The Deb's Delight Takes Fright! (part II)

I am sitting on the fourth bar stool from the window, between Robert Palmer on the fifth and Joe on the third. I order drinks. Robert's first: a Tom Collins. The American bartender in his white smock takes great care with this order, and Robert gets a Tom Collins in a glass we could only eat ice-cream out of in London. Maybe even Robert - the old sophisticate - is taken by surprise. "Oooh! A pink one," he remarks, stirring his big drink mock meditatively.

Joe and me carry on with Carlsberg. I pay up. Joe asks for the evening's newspaper. A big TV screen to our left broadcasts images of Middle Eastern conflict and stock car racing. The fire sign recurs. The sound is off and a tape deck is playing an eclectic (and, as it turns out, extraordinarily good) selection of songs and musics.

The interview begins as I switch on the tape recorder. Near the time when Robert's Tom Collins is empty the tape recorder's little red REC/BATT light starts to flicker a hesitant pink. No one says oooh! but Joe puts two new batteries in, and I turn the tape over. Minutes later, we've left the bar.

Advert for the single Johnny And Mary (1980)

What I'm after is an interrogation tinged with confession, as my profession demands... The tape is playing More Than A Woman.

You live over here?

"Nah, I've lived in the Bahamas for the past three and a half years."

An obvious question: how then did you come to meet Gary Numan?

The bartender says: "All this together?"

Yeah. I'll pay. How much? It's five dollars and seventy five cents. The till gulps loudly.

"I was doing three of his tunes in my live show about 18 months ago and he came and saw the show with his Dad. We got on really well so I suggested that... well, actually, he suggested that we work together, so we did."

Seems a bit like Bowie and Eno. Was it all planned at all?

"Nah, it was more like him coming out for a holiday - he was on his way to Japan and he had the rough mixes of his new LP with him and I liked one of the songs...

(The song in question was I Dream Of Wires. As Robert explains the working approach with Gary, the tape launches into some lovely Irish pipe music)

"... and I was playing him something I'd been working on and he liked that so we finished it off together (that was a song called Found You Now). Very accidental, very casual."

Robert Palmer and Gary Numan in the Bahamas: "I get really bored with style"

The album seems like a real mixture, a real hotch potch of things. Is that planned?

"To a certain extent, because uh, I get really bored with style. I'm sick to death of it."

What, your style, or...?

"No, just style as a commodity, whether it's disco or heavy metal or whatever the current trend is. I mean, I'm just really bored with it, always have been. For instance, I used to do a lot of reggae tunes - or things in that area - and now if I do them people come up to me and say 'You're jumping on the ska-band wagon'. I just get sick of it. So I was just trying to work with a certain kind of fidelity on a record that would hold it together, and just sort of include as many different things that I was interested in at the time and still make the thing read from back to front as coherent..."

Coherent in what way? Cos like the two tracks I really like are Looking For Clues and Johnny And Mary - which really stand out, regardless of whether you've done them, or whoever... But you've got a track in between them that seems years behind them, out of keeping, which spoils... 

"Which is that?"

Sulky Girl.

"Oh yeah..."

Which spoils the flow - and it happens in other places as well.

"Well, I do that on purpose, because again I don't want to make an album where it's presumed I'm into something. I mean, I haven't got a band, I never have had. I like singing songs and I try and think up songs that are gonna make a neat show when I take it on the road. People either love what I do or hate what I do - so I've got to the point where I just get on with it and the content of what I put on the records is determined from what I learn from the audience, from what  works live, from what I want to hear when I go to a club or what I'd like to play when I get home. I'm just trying to include all those different things and mix it up, cos otherwise you end up with, what do they call it, a 'concept' album or something..."

Advert for the album Clues (1980)

People you like - Gary Numan, whoever - do you think that's a pitfall of theirs?

"Totally, yeah. And I'm only interested in, I only like songs. There's no groups or singers that I like at all. I like songs by a lot of different people, but Im' certainly not a fan of anybody. I make up cassettes all the time - to take on road with me - a song from this album, a song from that album. That's the way I listen to music; it's like one of those K Tel things, it's from all over. I listen to Fred Astaire, I listen to African folk music, I listen to Talking Heads..."

Couldn't you get trapped in reverse? 'Artists' are sold to the public on their particular image - who do you think will pick up on what you're doing, who will you appeal to?

"Me."

But you have to sell the stuff.

"But I do. So it takes up no amount of my thought, it doesn't concern me a bit. I don't even think about that. I mean, to make music in order to make money - I can think of plenty of ways to make a lot of money, that's no problem. I like to sing. So, if I can keep my priorities straight, then what difference does it make to me? I'm not trying to build an audience or create a market or product. I'm trying to make up songs I like to sing and put them on a record and be pleased with the result and say, Yeah, I've made the best record I could make this year. I'll leave it up to someone else to market it. Of course, it does give me problems cos you can't be easily categorised, people tend to concentrate on my appearance and stuff, which is kind of frustrating."

That's inevitable in a market that's dominated by those sorts of considerations.

"Yeah, I understand it completely, but living with it is another matter."

(The tape recorder switches to Italian trumpets).

Where do you sell more, over here or in Britain?

 "Oh, I don't sell records in England, never have."

The current single and album got into the charts.

"Yeah, it's the first time I've had any real interest in what I've done at all. In terms of... when I say 'real interest' - the possibility of playing somewhere other than the Hammersmith Odeon which is very nice, but... you know, the crowd that goes there always looks the same to me, don't they you? And they do at this place tonight. It's like when you're out in Sunderland then you're playing to the English public. When I'm out in Kansas City then I'm playing to the American public."

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