Music2deal’s Richard Rogers interviewed electronic legend Gary Numan last month in Oberhausen, Germany before a sold out gig. The successful European tour followed Numan’s UK number 2 album ‘Savage’ released last September on BMG Records that included the huge single ‘My Name Is Ruin’. ‘Savage’ is Numan’s biggest charting album for 36 years.

Gary has just contributed the Foreword to Richard’s new book ‘Depeche Mode – Violator: The Ultimate A&R Guide’ due out in June through Glamour Puss Publishing.

In the first of a three part interview Gary discusses the current tour and a forthcoming UK tour in November with a full orchestra behind him that will see the light as a new DVD and live album.

 

Richard Rogers: Hi Gary, welcome to Music2deal. Music2deal is a platform to help everyone connect with professional music industry people in all areas of the music business whether as an artist looking for a manager or vice versa, songwriters looking for publishers, managers hunting for songwriters, agents, labels or publishers looking for songs etc.

Gary Numan: Hi. Music2deal is German based yeh but international.?

RR: Yes that’s right, it’s based in Hamburg. There are over 30 platforms internationally.

GN: It’s a great idea, I didn’t know there was anything like it.

RR: Firstly, let’s talk about the new album from last year ‘Savage’.

GN: That came out in September but I was doing promo for it from August so that’s been my entire life for quite a while. The current European tour finished March 29^th but we’re halfway through so by the time we are all done by the end of November there will have been about 120 shows for the album. We’re about 60 odd shows into the tour. So there’s a big American tour to do and then a small UK tour with an orchestra. Then there will be a European tour but the tour with the orchestra should be pretty cool. It’s been a bit of a headache setting that up but I think it’s worth the aggro.

RR: Will there be a live album culled from that? The reason I ask is that OMD did some shows with an orchestra a couple of years back and they went down a storm and it came out as a DVD.

GN: Yeah I think so, probably a live album and DVD. The orchestra that are going to work with me are called the Skaparis Collective and they are based in Manchester and they’ve done one song already. It’s kind of like a demo to see if the idea worked and to see if their idea of what I was after worked and it was proper tingles up the spine stuff. The difficult part has been the cost of it, it costs a fortune to cart an orchestra around so i’ve been trimming it back with the orchestra people. How small can we make this before it stops being as powerful as it’s meant to be. We’re there now but it’s shocking the expense of everything for this.

RR: I can understand this entirely. I did a World Cup Football album one year for a record company and we did everything with the Lubjana Symphony Orchestra just to get costs down.

GN: Actually it was suggested to me by a friend that I could use an orchestra in Prague. One of the biggest costs is the accommodation for the hotels and the travel for the flights and from the airport onward costs and so on. It was kind of financially spiralling and going round and round. There were two ways really to get everything down to a price more affordable and you could make the fans pay for it by whacking up the ticket prices but that didn’t seem fair or secondly you cut down the number of people you are using so it gets to the point where it becomes more manageable. I think we started off with 54 people and that doesn’t even include my band and now we are down to just over 20 odd not including my band. So we will end up with over 30 people on stage which is quite a bit isn’t it.

RR: It’s a hell of a lot of people! I think I remember seeing Duran Duran play with a string section once at the London Dominion but that was only three or four extra persons.

GN: Well I was watching Delores O’Riordan of The Cranberries the other day (she recently died) and they did a tour with an orchestra so I think i’m the last person to do it! I think some music lends itself to the orchestra idea more than others and I believe because there is more of a filmic sense to some of the stuff that I’ve done in the very beginning and more so with my recent music that it fits well with my music. If the demo song they sent me is a guide to the rest of the material then it really is fantastic, I love it. It is going to be a lot of tracks from the new album, a lot of that and then selected songs from further back in my career.

RR: Another new album or from the ‘Savage’ album?

GN: From ‘Savage’. It can be awkward. To be as artistically cool as you wanna be. ‘Savage’ comes from a book i’ve been writing so what i’d like to do next is finish that book and get that done. However it’s a long long way from being finished and will take a long time and all the time i’m sitting at home not earning any money and that is the problem as it were as i’m still working hand to  mouth. I’m not sitting there with millions stuck in the bank that I can live on so I need to keep working and don’t have the luxury of sitting for six months or a year where I can lose myself in writing a book which would be nice to do from a creative point of view but is totally unworkable. So really I do need to get on and work on a new album whenever I decide to do that and somehow I need to squeeze all these things in. There is another big project, which i’m not allowed to talk about at the present but it’s massive for me and a huge opportunity and huge fucking pressure and possibly that’s happening this year as well. It is busy but i’ve just got to keep on earning money. It’s kind of a difficult thing to juggle around in keeping on wanting to do the things you want to do creatively and doing the paid things that keep you living really while you are doing these other things. Let’s face it, it could be worse as things are getting much better. It’s been a really good year this one. Last year was a good year.

