it in the end. It got a lovely warm bassy feel to it.
GARY NUMAN: Bill told me that he genuinely believed that we received our inspiration from “beams” of some kind from across the cosmos. I thought that was complete crap and said that, at the time, I did it for fun, money, girls and all other trivial pursuits and benefits. He thought I was shallow, a point that I couldn't really argue against, and I thought he was a pretentious dickhead. I'm not quite as shallow now as I was then but I still don't believe in cosmic beams of inspiration. He was a fantastic producer and player though, very clever, very creative.
BILL NELSON: I think as Gary noted in his autobiography, we have a totally different approach to music, different views on what music is and isn’t. Whilst it was an interesting experience doing the album, there was a lot of friction in many ways, and I didn’t feel as comfortable as I might, I had no real desire to go further with it. Gary is Gary, and I am who I am. I do remember that I bought a Porsche 911 with the advance for working with Gary on the Warriors album though.
GARY NUMAN: To me, enjoying life comes a long way before art in terms of its importance so in that respect Bill would probably find me shallow. However, anyone that thinks that creativity comes from some f**king interstellar beam is a complete tw*t so I really don’t give a shit one way or another, It boils down to this, I don't see music as being very important in the great scheme of things therefore I don't see my own little part of it as being important at all. I use music to express whatever I feel like expressing but I do not believe that creativity is some projected beam of inspiration. This may make me seem shallow to some people that seem to think that they are blessed in some way because they are creative. However, there are a great many ways to judge a person’s depth of character and someone that makes such judgements about me on a brief acquaintance based on purely a most questionable philosophy is perhaps the shallowest person of all. It was a massive disappointment. I was a huge fan of Bill Nelson and had hoped that things would go differently. He was, and still is, a very talented man.
GARY NUMAN: Despite its surface gloss of futurism Warriors is really very inward looking. There’s some tremendous stuff on it, I particularly like the sax. I’ve worked with a lot of people such as Dick Morrissey but I never liked jazz, I’ve always hated it and still do by and large. But I’ve worked with musicians who liked it and they dragged me out to these nightclubs in New York to see the most awful bands and through that I became aware of some crossover groups who were really good- if not the music, then the individual players. So I started to work with them. The music itself has never gone jazz-funky but the influences are there. I think the albums cover could have been a bit better, Beggars told me that they could make the figure merge into the background. Instead it just looked like a cardboard cut out of me stuck onto a background. The 2002 CD re-issue had a new improved cover that looked more like the original was supposed to look
NICK SMITH: You could hardly sing along with the vocals on Warriors but that’s what he was doing at the time. I was concerned about whether it was the right thing todo but in a strange kind of way it has stood the test of time, so obviously it was. I have bands working here at the studio, young kids of 18 and 19 and they all want to know about Gary. I think it is because has always stood by his guns. He’s always taken the attitude “this is what I am, this is what I do, you either like it or loathe it.” And so if he wants to sing in a very perverse way, then that’s the way it’s going to be.
NICK SMITH: With the female singers on the album I think he was just trying to develop a new element to his sound. Tracy Ackerman from Shakatak was the first. She came in; Gary loved her voice and wanted to use it. I don’t know why Gary wanted girl singers, he never said. It’s like the synthesisers, the saxophone and the fretless bass- he discovers something and he goes for it. After Tracy he found Tessa Niles and loved her. He used to give them all carte blanch. He’d say to them “go out there and sing what you feel.” And they did. The song would be finished; all Gary’s vocals would be done. The girls were the last thing to be added to the album.
RRUSSELL BELL: It was always nice to have a few girls in the studio to brighten the day up a bit.
NICK SMITH: On Warriors Gary played virtually all the electronic stuff, which was still completely analogue at this stage. He hadn’t got into computers yet. Even on albums where there was a lot of musicians featured, Gary was still the main musician, as well as the writer, producer and singer.
GARY NUMAN: To me the Warriors album sounds like me, we’ve got all these great jazz musicians on the album and there’s little old me in the middle of it all on the electronic side. The Minimoog and the Polymoog were still like old friends to me then and I turned to them when I couldn’t think of what else to do. I used the ARP Odyssey more for bass things because it has more cut to it. My favourite synth at the time though was the Oberheim OB-Xa.
