Encounters: Gary Numan & Mark Mothersbaugh

Nowadays, there’s nothing unusual about artists making deliberately odd music, but when Gary Numan and Mark Mothersbaugh got started during the 1970s, there was something defiant, even brave about their compositions. Numan got his start in UK new wave group Tubeway Army, birthing now-classic songs like “Down in the Park” and “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” before striking out on his own as a solo artist. Though he’s best known for 1979’s smash hit “Cars,” he’s never stopped creating, and continues both touring and making synth-heavy, sci-fi-obsessed music to this day.

Mothersbaugh’s catalog dates back even further: in 1973, he co-founded Devo, a group whose oddball pop songs, surrealist aesthetic and unabashed love of kitsch resulted in the occasional hit song – 1980’s “Whip It” being the most obvious – but also gave rise to an intensely devoted cult following.

Although the group has never stopped touring completely, Devo took an extended break from recording in the 1990s and 2000s, during which time Mothersbaugh founded Mutato Muzika, a production house that quickly found favor in Hollywood and has since been responsible for the music in countless films, television shows and video games. Looking back at their lengthy careers, both Numan and Mothersbaugh can be hailed as pioneers and champions of the weird, but perhaps what’s most impressive is their ongoing willingness to engage the mainstream and shift the cultural conversation – even slightly – to the left of center. In this excerpt from RBMA Radio’s Encounters, hosted by Frosty, Numan and Mothersbaugh compare notes, starting with Numan’s live show.

Mark Mothersbaugh

I remember seeing your little car and going, “That’d be cool to get to drive around on stage.” I was really impressed with that.

Gary Numan

They’re kind of like Spinal Tap things, aren’t they? You can use them once, it’s a mad little gimmick.

Mark Mothersbaugh

Then you use it twice and then you start feeling...

Gary Numan

I’ve just been in England and that little car – or the frame of it – is still there. It’s a sad little thing. It was a wheelchair with a little joystick controller. We put this frame on it to make it look futuristic. It was unbelievably Spinal Tap and I’m slightly embarrassed about it now. It was good fun. The only problem with it was that it used to live under the drum riser, so we had these two doors that would open up and my problem was getting it back in at the end of the show. I often didn’t make it and I would crash into something. It went from cool to being crap.

Mark Mothersbaugh

You could’ve out-Spinal Tapped Spinal Tap if...

Gary Numan

I did, more than once. I went under the front of the stage with it once, that was really embarrassing.

Frosty

Do you recall anything else that you guys might’ve encountered in the midst of a show where a wild idea backfired on you?

Gary Numan

I used to have a little radio controlled... we called them robots, but they’re actually just shapes. At first, we had tall pyramid shapes and they had little motors in them. They would move across the stage and spin around. We had a tall one that we called Big Al, for some reason, and that had a complete mannequin inside it. We just didn’t get it right and it was slightly top heavy and it would just fall over. Then people got to come out and pick it up and carry it off and it was just rubbish. We abandoned it after the first three shows. Things like that, that you think are going to look really cool and mysterious, sometimes just look stupid. It just ruins everything. I’ve had a few of those. Obviously, the car crashing was another one.

Mark Mothersbaugh

Yeah, there’s probably a long list for me, but the first thing that comes to my mind is circuit bent instruments. When you’re in a studio and you’re getting it one time, you can record it over and over. Trying to make those things behave on stage sometimes proved to be very embarrassing.

Gary Numan

I think anything with a lot of technical aspects to it is fraught with danger, even now. Things are incredibly reliable now compared to how they used to be, but I can’t help but feel for the people on stage [when something goes wrong]. But it is funny. It just is.

Mark Mothersbaugh

Yeah, it seems like more and more stuff is on tape now, too. Which I can understand because so many artists are doing calisthenics and cartwheels and still singing in perfect harmony.

Gary Numan

Yeah, amazing that. Who’d a thought?

Mark Mothersbaugh

It’s kind of funny when you see those blooper videos and they go off the stage yet they’re still singing up on stage somehow, even though they’re not there anymore.

Frosty

How did you get drawn into electronic music?

Gary Numan

For me, it was a really lucky moment. I wish I could say it was all a great big plan and how clever I am and all that, but it was nothing like that. I was in a three-piece punk rock band and I went to a studio to record what should have been my debut album as a punk band.