RR: I should think so with your biggest charting album for over 35 year in ‘Savage’ charting at number 2 in the UK and only kept off the top by the new Foo Fighters album. Who of course are fans of yours and covered one of your tracks.

GN: Yeh, it’s been an amazing year so far even better than last year and it looks as though it’s going to carry on pretty well. So it all looks like it’s building pretty good with the album and on the live front.

RR: Well I saw you twice last year at the Standon Festival near Stansted in the UK and playing a decent sized venue in Cologne at the Essigfabrik and the new material went down a treat. I think Chris Payne turned up for that show (ex Numan band, the group Dramatis and writer of the Visage hit Fade To Grey).

GN: Yeh he was actually.

RR: I worked a tiny bit with Chris as a non paid roadie back in the very early 80’s when he had this band called Kalenda Maya. We used to hump all this equipment to a place in Henfield after playing venues like the Bridge in Shoreham or Worthing or Angmering in Sussex. The band and he would give me a lift back to Burgess Hill. I bought this cassette tape off him (I can even remember the song ‘Fine Art’) and on the inlay card it said ‘Kalenda Maya – You’ll never get anywhere with a name like that’ and they didn’t.

GN: Oh brilliant. Laughs.

RR: Actually Chris and I were possibly looking to do some work a while back when I had a studio in a tower in Malta with the embryonic idea of doing some music industry lectures together. It didn’t get off the ground unfortunately as I had two strokes and open heart surgery and was out of the scene for two years and he’s probably wondering why I never got back in touch.

GN: Oh fuck! Really?

RR: Such is life. I must get onto Chris. So what gigs do have in the UK for November with the orchestra?

GN: Cardiff St. David’s Hall, Birmingham Symphony Hall, Newcastle City Hall, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, The Bridgewater Hall in Manchester. I think we may may record the live album and DVD in Manchester. The one that you really want is the Royal Albert Hall in London and we’ve got that venue. It’s expensive but a top venue. We’ll have to talk to BMG about that one. Then there is the European tour which is mainly Scandinavia. They seem to really like my stuff in Scandinavia which is surprising as I haven’t been there forever. I’d never done any promo there but this tour with 3 or 4 shows up there sold out before we got there and the other sold out on the night. The promoter up there is very happy and wants us to go back and it was a lovely surprise and we did various promo things in Copenhagen and that went down well so we’ll go over and do more shows in bigger and better places.

Part 2 of the interview will be available on music2deal shortly.

 

Link: Music2Deal

Jaemi Skye does 1st stage A&R – industry sifting between the rough & not ready and the rough and ready to develop artists wishing to move on to 360 and 50/50 deals.

Tell us a bit about yourself?

For the first two years of infancy, I slid around rather than walked and didn’t speak one word. I was finally assessed as having two types of “Synesthesia”. Predominantly something known as Chromesthesia, a condition that includes ‘Perfect Pitch’ – a rare auditory phenomenon characterized by the ability of a person to identify or re-create a given musical note without the benefit of a reference tone.

I have since spent time in Spain, Australia, France, Egypt, Tunisia, the U.S.A, the U.K and of course my home, South Africa. Almost entirely within the sphere of professional music and its developmental journey from raw conception to a commercial release. Leaving aside both the astounding Jazz and Classical genre’. There is no other genre of music in which I have not applied myself …grime, trap, big-beat, punk, EDM, hard rock…just love the whole shebang!

 

Have you licensed your music / signed your artists internationally?

Actually, it’s with a grin that I recall the very first time I was approached to give license for the use of a composition. A bizarre yet great confidence booster, at the time. It was spring time 1993 in Bologne, a fishing port in northern France and I received a handwritten letter from an undergraduate in London, England, asking if I may consider composing three individual pieces of music which the student may use in their bachelor of arts contemporary dance performance final exam.

I remember the feeling, an internal glow…just like the way one feels when relaxing in the chilled heaven-sent lazer-red sky show that is a Johannesburg signature in the summertime deep dusk. Since then, with a brief gap as my children matured, it’s been a very, very lucky ride on the magic-stave of music.

