Embracing the Darkness: Gary Numan on his favourite Depeche Mode album
Falling somewhere between David Bowie’s Martian androgyny and Kraftwerk’s robotic desensitisation, Gary Numan established himself as one of Britain’s most progressive pop stars in the late 1970s. He began his professional career in 1977 as the frontman of Tubeway Army, with whom he released two albums and the enduring 1979 single ‘Are Friends Electric?’.
Just a few months after releasing his most successful Tubeway Army single, Numan soared to new heights with the debut album of his solo career, The Pleasure Principle. The album is home to the singer’s most iconic hits, including ‘Cars’, ‘Metal’, Complex’ and ‘M.E.’, setting the stage for a successful run of new releases and international tours through synth-pop’s heyday in the early 1980s.
Numan was one of the earliest proponents of the UK synth-pop wave, setting the tempo for artists like OMD, Depeche Mode and Eurythmics. Though he kept up with the blossoming pack in the early 1980s with memorable releases like the experimental Dance and I Assassin, Numan began to run out of steam, reaching a nadir in the early 1990s.
In 1991, Numan released the lacklustre Outland, a deviation into funk and dance music that didn’t resonate with his devoted fanbase. However, two years later, he released Machine + Soul, an album most critics and fans deem to be at the very bottom of the pile. By Numan’s own admission, this tenth solo studio LP “was the shittest album I’ve ever made by quite a margin”.
During Numan’s downward trajectory throughout the 1980s, budding synth-pop innovators Depeche Mode ran on an inverse plane. The Essex-born group led by Martin Gore and Dave Gahan set out with kitsch radio-friendly compositions like ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ and ‘New Life’. But over time, the group migrated to darker territory of conceptual depth and sonic originality.
The tide seemed to turn for Depeche Mode in 1986 with the arrival of Black Celebration, an early masterpiece succeeded by the commercially successful Music for the Masses. These albums foreshadowed an even more critically prosperous run for the band through the 1990s, during which they released Violator, Songs of Faith and Devotion and Ultra and became a global stadium-filling sensation.
As far as Numan is concerned, Depeche Mode struck their zenith in 1993 with Songs of Faith and Devotion. In a 2012 interview, the singer picked out some of his favourite albums, during which he described Songs of Faith and Devotion as “absolutely pivotal” due to its role in inspiring his return to form following Machine + Soul.
At the time, Numan was in a sticky spot. “I had massive money problems and had huge debts, and there was no obvious way that I was going to pay them off,” he remembered. “I thought I was finished, and I didn’t have a record deal.” Fortunately, he met his future wife, Gemma O’Neil, around that time, who introduced him to the new Depeche Mode album.
Numan noted that O’Neil sorted him out “musically” and introduced him “to things that I should have been aware of”. Depeche Mode inspired Numan’s embrace of darkwave rock in his 1994 album Sacrifice. Although the album wasn’t a runaway success, he found the experience creatively liberating and revolutionary. “I thought [Sacrifice] wouldn’t come out because I didn’t have a deal, and I did it pretty much as a hobby,” he said. “I did it on my own little home studio. I did everything on it myself, and that was partly down to Gemma’s pushing because [before that] I’d be using guitar players and backing and all kinds of people.”
At first, Numan lacked the confidence to release his new music as he hadn’t depended on his own instrumental talents previously. However, with O’Neil’s support, he decided to take the plunge. “She explained to me that what I’d been doing, in an attempt to make my albums more musical, I’d actually taken out the Gary Numan part of them,” Numan said. She told him that he “might not be the best guitar player ever,” but that what he did had “an appeal to certain people” and that he “should be proud of” himself.