It’s hard work being King. Don’t believe it? SIMON TOPPER has a chat to the man who has emerged from the pop culture dungeon to be retrospectively dubbed "The King of Synthpop" – one GARY NUMAN.

Sure, the chin-rubbing respect and music nerd cool all comes attached to Gary Numan’s name in 2009, but for a good couple of decades after his 1979 electronic breakthrough into the pop charts, we fickle subjects almost unanomously laughed him off as a pop sidenote.

Numan first attracted attention in 1979, with a trio of early electronic hits and future classics – Down In The Park, Are ‘Friends’ Electric? and his signature tune Cars, the first two with his shortlived new-wave band Tubeway Army. If the song titles don’t ring a bell, the darkly futuristic synth sounds of each certainly will, as the songs have been covered and sampled considerably in recent years. However, his popularity was fleeting, and by the mid ‘80s, Gary Numan, though still recording, was another future Where Are They Now candidate.

Yet here he good-naturedly stands, returning for his first Australian tour in 29 years, again King with the kids in the know. Let’s put this in perspective. All musical genre monarchs and diplomats have slow phases in their careers. The Godfather of Soul wasn’t always the hottest ticket in town. The King of Pop continues to have his share of personal problems. But the idea of their best music ever not being cool is almost blasphemy.

This level of genre-overlord respect has been unexpectedly earned the hard way by Gary Numan over a span of 30 years, spending many more in the dark than in the blinding neon light. Chatting to Numan before he leaves his English home to embark on his first Australian tour since 1980, he is extremely aware of how he has been regarded, or worst of all not, at different phases of his turbulent career.

"The thing about this trip to Australia is people have been asking ‘Why are you only coming back now?’ but it’s not like that. I’ve wanted to come back pretty much since the last time we were out there, but my career… Well, I had a good couple of years to start with, but then it went into a massive decline for like 15 years or so really. I’d kind of lost everything in my career, so I just had to come back to England and concentrate on trying to repair things here.

"It really didn’t work out well for quite a long time, and everything else went away one by one. My record contracts overseas were all gone, and I just couldn’t find a record company that was interested in bringing me anywhere let alone Australia. Until now. So this is really the first opportunity I’ve had to come back and do it again."

So why this turn around in Numan’s career now? Unlike a lot of past-it musicians who have lately been waiting for the cyclical nature of musical fashion to shine on them, before booking their ticket aboard the gravy train, Numan’s newfound relevance is not just an exercise in timely nostalgia. In fact, he’s done a pretty good job of working out the reasons for his cultural reappraisal, but before we hear those, let him get his thoughts of reunion tours off his chest.

"I’m a bit worried about that, to tell you the truth. I was around in the ‘80s obviously, so you do become a reference point for people to look back at that time. But the music that I do now is really quite different to that. Harder, more aggressive, and the performance itself is more along the industrial path too. We’re not standing there trying to look like we used to. So while I appreciate it if people come along who used to have a connection with me back in the ‘80s, I fear it’s the wrong one.

"I’d rather eat worms than do a nostalgia Here & Now tour, to be quite honest. I mean we will play some old stuff, there’ll be four, maybe five old songs. None from my middle period, because I hate it. But the rest of the show will be new stuff, off the last few albums."

After his fall from favour, Numan changed his sound quite a few times trying to get another commerical nibble on his line, culminating in his admitted desperate low point, 1992’s Machine + Soul. It’s been the non-contrived reinvention of his sound since that time that he sees as one of three reasons he’s back on the radar today.

Reason 1. "Basically in the early ‘90s, my music changed direction quite dramatically. I thought my career was over, so I just went back to treating it as a hobby, since nobody was returning my calls and I couldn’t get a record deal, and the music came back much heavier and darker than before. That really was my turning point.

Reason 2. "It also coincided with people doing covers of my early work, and talking about me as an influence. I was just doing my own very non-commercial, industrial type music, each record was darker than before, and I built some respect I think, that I hadn’t gone the nostalgia route. It was just a slow building process. Then Nine Inch Nails did a cover of one of my songs, Marilyn Manson did a cover, Foo Fighters did a cover, and that brought a lot of attention to me."

Reason 3. "The last thing that brought me back was The Mighty Boosh started mentioning me all the time. All of a sudden, there are hundreds of thousands, or millions of young people who are Mighty Boosh fans who know who I am. I’d seen Noel Fielding dong stand up on TV ages ago, and thought he was very funny. Then it was years later I got a phone call from a friend of mine who said ‘Quick turn on the tele, there’s this really weird comedy show on and they keep mentioning your name’ and I turned it on and went ‘It’s that bloke from the stand up!’ All those years later. It was very strange.

"I thought they were taking the piss at first, but I became a real fan of the show, and they kept mentioning me. I eventually got to meet them after a TV show we were both on, and they were genuine. Both Noel and Julian were fans, and they knew all about my music and they named my songs. It was really flattering. I was really proud."

The King is cool. Long live the King.

GARY NUMAN will play The Tivoli on Monday, March 2, supported by Pivot. Check out www.numan.co.uk for more information.

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