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The Mix is a remix album by Gary Numan released in the US exclusively by Cleopatra Records and containing specially commissioned remixes by several established
artists.
For Gary Numan did see the future, and still sees it today. It is the cognent thread which connects all his albums, and the coherent dread which underpins his darkest scenarios. Yet the past is just as potent, as he proved when he remixed "Cars" for a TV commercial, and laughed when the resultant hit was called a comeback.
Recording... re-recording... he has already endured the tribute process, as half of rock'n'roll Christendom turned out to honor the man who made them all possible, and Numan himself accepted their accolades with believable surprise. "For me to sit back and see that I had such an influence on such a cross section of bands is completely satisfying. I can't believe it."
This album, however, is Numan's own tribute to his work, as seen through the eyes of the artists who call his inspiration home. Not every track will be instantly familiar, but all are immediately recognizable, because that, too, was the message in Gary Numan's medium, forever pushing forward, forever breaking boundaries. And whether he's doing it himself, through the albums which still sound as fresh as tomorrow, or leaving it to others, challenging them to match the master, the momentum will always be in good hands. Friends are still electric, after all.
- Dave Thompson, 1998
Gary Numan - The Mix
A vision in black wich a shock of blonde crop, cheekbones to die for and a pallor which already had, Gary Numan exploded onto the stage like a man from Mars - which is probably what he was. Glacial vocals over icicle synths, Numan appeared from nowhere and invited everyone back there.
"I was just a guitarist that played keyboards," he shrugs. "I just turned punk songs into electronic songs." But no-one else had ever done it like that, and few people would ever do it so well. Numan - new wave. By the spring of 1979, punk had long since run its course, and Numan knew because he had been running with it. Tubeway Army, the band he formed in a frenzy of adrenalized indolence in London two years previous, had already rung the fashionable changes, playing the Vortex and covering the Velvets, but Numan was never content merely to jest. Tubeway Army's first two singles were savage jerking buzzsaw anthems, but he was already looking elsewhere and that spring he suddenly found it, in the frozen warnings of electronics.
"Down In The Park" served warning of his intentions, "Are 'Friends' Electric?" proved he wasn't joking. He came out of nowhere, and now he was everywhere, Number One on the charts across Europe, with an album which celebrated the outsider, and worshipped the machine. Replicas was part Kraftwerk, part Bowie, but completely himself, and stated its intentions from the very first track: "Me," that disembodied voice announced, "Me, I disconnect from you." By the time it reached its end, even the machines were rocking, and Numan himself almost married a human. Yuck and double yuck to that.
A second album, The Pleasure Principle, followed before the end of the year, and as the 1970's finally lurched into history, Gary Numan was already poised on the edge of invincibility, the first superstar of a bright new decade.
There simply wasn't anyone like him. His detractors liked to paint a studious xerox of one of David Bowie's old images, but Numan was always worth far more than that. So much more, in fact, that Bowie's own next album (and his best in three years), 1980's Scary Monsters had far more in common with Numan's machinations than Numan ever had with him. And wherefore the synthesized New Romantic movement without Numan to paint their faces for them? Numan did more than simply kickstart the Eighties, he designed the blueprint, and then built the machine.
Ultravox, OMD, Depeche Mode, Soft Cell - Numan's new men were suddenly everywhere, filing out of the mini moog store with their hearts and minds set on praying to the aliens. But no matter how far they went, Numan pressed his dream further. Onstage he drove an electric car, offstage, he passed his pilot's licence, and took to the skies to survey his domain. The Telekon tour, built around his latest album, carried his cold dreams to their arctic limits, static movement, factory costumes, and the glaring white light of an industrial future, "Metropolis - The Musical." And where could he go after that? Into studio seclusion, with one final extravagant concert in London, in April of 1981. He was 23 years old and he ruled the world.
Privately, he turned his attention to that other passion, flying. Publicly, he continued to record: from the brilliant Dance in 1981, and I, Assassin the following year, he has released a new album almost every year, and if his biggest hits are the old ones now, it is less a reflection on the music he makes, and more the justification of his own original prophecies, that nothing lasts forever, the future least of all.
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