As anyone who reads the Quietus regularly knows, we are enormous fans of the one and only Mr Gary Numan. We’re therefore very excited to be able to bring you a new track, ‘Dead Sun Rising’, set to feature on his next album, Dead Son Rising. You can listen to ‘Dead Sun Rising’ below, and find out more about the new album, and next studio album proper Splinter after that.
Gary Numan – Dead Sun Rising by theQuietus"I do appreciate that it’s a little bit confusing – I’m waiting for all the emails to come in saying ‘there’s a misprint on the album’" says the Nume of the similarity in track and album title. But, he explains, the resurrection theme is important in understanding the unique album project that is Dead Son Rising, not to mention the reason why the track perhaps sounds like a cross between Synth Nume and the more recent Industrial Nume: "Ade Fenton was round one day and we went out and I told him about the old stuff that I hadn’t released, stuff in demo form," Numan explains. "He said to me ‘most people have got a massive catalogue of unreleased songs on their shelves that they’ve never used’. Well I’ve not done that, if I’m working on a song and it doesn’t happen or I don’t think it works, I erase it. To me, it’s been a sign, if that’s not good enough, then don’t shelve it, erase it, and start again. But I decided that was perhaps a bit stupid: one day I wrote a song and thought it was great, then two hours later I thought it was the worst thing I had ever done. I thought it can’t be like that, a track being the worst and best thing I’ve ever done within a two hour gap! It’s all down to the mood you’re in. So I realised, 25 years too late, that what I had been doing was very stupid and I had deleted any number of songs that were quite good!"
He continues: "So I stopped erasing everything. I played Ade these older tracks, and he was going ‘that’s brilliant, that’s great, we should do something around these shelved songs. And that’s the reason why I thought "Resurrection" [the original title for Dead Son Rising] was a good title to it, because these were songs that had been dead and buried being brought back again. So we took some tracks off the shelf, and I wrote some new material for it that I thought was more appropriate than for Splinter. I don’t see it in the discography, if you like, as the next album from Jagged; that’s Splinter. I had a clear vision for that and how I wanted it to sound and feel, it’s a well-defined project. Dead Son Rising is now no longer a collection of songs that didn’t quite make an album, it’s become much more than that. The songs are radically different from the initial ideas, the songs on the shelf have just ended up being sparks for what got it all going."
Numan is keen to credit his collaborator: "the work Ade had done on it is significant, much more than a producer. We’ve gone into it as a team, which is another reason why it’s an offshoot to what I’ve been doing on my own."
About the track ‘Dead Sun Rising’, Numan says: "That was one of the first tracks we approached. At the time I hated it, I thought the lyrics were shit, I went off it, I went on it, I went off it again, and then slowly but surely we kept chipping away at it, and doing things, and Ade suggesting things, it became something I was really happy with. It was tortuous. I was trying to explain to my wife the other day that when you start an album you’re aware that this emotional rollercoaster is about to happen, you’re going to have these hours when you love what you’re doing, and then hours when you think you’ve lost it and what you’re doing is shit, and you’re never going to write a good song again. You know you have to weather it, like riding out a storm. It’s become more and more like that over the years – when I first started, it wasn’t like that at all, I loved every minute of it, every minute of it seemed to be new and exciting. But as I’ve got older, each album has become more difficult to make. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing to admit or not."
How is Splinter going? "I am right in the middle of it. I’ve done quite a lot of it already, I’ve got lots and lots of bits. I have specific parameters for how I want it to be, which gives me limitations, but I like that. I’ve done these things like the track with Battles that have introduced me to new people, and I need to be making music for these people, especially as I think my songwriting is much improved as to what it has been 15 or 20 years, when I went through a low period to be honest. I need to be making new music, and to give myself a kick up my arse and do it, and I am doing that, and that’s what’s happening with Splinter."
The Dead Son Rising album will be available as a Super Deluxe Edition directly from the Official Numan store and on the tour – details on the Gary Numan website
