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From Ukuleles To Industrial Metal. Via Gary Numan…

by Damien O'Carroll — 29 Jul 10 — Blog 1

I don’t know about you, but my listening habits veer wildly from month to month and even day to day. One day I can be completely into the ’70s glam rock stomp of T-Rex, then the next it might be the proper Delta blues of Robert Johnson. Next week it will be the angry punk rantings of Jello Biafra or possibly the slick pop thump of Goldfrapp.

Take, for example, last week: I was completely enraptured with ukulele cover versions of Radiohead songs, whereas this week I am totally absorbed by Industrial Metal.

For those who don’t know, Industrial Metal is a wonderfully polarising form of music that mixes heavily processed guitars, synthesisers and driving, robotic drum beats to create a very loud, very dark, very antisocial form of music that is utterly loved by its fans and utterly hated by their neighbours. Bands like Killing Joke, Skinny Puppy, K.M.F.D.M. and Godflesh started it off, bands like Ministry, Pitchshifter and Megaherz took it to louder extremes and more commercial bands like White Zombie, Rammstein, Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson took Industrial Metal elements to a wider audience.

So how exactly did my iPod go from pumping out the gentle strum of ukuleles to crushing grind of Industrial Metal? By way of ’80s New Wave and British comedy, actually…

While Amanda Palmer Performs The Popular Hits Of Radiohead On Her Magical Ukulele is brilliant, it is only seven songs long, meaning something else could also stay on constant rotate. This something else was Devo’s awesome Something For Everybody, their first album in nearly 20 years. This, in turn, put me on an exhaustive search of YouTube for old Devo videos and this naturally enough led to associated ’80s coolness, including a very silly video of brooding synth-god Gary Numan playing his biggest hit, Cars, on a keyboard attached to 24 cars.

At the same time my love of British television comedy was back in full bloom, and the Gary Numan discovery coincided with a re-watching of the The Mighty Boosh, in which one of the main characters – Vince Noir – has a mild Gary Numan obsession.

This carried over into my real life, as these things usually do with seriously impressionable people like me. Old Gary Numan stuff was dragged onto the iPod and I embarked on a serious mission to learn to play Cars, with only a vague degree of success before I got bored with that idea.

The Cars video on YouTube was very recent, and led me to wonder what Gary Numan had been up to since the ’80s, so research was required.

Turns out he had carried on recording music. In the early ’90s he gave up on trying to crack the pop market and stripped his music back to its roots, getting darker and heavier, adding more heavily-processed guitars to his traditional synthesizers. He wrote more personal lyrics and played all the instruments himself on his next few albums.

Not long after a whole bunch of bands that cited Numan as a major influence began to rise to significant popularity with a similar sound – most notably Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson. Funnily enough, it is also when one of Numan’s major influences – David Bowie – also dabbled with a darker industrial sound on his excellent and hugely underrated Outside album and the equally awesome, but more accessible Earthling. But this was the late ’90s, everyone went a little bit industrial…

Things have pretty much gone full circle now and Numan has performed live with Nine Inch Nails and he and Trent Reznor (the man behind NIN) are said to be planning on working together sometime soon.

So that’s pretty much how I went from ukuleles and Devo to Industrial Metal by way of The Mighty Boosh and Gary Numan. Does this ever happen to anybody else?