Album Version
As I’ve been going through the ‘Savage’ album I have had to reconsider my approach to the album. Initially I positioned the album as more of a concept album than Gary Numan’s other recent works. To be fair this is likely a good thing as it’s quite difficult to approach several songs of similar lyrical and musical content from different angles. ‘Exile’ for example may be tough to separate into individual posts. So the fairly personal content of ‘And It All Began With You’ is welcome.
Q - “You married Gemma, in ‘97 and have a delightful family now. I’m really happy for you that that’s worked out because on paper in must have had an imbalance to it at the start as she was originally a huge fan of yours before she met you?”
A - “Fans are people, not less than me, not better than me. We all have our talents and our quirks, our good points and our bad. I’m a fan of things, we all are, whether we have nothing to show for our efforts or whether we are the President of the USA, but I don’t see myself as less than the person I’m a fan of. I see everyone the same. Gemma was a fan, but she was also the most fascinating person I’d ever met, with a heart the size of a small planet. I have never met anyone like her, on so many levels.”
- Interview with Norwich Outline, February 2016
Gary Numan has remained happily married for over twenty years now, and Gemma Webb’s contributions toward Gary’s personal life and career direction can’t be overstated. If not for her ability to deliver some home truths at times where he perhaps needed them the most, Gary’s 1993 comeback tour, the subsequent ‘Sacrifice’ album and ‘Dead Son Rising’ may have either not happened or been different beyond recognition.
Numan has written a few of his most affecting ballads regarding his relationship with Gemma, with ‘And It All Began With You’ being the latest and forming the apparent end of a trilogy of similar tracks. The song also pulls double duty as the main ballad on all versions of the album and also as the most noticeable hope spot in a largely aggressive and dystopian album.
‘And It All began With You’ shares its subject matter with two previous ballads namely 1994’s ‘You Walk In My Soul’ and 2013’s Lost. The first track was the one light patch on the oppressive ‘Sacrifice’ being a straightforward paean to his future wife to “share my life with me” and I find it to be one of his unambiguously positive songs whereas the middle chapter ‘Lost’ was written at another personal low during the studio lull as ‘Dead Son Rising’ and ‘Splinter’ languished in development hell. The track autopsied the present and became the heart of ‘Splinter’. ‘And It All Began With You’ anticipates the eventual end of this relationship. Much of ‘Savage’s themes initially spun out of Numan’s reaction to President Trump’s disregard of the climate emergency and gave birth to the album’s idea of a world reduced to savagery and confrontation bolstered from a few pieces from Numan’s ideas for a dark fantasy novel.
Similarly where much of ‘Savage’s dystopian leanings look at the breakdown of society through extreme figures, ‘And It All Began With You’ examines the breakdown of Gary’s own self by putting out the idea of a world without Gemma Webb.
Starting with a heavily processed sound courtesy of Ade Fenton’s software experiments, (“I came across this sound and thought, ‘God I like that, it’s so weird’. It’s an arpeggiated sound, but with a bit of jiggery pokery started firing off all over the place… [Gary] wasn’t sure whether the random arpeggiator things was genius or complete shit – I just sent an email back saying that it’s genius") ‘And It All Began With You’ has an equally ornate arrangement matching its title. String plug-ins and sparser drums replace the wall of sound production of much of the ‘Savage’ album and Gary delivers an equally understated vocal. In terms of personal tracks I’d guess that anticipating the future is always more difficult to put into a ballad and the track benefits from it’s surroundings giving greater weight to lines like “When you stand before God / I’ll be with you”.
Top: ‘Chance Meeting’ by Simon Jowett. Picture is public domain.
“The picture was taken onboard the 09:35 Warszawa Centralna to Budapest ‘Euro-City’ train as we passed through Grodzisk on Sunday 15th October 2017, edited in photos on the iPhone and uploaded from the train.”