RRUSSELL BELL: Warriors is great because it’s got a bit of everything which is why it has such a weird sound to it. Gary just comes up with ideas as he goes along, layering it all up, and bouncing one thing off another. He used to knock out his songs incredibly quickly. He wasn’t one for worrying things to death which was good because it kept things fresh.
AFRIKA BAMBAATAA: There’s some cool jazz shit on Warriors.
“WARRIORS” Debut live performance: 1983 “The Warriors Tour / Glasgow.” Released as a single in September 1983.
GARY NUMAN: “Warriors” was about how I felt being a pop star more or less, I felt I was losing it and slipping down the ladder of success. The line “The ghost of the white faced clown” was a direct reference back to the old images that I’d had before and I wanted to establish that was all done and gone, I was over my Star Wars, Buck Rogers type period.
GARY NUMAN: I was introducing jazz heavier than ever, with off the wall solos and trying to widen the scope of electronics.
GARY NUMAN: Its one idea of what life could be like after the war, “Warriors” is just about people fighting to stay alive, it would be interesting to see what I’d be like in that situation. I’d had the Mad Max look in mind during the making of the album; I was just interested in the idea of people fighting for survival after the bomb had dropped not that that had anything to do with the album though.
GARY NUMAN: I had a lot of fun making the video for the single, sort of a mix between joy and terror. I think “Warriors” is probably by favourite song on the album.
Magazine advert.
“I AM RENDER” Debut live performance: 1983 “The Warriors Tour.”
STEVE MALINS: The self-depreciating “I Am Render” is one of the album’s few genuine Sc-Fi references although it is disguised to the point of invisibility.
GARY NUMAN: My brother John wrote that one. I think John is extremely clever as a producer and writer and his talent as a player is obvious from the concert tours, never a note wrong.
“THE ICEMAN COMES” Debut live performance: 1983 “The Warriors Tour.”
GARY NUMAN: This was aimed directly at the press ‘cos I just knew what they were gonna come out with when I started touring again. I really like the song trouble is I can’t do it live because I don’t have the right kind of band at the moment, I’d need to bring in another sax player, a fretless bass player and some girl vocalists. Incidentally, when I stopped using sax and backing singer’s fans seemed to leap up and down with delight. But that took away over half of my songs from the live set in that they have sax and backing singers on them. Lately people have been rumbling about doing some of that stuff again. It’s very difficult to know just how many people want to hear what songs and whether it’s worth the time and effort to rework those songs into new arrangements without sax and girl singers. And if I do, is that the sort of version they want? If not, it means I have to employ a sax player and girl singers to perform a handful of songs and then sit on their backsides for the rest of the show. I doubt I could afford that.
GARY NUMAN: The original idea for the image for Berserker came from the song “The Iceman Comes.”
“THIS PRISON MOON” Debut live performance: 1983 “The Warriors Tour.”
GARY NUMAN: One of my favourites from this album, the sax and the backing vocals were tremendous and the arrangement and production were just so good. On the Warriors album I found that Bill’s ideas didn’t really enhance things at all but on this one they were tremendous. I do like this song a lot actually.
GARY NUMAN: It’s about a prison colony on the moon, a little bit like the film “Escape From New York.” Inspired by one of my short stories.
STEVE MALINS: “This Prison Moon” is a fairly quirky song about emotional withdrawal, spiked with declarations about exactly what he did vote for-pleasure, sleep and “Power that I can keep.”
GARY NUMAN: Songs like “The Iceman Comes” and “This Prison Moon” had more to do with what I was going through than anything Sci-Fi. Lyrically I was already becoming overly focused on the career struggle. The album was written, in the main, in a hotel room in Jersey. My girlfriend had just left me. I’d been evicted fromthe house I was living in and I felt pretty much alone in more ways than one.
“MY CENTURION” Debut live performance: 1983 “The Warriors Tour.”
