Understanding Gary Numan: The Machine Quartet (1978-1981)

In this stunning 13,000 word essay, the historian Paul Sutton, author of acclaimed books on Ken Russell and Lindsay Anderson, explains the importance of Gary Numan on music. With the kind of packed virtuoso prose the likes of which we have rarely seen since the heyday of Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer, he takes the reader through a vastly entertaining potted history of rock music pioneers, tracing them all back to “a bayou swamp or a delta of Mississippi mud from where howled the first wolf and harmonica, and from where was heard the first blue plucking finger on string”, to show that “popular music was strictly The Imitation Game until Gary Numan re-invigorated rock and roll with his Machine Quartet, four albums that added so many new strands of DNA to the gene pool of what hitherto had been dead Mississippi mud that the transformative effect was immediate and everlasting. Artists major, from Frank Zappa, Neil Young and Alice Cooper, and bands then minor, including Tears for Fears and Depeche Mode, all stopped what they were doing and added lessons learned from Numan to their art. Gary Numan wrote music so original that it is still inventing genres I’m too old to know about.” The defenders of the establishment, the music press, responded by declaring it open season on the managerless young musician. Sutton details the battle and the winning of the war.