Illinois Entertainer March 2014 | Page 26

H A P P I L Y A S P L I N T E R E D s a licensed pilot, veteran New Waver Gary Numan used to live to fly, and fly to live. Even though it nearly killed him a few times, like the pitch-black night he was over the Pacific, halfway from San Francisco to Hawaii, when his fuel line froze, sending his stalled WWII-vintage plane hurtling toward the ocean. It thawed just in the nick of time, the engine sputtered back to life, he attained some altitude. And it choked all over again. "It was almost like a film script when it happened the first time," sighs the daredevil, who turns 56 this month. "And it was so dark, you knew the sea was coming. But you couldn’t actually see it." Numan doesn't fly anymore. But almost drowning is not the reason. "A number of things happened, really," explains the singer, who's come out swinging with the dark, Victorian-creepy new comeback Splinter (Songs From a Broken Mind) – he's even dressed like Jack the Ripper on the sepia-toned cover). For instance, he and his wife Gemma began having children – Raven, Persia, and Echo. Tired of their native gray Britain, the family moved to sunny Los Angeles in 2012, where they regularly fraternize with longtime supporter Trent Reznor and his clan. "Within a week of arriving in California, he invited us over to one of his children's birthday parties, and we brought my children and met all of his friends – he's really made the transition much more pleasant than it would have been otherwise," Numan says of his Nine Inch Nails benefactor. But the man who achieved worldwide success with his quirky 1979 smash "Cars" and its inventive parent album The Pleasure Principle had a more serious motive for climbing out of the cockpit. "More people carried on being killed," he sighs. "I was in a flying group called The Harvard Formation Team with six WWII airplanes, and of those six people that started it, four of them were killed in crashes. I did a twoship formation aerobatic routine with a teammate that we used to take all over Europe, but he was killed in a crash – not with me, with somebody else. Even the man who taught me my aerobatics was killed in a crash. So flying went from being something very exciting to something really sad. You'd go to an air show every year, and there would be less and less people that you knew." Once it finally dawned on Numan that his number was bound to come up eventually – and to please his worried missus – he grounded himself. He tried piloting little Cessnas for a bit, then gave that up, too. "When you've been an air display pilot for 15 years, normal flying just seems so tame," he confesses. "Flying was everything to me, it was my entire life. The reason I did music was to pay for my flying. 26 illinoisentertainer.com march 2014 By Tom Lanham But I love my wife very much, and I didn't want her to be frightened all the time that I might not come back. So I sold the airplane and haven't flown at all now for a couple of years. I think my license has even lapsed!" Earthbound. It's a good metaphor for Splinter, which the ex-Tubeway Army leader made after confronting some harsh everyday truths about himself and his art. The keyboardist recruited NIN guitarist Robin Finck and producer Ade Fenton, and arrived at an industrial-strength reimaging of his original electronic sound. The album opens with the thunderously clanking processional "I Am Dust," then accelerates into a marching "Here In the Black," with the singer hiss-whispering lyrics like "Here in the black there's a feeling of loss but it's hungry and restless…It's dark and I'm lost, there's a breath in the wind and the breath is malicious." Ominous? Hey – the guy is just getting started. There's further funereal pall shrouding "Lost," "Love Hurt Bleed," "A Shadow Falls on Me," "We're the Unforgiven," and a windswept closing ballad "My Last Day," in which he attempts to prepare the children for his eventual death. It's all firmly rooted in some rather grim, appropriately Gothic reality. Continued on page 47