Gary Numan – Dead Son Rising
Mortal
People sneered at former synth pop star Gary Numan when he started dating the head of his fan club in the mid-nineties. He had fallen out of favour since scoring two number one hits in 1979 (‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’ and ‘Cars’), clowned by the press, crippled by debt and seemed incapable of releasing anything other than arid funk rock. But it was Gemma O’Neill (who told her careers teacher that she didn’t need to attend his class as she was planning on marrying Gary Numan), now the mother of his three children, who deserves a lot of the credit for pulling him from the brink.
O’Neill was responsible for introducing him to American artists such as Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson, who deified him as a pioneer and persuaded him to abandon his disastrous ten-year flirtation with funk. She was also key to him being diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. This form of autism, to put it politely, has been a double-edged sword — while making him noticeably depressed, paranoid and isolated, it has also given him a fierce tunnel vision when it comes to music, something that has become thankfully evident in his work again over the last decade or so.
Dead Son Rising’s conception was sparked by demos written around his last two albums, Pure (2000), and Jagged (2006). There is a lighter, more melancholy, if no less sinister, touch on the instrumental ‘Into Battle’. This and the anthemic ‘Not The Love We Dream Of’ feature the unusual (for Numan) inclusion of acoustic instrumentation such as pianos and Spanish guitar. Tantalisingly, the spirit of Tubeway Army is even resurrected on ‘For The Rest Of My Life’ and there are colossal industrial bangers like ‘When The Sky Bleeds, He Will Come’, but overall the mood is one of lugubrious and luxurious electronic introspection created by an artist once again near the height of his powers. John Doran
