It’s hard to believe it’s been more than three decades since the release of Gary Numan‘s The Pleasure Principle, the electronic-pop masterpiece that spawned massive hit single “Cars,” one of the defining tracks of the new-wave era. (The song has since been covered and sampled numerous times and been used in countless commercials, movies, TV shows, video games, etc.) To celebrate the highly influential album making in into the Billboard top 20 in 1980 and the recent multi-disc, 30th-anniversary reissue, Numan just kicked off a three-week U.S. tour that features him playing The Pleasure Principle in its entirety, along with songs from his entire career as well as tracks from forthcoming album Splinter. Numan will also be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our Q&A with him.
Numan: A few days ago I was watching a documentary written and presented by a friend of mine. He’s a very clever man and is able to grasp, on multiple levels, much of what I can only go, “Wow,” at. For example, in just our galaxy, the Milky Way, there are hundreds of billions of stars. And yet there are hundreds of billions of galaxies. Apparently, there may even be an infinite number of universes. Wow! You have to admit that’s pretty incredible stuff. Actually, if I’m honest, I usually say, “Wow,” then giggle. It’s all just so amazing and yet so impossible to truly comprehend “big” and “far” on that scale. I mean, my dog is big, and Australia is far away. But light years, billions of light years even? Wow! I have nothing to relate that to that can possibly make sense of it. I just know that hundreds of billions is a lot and that something a million light years away is very far away indeed. I sit through these many and various scientific documentaries, absolutely glued to the TV, oooing and aaahing at every amazing fact but knowing that most of it is going way over my head. I know this because after every programme I rush out to my wife to try and tell her all about it and realise that I can remember almost nothing. I do this not just out of a desire to share some fascinating information but because I know it annoys her intensely and it’s funny. Gemma is actually very intelligent; she has more qualifications than almost anyone I know but is unbelievably selective about what she chooses to learn about. If she has no interest or any use for certain kinds of information she just closes her mind to it. Hence the following gems of wisdom from the mouth of my dear wife: “If the Earth stops spinning it will fall into the mud.” “West is always to your left, no matter what way you’re facing.” “Space isn’t real, it was invented by Hollywood.” “All cars travel at one mile per minute.” “Clouds do not move with the wind, they go where they are needed.” “On a sunny day, the clouds go all the way to the sun.” I could go on, for hours. Every day is a trip into a beautiful alternate reality la-la land, perhaps even more fantastic than the universe itself.
Video after the jump.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0lxbzgwW7I
