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