Released September 1992.
JESS LIDYARD – Gary’s uncle and original Tubeway Army drummer.
STEVE MALINS – Gary Numan PR and biographer.

GARY NUMAN: Machine And Soul went in the wrong direction for all of us which, in some ways, has probably turned out to be a good thing as it forced a complete re-think on my part with a much better result in Sacrifice. I drowned out my own vocals with incredibly gifted female vocalists. I tried to move each album into a variety of different styles. I changed the way I looked every year. What I hadn't realized is that the way I play and sing, with all its faults, is what people had first turned on to. I had slowly but surely taken out the flawed ingredient that had given me the style and sound that had worked so well for me before. I'd taken out me to a very large degree. The early 90's were a desperate time for me. I had huge money problems, the career was pretty much down the toilet, I had lost my way completely musically, my private life was miserable and my confidence was gone. A friend came in and helped finish the album as I had ground to a halt with it. It now ranks as the worst album I ever made, by far. After that, I was lucky enough to get through my money troubles. It was at the end of that I had a really serious rethink about everything to do with why I was in the business and why I was writing and if I wanted to carry on doing it, and so on. I went back, as much as possible, to writing songs for fun, the way I had when I started, and started looking for sound again. I just went right back to the way I was when I was a teenager, first time writing songs, with all the enthusiasm for it. I started trying to be innovative again and using sounds in more interesting ways than I had been doing. So what I'm writing now, and have been for the last few years, is very much the way I wrote when I first started. It's the bit in between that got a little bit
misguided.

GARY NUMAN: The way I’d describe it is I panicked in slow motion. I did panic. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what I wanted to sing about, or write about. I just lost my direction very badly. I was in a really bad relationship as well. And all these things sorta peaked at once around '90-92. Everything came to a head -career, private life, money - the whole thing. It was a terrible year.

JESS LIDYARD: They were very tough times and I think, to a degree, they brought Gary down to earth a bit and he had to try a lot harder.

GARY NUMAN: Thing is at the end of the 80’s, I felt like I was drifting and what I was writing then was nothing compared to now. It was really a lack of confidence, and as I became successful, I could bring people in to help me out and that took away “me.” I was hardly on the record. I’d run out of money, I’d run out of ideas and I was listening to the wrong advice. That album was a watered down piece of s**t. My creativity was at an all-time low and I was selling no records.  I’m ashamed to admit it but when I ran out of money at the end of the 80’s, early 90’s I was selling so few records my career was fucked and I was so desperate I would have done Osmond’s covers. You go such a long period with no success and eventually you think, I wonder if what they've been saying is right. I wonder if I should do a dance track or if I should do a cover. As soon as you do that, you're gone, because you've lost your own sense of purpose. From that moment on, everything you do is diluted with outside opinion. And that's what happened to me. I’m not saying it was bad music; it was done with good intentions and done as best as we could. But in terms of style, whether or not it was the sort of thing I should have been doing, it just wasn’t.

GARY NUMAN:  I no longer knew what I wanted to sing about or to write about. I had no idea of what sound I wanted or what style I had. Nothing was natural, everything was contrived and so it felt stale and lifeless. I went from depression to depression as I tried to write but had no heart for it, no enthusiasm. Everything sounded awful and I went through a period of over six months where I threw away every single thing that I'd written or played. That destroyed what confidence I had left and so things went from bad to worse. I had been without any success for so long and without a friend to whisper words of encouragement and enthusiasm that I began to listen to advice. A major mistake. I began trying to write things that had little bits of everybody's advice sewn into them. I lost myself trying to keep others happy, because I lost my faith in going my own way. It was a desperate time and I will never get over it completely.

GARY NUMAN: I also realised that, as the career was slowly going down the toilet in the late 80’s so my song writing had become little more than a series of desperate.attempts to recapture that former glory. I sold out. Not out of greed I hasten to add but out of misguided necessity. I was going broke and dragging my family down with me. We needed money to survive. We had massive debts and I bottomed-out creatively and personally. We were really struggling to sell tickets, we’d drop the size of the venues and we’d drop them again and then again and we always seemed to be just that little bit behind the problem. We were doing some venues that were really small, tiny compared to what I had previously done. And even then we were only doing about 30 to 40% ticket sales and I thought that this was probably it; I remember one tour I thought was just terrible it was getting really embarrassing not really for me but for the fans. It felt like it was finished.




GARY NUMAN: Musically the album was acceptable but it had very little Numan about it. I also think it lacks heart. A lot of good playing, certainly well produced and I would agree some good songs. Machine And Soul felt like a blind man with a good dog. Travelling well but seeing nothing.

GARY NUMAN: I ended up leaning on a chap by the name of Kipper and eventually put out an album that was not very “Numany.” I find this kind of problem even harder these days as I now do virtually everything short of driving the truck to the shop with the CD's in the back. I don't always feel as though I can spare enough time to just lose myself and wonder the way I would like to because there are just so many jobs to do.


GARY NUMAN: I was getting into the rock scene at this point; I was very impressed
with bands like Faith No More and Def Leppard.  “Machine And Soul” was my first move in to the rock area, I know I’m never gonna be like Def Leppard because I don’t have the voice for it but I did find it the most exciting music around. The thing about the rock scene is that they were writing songs.

