Last updated 13:10, Thursday, 24 July 2008

Gary Numan’s world is dark and moody, monochrome and claustrophobic...so it’s a bit of a shock to realise he’s playing so many festivals this summer.

• Official Gary Numan site

It doesn’t seem right to think of the pale ‘Numanoid’ blinking in the daylight.

These are giddy times for Gary, who has combined rebuilding a shattered career with starting a family since the Millennium.

The 50-year-old is surfing a huge wave of renewed interest in his music among fans and fellow pop stars and is loving every minute of it – especially the festivals.

Taking a breather at his Sussex home between appearing at the Mighty Boosh Festival and this weekend’s Wickerman Festival, near Dundrennan in Dumfries and Galloway, he revealed exactly why.

“Because my music has got much heavier and darker, it is impossible to get it on the radio,” said Numan, who tops the bill tomorrow night .

“I’m not griping about that, I understood that years ago, I knew I would struggle to get heard.

“The best alternative for people in my position is festivals – you can reach out to a lot more people than usual, people who would not normally come to see you.

“I actually like going to them and playing them.

“This year I’m doing four, which is the most I have ever done.

“The Boosh was fantastic, but festivals are a bit of an unknown for me, I have only done 10 in 30 years and I’m yet to get that confidence. I was a bit nervous and pleasantly surprised.”

His Boosh set was a mix of the new and the classic, such as Are Friends Electric?, Cars and I Die You Die but the heavy emphasis (and heavy is the word to emphasise) is on his latest tracks.

“Three quarters was new stuff, with three from 1979, it is fairly forward-looking.

“I have been around for a long time and if I go and play my so-called ‘greatest hits’ they are too early for most of the crowd who weren’t even born when they were released!”

Numan’s most recent friends are eclectic, rather than electric with bands as diverse as Sugababes, Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, Armand Van Helden and Basement Jaxx covering or sampling his tunes.

And while he is genuinely amazed and flattered by that recognition, the modern-day treatments don’t always seem to help his profile.

“A friend of mine took his son to a gig of mine and the boy wanted to know why I was playing a Basement Jaxx song (they sampled M.E.),” he said.

“His dad tried to explain I had written it originally, but the lad didn’t believe him!

He had no idea that his second album, Replicas, released in 1979, would prove to be so influential and long-lasting.

“When I did that album, I said ‘If this does well, if I’m lucky, I could end up headlining the Marquee Club’.

“To me, it was a big deal to sell out to 800 or 900 people after playing in pubs in front of nobody.

“Are Friends Electric? was a hit and everything about that song was wrong – it was too long, you can’t dance to it, there was no chorus to speak of...”

He has produced dozens of albums in his 30 years, album 45 was released just last week .

A double, called Jagged Edge, it is a reworking of 2006 release Jagged and includes tracks such as In A Dark Place, Haunted and Before You Hate It.

Resurrection is due later this year with Splinter, featuring all-new tracks, due out next spring.

Despite his experience of the giddy highs and the despairing depths of the chew-‘em-up-spit-‘em-out pop business, he is genuinely delighted to be back producing tunes he is proud of and against all odds, with a growing fan-base.

“It is lovely, it is a very cool position to be in as a 50-year-old.

“I was all but dead and buried in the Nineties and to find where I am now, doing well and my last two albums have got the best reviews I have ever had.

“I think I became to the music press something of a figure of fun and I do think that at the end of the Eighties and in the early Nineties I put out some albums that were terrible.”

He has cited 1992 as his low-point: “I couldn’t sell gig tickets, I looked rubbish, and I released the album Machine + Soul, which was an absolute piece of garbage.”

The turning point came when he accepted how far he had fallen.

“I realised the state I was in. I couldn’t get a deal any more, I actually thought: ‘I’m finished now, I might as well do this as a hobby’. Instead of writing songs to keep my career alive and get onto the radio, I went back into the studio to play everything and record everything myself.”

“All thoughts of experimenting got squashed.

“But as soon as I stopped worrying, all the imagination and attitude came back – but it was all dark I don’t know why that is, but I don’t worry about it.

“The music all became very heavy, dark and aggressive with anthemic choruses and it suddenly started to do much better.”

It’s odd to hear the tinkle of children’s laughter in the background as we chat on the phone. But shhhh! the man in black whose strange voice overlays hard, heavy industrial sounds, is actually a doting dad who lives in rural Sussex.

Most people in love tend to write fluffy, tinkly pop-songs, not Numan. The arrival of his three daughters in the past five years has also failed to mellow the sound he makes.

Scanner on the Jagged album, hears him musing about the life his children will have after he’s dead. It was supposed to be “a lovely song” about him looking down on his youngsters, but he admits it does come across as depressing and “a bit strange”.

So, what can we expect at Wickerman?

“Three-quarters of the set will be new material. I want to sink or swim because of what I am , not because of what I was.

“People going out and saying ‘this is what I used to do’ have given up.”

Also playing the Wickerman are The Fall, Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall, Neville Staple, former vocalist with The Specials and founder member of Fun Boy 3, and Miles Hunt of the Wonder Stuff. DJs include Annie Nightingale and Louis Osbourne.

The Wickerman festival takes place at East Kirkcarswell Farm, near Kirkcudbright, south west Scotland.

Tickets cost £75 for a weekend ticket and £50 Saturday only ticket, with children aged 12 and under admitted free.

Tickets include camping and parking and are available from www.thewickermanfestival.co.uk