I go in and say hello to the studio manager while my mates were unloading the guitars and amps and so on. In the corner is a Minimoog synthesizer. I’d never seen a real one before and I am quite geeky so the dials and the switches, I’m into that. I said to the man, “Do you mind if I have a go very quickly, I know I haven’t paid for it or anything. I hadn’t rented it, but do you mind if I have go?” I pressed a key, I didn’t set it up, I just pressed it as it had been left. Luckily for me it had this amazing, huge sound. It sort of roared out the speakers and the room shook. You know, I had never heard anything like it in my life and just blew me away. That one moment just blew me away completely.

Mark Mothersbaugh

Thank God Captain and Tennille weren’t in there doing “Muskrat Love.” You might never of wanted to touch a synthesizer again.

Gary Numan

This is why luck plays such a big part in where we end up. Over the next three days, I very crudely reshaped my punk songs on the guitar into this other thing. I take it back to the record company who were horrified and didn’t want it at all. We had a big argument. I was convinced that electronic music was coming and it was going to be massive. Kind of ignoring the fact that Kraftwerk had already done it, but nonetheless, I thought that Kraftwerk and even the stuff Bowie had done...

Mark Mothersbaugh

It was intellectual and artsy and removed. They were like...

Gary Numan

Purely technical. I just wanted it to be a band. Just a band with some electronics in it. I still had bass guitar. I still had a drummer. I just had this new layer that I added to everything and it changed the emphasis of what the music was about. I think that’s why it worked and I think that’s why it crossed from being something experimental into something mainstream. Not because I had done anything clever, but because I stumbled across quite by accident this mix of something that people could relate to.

Frosty

What were you guys seeing when you first came upon synthesizers?

Mark Mothersbaugh

For me, I was already kind of bored with rock & roll by the mid-’70s. I was looking for something that I thought reflected what was going on in the world, what people were thinking about and where technology was and where humans were. I already felt like rock & roll by the mid-’70s had said everything important and it was really redundant. I was looking for synthesizers to help me make V2 rocket sounds.

My little brother, he was our first drummer, but he got really obsessed with being, before it was a term, a circuit bender. He used to take everything we had, every guitar, foot pedal and amp and mess around with the circuitry. He brought a lot of our curiosity about where electronics could take you. Luckily, my drummer and my bass player and my guitarist didn’t pay attention to me the whole time, so they kept a really strong rock thing happening so I didn’t take us all the way out into Kraftwerk land.

Gary Numan

I think it’s a fascination with sound. I think for a lot of people that work in electronic music, it’s sound first, not technique, not scales. It’s noises. Before I found synthesizers, even when I was in a punk band, I would have a guitar but I would often actually have it on a stand plugged into a variety of pillows on the floor and I would hit the guitar, bang it with the back of my hand and then just twiddle with something, recording it. You just find ways of making noises. It’s probably why I’m such a shit guitar player, I never really bothered to learn it. I can do a few chords enough to write some basic songs, but the noises that came out of it were cool.

I must’ve done hundreds of interviews with technical magazines about synthesis and how it all works. I don’t have a clue, I really don’t. I bluffed my way through a lot of it. I don’t care about how it works. I don’t care whether it’s digital or analog. I just care about the noises that come out of them.

Mark Mothersbaugh

Kids, they’re not weighed down with all that stuff. They’re just making art because they love it.

Gary Numan

I love it. My kids, all of my three kids, are massively interested in getting into music and I’m all for it. I think an awful lot of people get into the music business with this end result in mind and they don’t appreciate the journey. I’ve appreciated the journey, I think, far more than I’ve ever appreciated the success. The success when you have it, great. The success when you don’t have it, you realize it’s not actually that big a deal because it was so much fun making it and it’s been so much fun traveling all over the world touring it.

Frosty

Were you were set on the path doing art or music or was it just something that kind of innately was part of you?

Mark Mothersbaugh

For me, I was all the way through second grade and I was a problem child to the teachers. During the last week of school in second grade I got my eyes tested and they found out I was legally blind, and so I put on a pair of glasses and it was amazing. I saw rooftops, I saw clouds, I saw birds in the sky. I’d never seen any of these things and I was totally impressed so I started drawing and this teacher – who had spanked me, put me in the corner, sent me to the principal’s office, gave me detention, called me names because she just thought I was a jerk – said “You draw trees better than me.” It was the first time a teacher had ever said anything nice to me.