 

How do you know whether something is good and modern? How do you keep yourself up-to-date?

Having a default condition such as Synesthesia and particularly component that affects me personally, Chromesthesia, makes the whole world a constant musical influence. From external sounds such as the orchestration of passing peak hour traffic, even the sound of sub-woofers as a car reaches a stop-street or red light, works its way into keeping my musical pulse actively fused to the ‘here & now’. All I have to do is eat, breath, stay as healthy as possible and im a natural born music trend sensor & setter. There’s a book called ‘Lucky Jim’ by Kingsley Amis. That about says it all…(grin).

 

But then, what do you do after work? Go to your studio and continue to work on music?

Over time, whether music has been my daily bread and butter or I have taken a break by working in another sector entirely, when the clock hits 7pm, I find it exceptionally important to shift into an environment in which those I love and hold dear are the main focus of the rest of what the day has to offer us in time. As a younger man, I certainly hit the burn-out phases of non-stop studio six-dayers  (and I do mean no sleep, 24 hr sessions, till you drop!). However, with hindsight, those days, though enjoyable to an extent, don’t give one the space to experience the other things that life has to offer. And that will limit a person’s compositional scope and final product…big-style!

 

What do you suggest for the artist being part of Music2Deal.com having success in the music business?

Belief is everything. If you have a gift in music, whatever that may be, learn to be suggestive, never limit your mind to genres simply because they seem to be in fashion yet keep your ears tuned to the hear & now and most importantly keep connected……one of the best ways to do this?

You want your talent to appeal – Get in with Music2deal.

 

 

 

 

Last month Music2Deal picked up a real coup as UK manager Richard Rogers, himself  a songwriter/producer, manager and A&R Man interviewed Ade Fenton the admired producer, manager, DJ and current Gary Numan Producer. With over 40 solo releases under his belt as a writer/producer the respected Fenton was upbeat about the new Numan album in part one of a 2 part interview.

RR: Hi Ade, you’ve recently completed the new Gary Numan album Savage out on BMG Records on September 15th, what was your role and how long did the album take to make?

AF: Hi. My role was as producer as it has been for the last four albums. We started the new Savage album in late October 2016 and finished it in mid May 2017 which was pretty quick for us. Splinter the last album took about 18 months on and off to complete but with this one we said ‘We’re going to start it and we’re going to finish it’ and we worked every single day and I mean every day with no time off at all, I was working silly hours on it but it needed to get done. The deal with BMG that Gary had done meant we were hitting a deadline and we knew we had to finish it by that date so we got the mastering booked up way way in advance. So we know we had to get it done but that pressure just makes you work really really hard but I don’t mind working under pressure, working under deadlines as long as they are sensible. We had a great time making it. We’d had a break where we hadn’t worked together for a year or two and we went off and did our own thing, but when we got back together it was that instant perfect recipe where the ingredients really work.

So Gary had already written some demos, I think he started writing his demos in January 2016 and then he started getting a collection of demos together but because of other musical commitments I could only start in October 2016. It’s only August now and we got the album mastered on the 24th May. He was still writing new songs for it up until March of this year. That happened with Splinter as well but that was on and off as we were touring and doing other things. With this one it really was a case of ‘this is what we are working on in the next six months’. It’s like a chain reaction with me and Gary, we get into a method, he sends me demos, I work stuff up and send it back to him, that gives him a new idea and he goes ‘what about adding this to it?’ and so on.

An example would be the new single My Name Is Ruin, using Gary’s daughter Persia on backing vocals was a really late move. My Name Is Ruin had originated from a working title called March because I believe Gary had written it in March 2016 and it was a groove with the top line melody and everything. We thought we’d finished it, it was the bassline and the big chorus and i’d put all the drums together and it had turned from one thing into another thing but we felt that we had a problem with the chorus as the chorus was dragging slightly. It was one of those tracks where when the chorus kicked in it felt like it was labouring slightly so we came up with the idea of bumping up the BPM on the chorus. You might not notice it but there’s a 2 BPM jump on that chorus and with Persia it was a last minute thing with what we thought was the last version of the track. Then all of a sudden Gary said ‘i’ve got this idea for an Arabian top line’ in the verses and i’m thinking ‘where the fuck is that gonna go?’ because it’s just a bassline and a groove and that was the whole point of it originally, but then he came up with this fantastic Arabic top line and we thought why don’t we get Persia his 11 year old daughter to sing on it as she’s got a great little voice and that was a last minute thing and it just developed and developed from there so even though that track was started in March last year it wasn’t finished until April 2017. We were working on other things of course but the chain reaction of sending each other stuff backwards and forwards works brilliantly. We decided we would have quite a big middle eastern influence on this album and there were hints of it going as far back as the Jagged album. In fact Jagged, Dead Son Rising and Splinter have all got a little bit of that middle eastern influence but with this one we thought if we were going to do it then lets do it properly so we really went for it.