GARY NUMAN: I wanted to take the elements from the different styles I liked and
turn out something that had power, excitement and the energy of rock, the more interesting grooves from dance and the quality of sound you might find on a Prince recording.


GARY NUMAN: When we issued this track as a single it slipped by with hardly a ripple beneath the waves of obscurity.



GARY NUMAN: I expected “The Skin Game” to not do very well when it emerged as a single, sad to admit it was the same old problems. Lack of Radio play.  Neither this track nor the Isolate compilation album did very well when released in the spring of 1992.

STEVE MALINS: I think “The Skin Game” is one of the best songs on the album, certainly the most European sounding song on the album.


GARY NUMAN: I co wrote this track with Kipper.

STEVE MALINS: “Generator” was absolutely contemporary for 1992.


STEVE MALINS: “Poison” features quite a haunted lyric from Gary.


GARY NUMAN: I don't like “Cry” particularly but I wouldn't say it was my least favourite.

GARY NUMAN: The early versions of the songs (“Wonder Eye” and “Cry Baby”) were considerably different to the album versions. I was considering releasing “I Wonder” as a single at one point. The track was to have been included on the now aborted Ballads albums.

GARY NUMAN: “Love Isolation” started out being for my mum but I didn't think I was doing her justice and so it kind of evolved into just a general ballad. The bits that were meant for my mum were the chorus sections “Call me +”, “You were there +” and the “You cried for me” bit, but the rest was definitely not for my mum, those bits were written for someone that used to be a friend of mine.


GARY NUMAN: Both these tracks featured whispered vocals. I later used this idea for the Pure sessions in 2000.



GARY NUMAN: I thought my version of “U Got The Look” was ok. I wasn’t so keen on “1999” though; I only did those two songs because I.R.S. made me anyway. IRS was not keen on releasing “U Got The Look.” I think the reason they gave was that it was too close to the original. I was a bit disappointed, not because I wanted that song released particularly, but it was IRS who had bent my arm to do a cover in the first place and then they didn't use it. I would rather not have done a cover at all. Maybe it was just as well though because I ran out of ideas and confidence totally on this album and I needed that song to make up the numbers. I tried to think of songs and an artist that would be acceptable to them commercially and acceptable to me musically. Prince was a hastily arrived at compromise to be honest. I was a fan of his Diamonds And Pearls period and I'd always likes 'U Got The Look'. If IRS hadn't insisted though I would never have done a cover of anybody not just Prince. As a songwriter to be told by your record company to record somebody else's song is very demoralising. I'm told that Prince used to play “Cars” as one of his sound check songs but I have no idea how true that story is. As for my influence on Prince I've not noticed it to be honest.






Special note: these CD’s began appearing throughout the 1990’s and early 00’s.
STEVE WEBBON – Beggars Banquet Records.

STEVE WEBBON: My understanding is this, without giving the full story, Gary was miss-lead into licensing 50 odd tracks for an advance lump sum way back in the late 80's. However, it appears that this has been interpreted so that Receiver (or any other company that has subsequently owned them) can do what the hell they like with those tracks without any further payment to Gary. Unfortunately these companies have a lot more money to fight a court case than Gary so the same tracks are constantly recycled as there are no artist royalties to pay; cheap artwork and they are all mastered from other CD's – i.e. low costs. The Fall also has the same problem and appears to release 4 albums a year.

GARY NUMAN: Apart from being crap, they are, in our opinion, illegal and not part of our agreement at all. So I say to fans don't complain to me, complain to them, and best of all just don't buy the f*****g stuff. Anyone that took note of my NuWorld Internet site would have noticed our own warning about some of the releases so I think we've tried to do our part in warning people away from them. Trojan Records are the people that did the dirty in the first place and had no right to licence the music on. Nothing has been resolved as the contract was worded loosely enough for it to mean that legal action would be drawn out with an uncertain outcome. Expense prohibits us from taking it any further legally but we are trying to advise all fans that these albums have nothing they want on them, are complete rip-offs and are doing me no good whatsoever.

STEVE WEBBON: These releases are the main reason why Beggars (as well as Eagle and Artful for that matter) have had a hard time getting proper releases into the stores. They are aggressively sold in, have titles like “Down In The Park” (though as live versions), so the casual buyers can't tell the difference between these and the original albums. Consequently the racks are full of Numan recordings that don't sell so the stores won't take any others. Beggars, Artful and Eagle have worked together to leave space between releases but Trojan just keep plugging and pumping them out and confusing everyone.

GARY NUMAN: Most of these compilation albums are nothing to do with us and are released by other record companies. They are a complete rip off with misleading sleeve notes and the tracks that we own were tricked out of us by shady people. Working back catalogue is often a good way of rekindling interest in an artist but just lately it's gone crazy. We do not approve of any of the recent compilations with the exception of The Premier Hits and the Exposure albums.


Released 1986 to 1992.
One thru Eleven.

GARY NUMAN: These double interview albums covered my life from my schooldays to the present day. I just wanted to put out my side of things, so much that is written about me is complete bollocks especially by people I have never met. It was the only way I could provide an answer to what the press had to say about me. The conversational topics covered every aspect of my career that I considered important. I just thought it was a fairly novel way of doing an autobiography.