Music, to me at that time, was just something that was invented to torture me. I was taking organ lessons and I hated them. But then I saw The Ed Sullivan Show with The Beatles on it and it was like an electric bolt. I remember my friend who had an accordion came over to my house and we started playing music together. We were playing “A Hard Day’s Night” on an organ and an accordion. After about a week of trying to play this stuff I’m like, “Oh my God, I wasted my life learning the wrong instrument.” I remember I was totally depressed at 12.

About a week later The Beatles came on Ed Sullivan again and one of them is sitting at a card table and I’m like, “What’s going on? John Lennon’s sitting at a card table?” Then they came in close and it was a Vox Continental and I was like, “Oh my God. It’s a keyboard!” It was not only a keyboard, but the black keys were white and the white keys were black. That was insane. I could not believe it. I was like, “Oh my God. I’ve never seen a keyboard like that. That’s amazing. Of course The Beatles would have the best keyboard in the world and he’s playing it.”

You know, I’d never heard a Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard, so in the middle where he does that solo with his elbow I’m like, “My teacher Mrs. Fox never told me you could use your elbow to play.” I couldn’t believe it. After that, I just bugged my parents mercilessly until they got me this $278 Farfisa portable organ and I started my journey because I knew what I wanted to do.

Gary Numan

My mom and dad used to play records a lot when I was a kid so I was always surrounded by it. My mother bought me a little acoustic guitar, I think when I was four or five, and I would play various tunes on it. My grandmother would always get slightly frustrated with me, “Why don’t you play anything that we know?” “Well, I am not interested in playing other people’s stuff.”

Frosty

Are there things outside of music that feed what you do musically?

Gary Numan

For many years, I was an acrobatic display pilot. I would do air shows all over Europe, I was flying World War II airplanes. I was in a formation team. I was an instructor for that for many years, and then I was an examiner for the civil aviation authorities for a few years, so it became a big deal for me, but it was an escape from music. It never worked hand in hand at all.

I found that the problem with music, if you can call it a problem, is that everything you do is judged by other people’s standards and so there is no constant. There is no definitive: this is good or bad. And being number one makes no difference. That is just you luckily connecting with a lot of people, it doesn’t actually make a good song a good song or a bad song a bad song. I suffered from that quite a lot I think. I missed having a yard stick, I missed having something permanent that you could gauge yourself to other than your own personal opinion or someone else’s dubious opinion.

With flying, if you could do that thing in the airplane, you were unquestionably a really good pilot and nobody could take that from you. You have the fact of that. The truth of that. I threw myself into it wholeheartedly for more then a decade and absolutely loved it. I became part of a team, I became part of something that was very, very, very small and so you became very close to people that were in it. You literally trusted your life to other people every weekend, they make a mistake you will die. It had such a different level of challenge and therefore reward and satisfaction and it had nothing to do with money or career or fame or ego or nothing like that. It was a completely different set of rewards and challenges compared to what I was used to in the music business and I absolutely loved it.

I neglected my music career for many, many years. It coincided with when it was at its all-time low, so there was probably a reason for that. Unfortunately display flying is extremely dangerous and over the years pretty much everyone I knew was killed doing it. Almost everyone I knew except for maybe two people that I was close to, and so the realization of that started to hit home after a while. My wife did not want me to do it anymore. We then talked about having a family. It seemed an incredibly reckless and dangerous thing to be doing if you had children and so I pulled back out of that, and that coincided with a renewed love of music.

I got into music for all the right reasons. Nothing to do with fame and fortune, just loving music and noises. I know I became completely corrupted by fame and the desire to keep the career going for those reasons and so my songwriting changed. My songwriting became vehicles to try to re-establish the glory that I had before, which is an awful reason for writing songs and I became really ashamed of myself.

I met Gemma and she was able to help me understand the mistakes I made musically and why I was writing shit and I was able to reattach the attitudes that I’d had when I was first doing it. I went right back to doing it for those reasons again, and suddenly it’s all glaringly obvious in a way that it was never obvious before and the music was suddenly so much better, heavier, darker, more interesting. I think the first album I made after that was in 1994, Sacrifice, and I’ve kept that attitude ever since. If I’m working on a song and I think it will sound great on the radio, I erase the bloody thing. I erase it because that attitude sucks. I don’t ever want to think that way again, ever.

Mark Mothersbaugh

The hardest thing about it all was the touring. You have this great two hours on stage and then basically the next 22 hours you’re getting to the next venue. Flying commercially is so un-fun, it’s so un-glamorous. Then you get to the new city, you check into another hotel, you take some stuff out of your suitcase, then you get ready to go to sound check and then you get to do a show. It’s like 22 hours where you feel like you’re wasting your time. When I got offered a chance to do soundtrack work where I’d just get up early and write all day I was like, “I love this job.”