GARY NUMAN: I wrote the song "My Centurion" about a plane crash I was in because it was a very traumatic experience. The aeroplane was a Cessna 210. The laughter at the beginning was there because I used to have an ongoing joke with Nick Smith, the engineer, along the lines of “what disgusting, dangerous or unpleasant things would you do for a million pounds.” I think that intro to “My Centurion” is the tale end of one of those 'Would you?' questions.
“SISTER SURPRISE” Debut live performance: 1983 “The Warriors Tour.” Released as a single in October 1983
GARY NUMAN: I really like that song; I wanted to write something that was a little bit more aggressive. I was very disappointed when the “Sister Surprise” single failed; it was one of my favourites.
GARY NUMAN: The single version was a little different to the album one because in the time between the album and the single version of “Sister Surprise” coming out I’d thought of a better chorus for it.
GARY NUMAN: One of the single reviews for “Sister Surprise” said “Gary Numan is a worm and it’s about time somebody stamped on the witless bastard!” and that was it! I just wondered what they actually thought of the song.
“THE TICK TOCK MAN” “THE RHYTHM OF THE EVENING” Debut live performance: 1983 “The Warriors Tour.”
GARY NUMAN: About one or two of the groupies that I’d met.
“LOVE IS LIKE CLOCK LAW” Debut live performance: 1983 “The Warriors Tour.”
GARY NUMAN: Much of the album and many of the songs on Warriors are quite autobiographical.
STEVE MALINS: One of the key elements to the album was an obsession with time, in particular the loss of youth and a sense of time running out.
“POETRY AND POWER” (B-SIDE) Never performed live.
STEVE MALINS; This track as well as the “My Car Slides 1 and 2” tracks were originally included on the Bill Nelson version of Warriors.
GARY NUMAN: I got the title when I was in America, there was a car advert on the TV that said something about the “poetry and power” of such and such car, I just thought it was a really good title for a song. For a time, the album was going to be called that.
“MY CAR SLIDES 1 AND 2” (B-SIDES) Never performed live
GARY NUMAN: The engine sound at the beginning of “My Car Slides 2” belongs to my old Ferrari, a BB 512 Berlinetta Boxer, a car I now seriously regret selling.
STEVE MALINS: Bill Nelson’s distinctive; dream like playing is all over “My Car Slides 1 and 2.”
“GANGSTER STRUT”/ “NAMELESS AND FORGOTTEN” Original issue in 2003. Never performed live.
STEVE MALINS: The song was discovered on a session tape with the reference title “Gangster Strut.” The song was almost certainly an early session’s reject with Numan’s vocal’s toying with random words and an unfinished melody. Even so, Dick Morrissey is in fine form and there’s some nicely textured electronics. The track was abandoned but the lyrics were partly recycled and incorporated into both “Sister Surprise” and “This Is New Love.”
GARY NUMAN: I think that “Nameless And Forgotten” is a very appropriate title for this track.
STEVE WEBBON: On the subject of unreleased Gary Numan recordings, there are instrumentals, alternative versions and demos which we will probably make available on-line once there's a good, worldwide delivery platform.
be on my own. The biggest problem with record companies is that, despite all the bullshit and the crawly bum licking that goes on, they very rarely believe enough in the artist to leave him or her alone and just let them get on with it. I hate the political dance that goes on as soon as a record company gets involved. I need their power but I really don't need their opinions. I hate the way an album is watered down, diluted to appease the opinions from everyone that has one from the top man to the door man. They say a truly great album is a masterpiece of compromise but that's bollocks. How much more interesting and varied the music biz would be if we were all allowed to make what we wanted to make, mistakes and all. What I learnt early was that you can be as precious as you like in the studio when you’re making the music, you can think it’s the best thing that has ever been but the second you walk out the studio door to the rest of the world it’s just another f***ing piece of the product.
what Gary was doing and developed a lot of respect for Gary. It worked well and they played together for several years. Dick’s a very nice, quiet, unassuming guy and Gary really liked that about him. Anyone who did get too big for their boots in the studio, it was always a case of, “thank you, goodnight.” It really didn’t matter who they were.
GARY NUMAN:
good. On the Warriors album I found that Bill’s ideas didn’t really enhance things at all but on this one they were tremendous. I do like this song a lot actually.
the “Sister Surprise” single failed; it was one of my favourites.