Keeping Busy

Steve sent me this snippet from some old interviews with members of Numan's band. This was how they used to do it in 1979. Actually its how we still do it in The Maths!

Quote from Russell Bell [Numan's Guitarist, although you wouldn't think so by the gear he used...]

"On that first tour, I had two Minimoogs, a Polymoog, a set of Moog Taurus bass pedals, four Synare syndrums, a guitar and of course a tambourine for Cars. I liked to be kept busy! We liked to use a lot of effects on our instruments as well. For instance, the starting noise of Cars was produced with an MXR Phaser pedal, a small orange box with the modulation turned up to full. We also liked to run the Minimoogs through harmonisers like the Eventide. In total we had twenty three keyboards on-stage at any one time, (with plenty of backups on the trucks in case they were needed)."

For Praying To The Aliens on Sat Night Live: (see video below. BTW, this TV program was seen by 40 million people at the time)

"The set up we used on that show wasn’t quite the same as our live shows. For one thing, Gary was standing behind a bunch of keyboards. In-fact, we had synths everywhere! Gary, Chris and I all had Minimoogs and Gary had a Roland SH-2000 for that low frequency oscillator stuff on Praying to the Aliens. Gary was playing all these extra whooo noises, I was playing the standard tune and I think Chris was doing the same. On Cars, I played the bottom D on the Polymoog. Amazingly, I think I can still play it..."