RR: Have you seen the video? It is excellent, I don’t know the guy who put the video together but it is superbly done and they’ve edited it down from over 6 minutes to 4 minutes 25 seconds and it’s been really well done.

AF: Sometimes it’s a bit tricky to do the radio or video edit, but to be honest it only took about ten minutes to do it!

RR: What’s your favourite track on the album and why?

AF: It’s a track called Mercy, it’s evil, it’s just so evil and so much fun. Steve Harris is on guitar again on this album and on Mercy. I’d seen a trailer for possibly Bladerunner and I was writing all the back end stuff for this track and I saw the trailer while on a coffee break with the arrangement on my computer opening up and it was one of those things that just takes you off in a completely different direction so when Steve came over to do it I got him to record just the weirdest stuff on his guitar and all of it ended up in the track. It’s like The Wretched by Nine Inch Nails or something like that. It’s just one of those tracks where you’re banging your head, it’s really slow and electronic. In fact the whole album is really electronic and much more electronic than the last album Splinter. For me it’s the darkest track and most satisfying for me.

RR: Gary’s based in Los Angeles now as he has been for a few years so do you join him in America or do you do everything from Bath where you live and work?

AF:  On Splinter we worked in Los Angeles quite a bit but that’s because I was managing him at the time and I was in the band so we were always together but on Savage everything was done remotely although Gary came over to the UK and worked in my studio for a period of about two weeks in the whole six month period. But you know it doesn’t matter these days, the way we work we have complete trust in one another musically and i’m still a Gary Numan fan so when he sends me something he knows pretty much i’m gonna like it. Equally he trusts me and gives me complete carte blanche to do whatever I want as a producer but for certain tracks I don’t need to do what I want. He might say ‘Here’s a track, I want it to go in this direction, come up with a few ideas’ but other tracks like Mercy for instance he’d sent me this back end that was brilliant and that bassline that was Gary’s 100% but it’s so effective. It’s one note all the way through but it’s that one note that gives it this feeling so all I did was build on that one note and I kept building and building layers and layers.

Whereas with other tracks he’d say ‘I want it to be this’ and then he’d let me go off and do what I want and that trust thing is knowing that 99 times out of 100 he’s going to like it and on the odd occasion he doesn’t like it then fine but i’m not precious about it. But they’re not my songs, they are Gary’s and my job is to make him happy and do the best job I possibly can and added to that he is so generous in allowing me to do my thing and you have to have confidence in yourself that Gary is working with me for a reason. I’ve got a particular sound and he likes it and it’s like I said it’s this whole thing about having these certain ingredients that just work and for us having high speed internet makes it easier as well as Dropbox. We can just fire ideas at each other, we were swapping logic arrangements and he’d change arrangements and want one beat here and one beat there and 30 seconds later it’s changed and it’s brilliant. Yet we’re still getting the benefits of being able to do our own thing but use Facetime, 5 or 6 times a day and technology has allowed working remotely to become a much more personal experience. It seems to be the way we like it, it’s great. I mean I wish I could have gone over to his house and jumped in the swimming pool every day, but you can’t have everything I suppose. When Gary came over to work in the studio it was still great to work with him here because we are able to scientifically get into every single channel and every single track and every single segment and for that you need to be together.  No swimming pool at my place though, sadly.

RR: Have you got any writing credits on the album?

AF:  Yes, there’s one track I co-wrote called ‘What God Intended’. It’s just the way it worked out, it wasn’t intended to be a co-write. It was another example of us firing ideas at one another, but with that one we did it in reverse.

RR: On Savage are you classed as produced by you and you alone or is it a co production with Gary?

AF: No, it just says just produced by me.

RR: Good for you mate.

AF: Well I hope so. The signs are it’s going to do really well. Secretly we hope it’s going to do better than Splinter the last album. Savage feels like it’s a real progression from that album and it feels like a different sound and way more electronic than Splinter.

 

Part 2 Will be in two weeks where Fenton talks more about working with Gary Numan.