ELECTRO pop pioneer Gary Numan is baffled.

While he is delighted to be headlining the second DV8Fest in York, he wonders why he is atop a goth/alternative festival.

“I get a little confused by the gothic thing,” admits Gary, who will play York Barbican tomorrow night. “I do quite a lot of interviews with the gothic press and I’m not entirely sure why.

“Maybe it’s because of who I’ve influenced, but I guess it’s because there has been an anti-God thing going on in my music…which I’m now getting away from because I was becoming a one-trick pony.

“But by moving away from it, I’m probably not going to get invited to another goth festival.”

Tomorrow’s set will combine such iconic electro anthems as 1979 number ones Are Friends Electric and Cars with material from Gary’s next two albums. Yes, two albums.

This represents a spurt of songwriting after a trickle of Numan albums in recent years. “The last album [Jagged] came out in 2006 and the one before that was five years earlier, but when you get to this point in your career, doing an album every five years is the stupidest thing you can do when you need to be pushing them out regularly,” says the 53-year-old West Londoner.

“The new album ‘proper’ will come out in the New Year, called Splinter, but now me and Ade Fenton, my producer and manager, who’s in the band, have done our first album together. Really it’s a joint album, though it’s going out under my name, but it’s basically a sidestep project to try a few new things out.”

Just to confuse you, the album title is Dead Son Rising but a track on there is entitled Dead Sun Rising. Anyway, that is beside the point; the distinction between the two albums is more significant. “Splinter will be a huge onslaught of relentless rhythm, big choruses and the most monstrous chords we can find. It’s very dark, very heavy, and lyrically it will be very weird, so there’s not much room in there for subtlety, romance or variation,” says Gary “It’s tear-your-head-off music, whereas Dead Son Rising even has songs about relationships, which I haven’t written about for 25 years.”

When Numan writes for a new album, usually he establishes initial boundaries. “Anything that doesn’t fit in is left on the shelf as I feel the album should be cohesive rather than sounding like a greatest hits set, veering from place to place, when I prefer to have a common thread running through it – which doesn’t tie you down but focuses you.”

Dead Son Rising differs from that approach, but not radically. “I don’t mean ‘do a country and western album’ but going off at a tangent,” says Gary. “For a long time I’ve wanted to write novels, so I make notes constantly; I’m kind of on with it all the time and in fact some of the songs on this album come from ideas that I have for a book. It’s a move sideways to make them into songs – and it’s the first time I’ve done that since Replicas in 1979, which had a whole lot of short stories that never came out but matured into songs.”

• Gary Numan plays York Barbican on Friday at 8pm, supported by Luxury Stranger. Box office: 0844 854 2757.