Gary Numan

I do understand that point of view completely, it’s just that I’ve gone the other way to it. It is true that the two hours that you do on stage are very cool, but all the people I tour with are my closest friends in the world. And I actually love sitting in the back of the bus watching the world go by, I really do. We don’t fly. We have these lovely big buses and we’re all in it together, everyone’s good fun and we just spend the whole day making each other laugh. You get somewhere, you have something to eat, our meet-and-greet, we do our sound checks, we do our gigs, these are all things which I’m in a band for.

After the gig I’m probably a bit drunk and it’s fun for a while to fall over or whatever you’re going to do, get back in the bus, you have a bit of a party for the next few hours until everyone just gives up, it’s like a schoolboy’s outing for weeks and weeks in that time. The only bad side of it is I really miss my kids when I’m away, so now I make the tours shorter than they were before. They’re two to three weeks where before they’d have been two to three months.

I’m now thinking if I could keep this going forever then that’s what I want to do. I’m 58 now and I see those latter years rushing towards me where I may not be able to do the touring thing as much as I would want to and I’m really...

Mark Mothersbaugh

Well, as long as you have adult diapers in the backstage you’re fine.

Gary Numan

[laughs] It’s going to come to that, I think it will. I just want to keep it going as long as possible, yeah.

Frosty

Mark, were you aware of Gary’s music growing up?

Mark Mothersbaugh

There was a handful of people that we looked at and thought, “Oh, that’s pretty great.” It was a small handful because there was a lot of people that you could judge very harshly [laughs] and I was not so generous back in the old days, but we really liked you guys.

Gary Numan

But you were clearly doing it before I was. I get such a lot of credit for being a pioneer and I’m really uncomfortable with that because I’m very aware of how many people that were doing it before I was. Certainly in the UK there was Ultravox and Human League. Ultravox was on their third album when I was making my first. They were so advanced in the sonic structure of their songs and how they integrated electronics with conventional instruments where I was still fumbling around, yet I get credit for starting this whole thing.

Mark Mothersbaugh

I think you should be okay with taking that credit because here’s the thing: Ultravox were doing very interesting things leading up to your album, but your album inspired millions of kids that didn’t know about Ultravox or might not’ve been that interested in them because maybe you did it better than they did it in a way, or you had a very succinct aesthetic. Listening to you talk now is very interesting for me because I was always curious how much of it you had thought about ahead of time. The way you talk about it, it sounds like you’re a product of Ultravox too, but you focused it in a way that they never really did and that’s pretty great. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over Ultravox because the people that know them love them and kids now, they can go, “Ultravox? Who’s that?” And they can go look it up on Wikipedia and then they’ll find out and they’ll know who inspired you, you know?

Gary Numan

I used to have a way of looking at it, I used to think of the whole thing as a machine and all the different parts had to be going in the right direction for that machine to function, and that included music, lyrics, the way you looked, the way you moved, the way you talked in interviews. And that’s the only thing I had with Ultravox. I saw Ultravox on a TV show not long before I did a TV show, and as much as I love them and as much as I’m a John Foxx fan, it didn’t look right for what they were singing about, for the music that was behind them. It was a huge lesson in how you’ve got to think it all through, all of it, even down to the way you use the camera. You watch Top of the Pops and everyone singing is staring at the camera. The little light will come on the camera and they’ll look at that one. I used to think that was so naff. “Don’t do that, don’t do that.”

I used to go to concerts all the time, not really to experience the music, although that was a part of it, but to see how they used the lights, what worked, what didn’t. How did they work the crowd, did they talk a lot, did I find that annoying that they talked a lot, if there was a song that a crowd that was really going for it and the other side didn’t? Did they concentrate on the safe side or did they work the other side? It was like going to school. Going to a gig was like going to school to see how other people do it. Listening to records was much the same thing. It’s still very difficult to listen to records without analyzing it and pulling it apart.

Mark Mothersbaugh

That’s kind of what you lose by being in the business. You lose that innocence that the average person on the street still has when they hear a new ablum. I’m the same way. I don’t watch TV anymore because I wrote so much music for TVI just watch old black and white movies because I can still get into those. But when I watch new movies I go, “What did they do that for?” But see, Alzheimer’s, that could be the solution. [laughs] We can only hope that it shows up in time.

Gary Numan

Something to look forward to. [laughs]

Header photo: Johnny Brewton