“There is a glossy version with the front cover where everything looks very shiny,” he says, “but the reality can be devastating and destructive. Making music stops being what you love and starts dealing with modules and strategies. The stress and pressure of it all was incredibly difficult, especially for someone like me.” I should have quietly stopped touring. No one would have noticed. Instead, I upset everyone and ruined my career Numan has since “learned how to be a famous person”, but at 23, with long-standing problems with social interactions, constant interview requests, trespassing outside his home and harsh coverage from the music press (“with a unnecessary level of hostility”) were intolerable. . He then received death threats. “I felt like I was being pushed to the edge of a cliff,” he says, waving his arms as if to indicate a sense of losing balance. “And I didn’t want to fall.” So Numan left, announcing a ‘farewell’ gig at Wembley Arena in 1981 (which was extended to three nights due to huge audience demand) and retired from live performance (for less than two years). “I wanted to get back to music and to who I was before it all started,” he says. “The mistake was to make it public. I should have quietly stopped touring and no one would have noticed. Instead, I upset everyone and ruined my career.” “I think the audience was even more emotional than me” … back at Wembley Arena in May. Photo: Matt Frost/Sky UK Today, the 64-year-old star is speaking via video from a home near Stirling in Scotland, which he bought as an investment after the pandemic exposed his reliance on live touring. Soft-spoken, friendly, open and occasionally self-deprecating, the boisterous electronic pop pioneer is in fine form – and with sense. After years away, his last two albums each went to No 2 in the UK charts and in May he returned to Wembley, which had become a “symbolic target” for his recovery. “I thought it might take four years,” he laughs, “not 41.” A new documentary, Gary Numan Resurrection, tells the story of his revival with unusual honesty, even showing the singer having a panic attack as the Wembley stage beckoned once more. “There was an older one that didn’t get shot,” he reveals, “but about an hour before I went on, I was losing it properly. My dad was there and he did that typical dude, “Come on, you’re going to be okay.” It was almost word for word what he said to me when I was 18, playing in a little pub.” But the moment Numan faced the audience, his anxiety melted away. “It was great, actually,” he smiles. “The power of all those people making all this noise. Some of them were at the first Wembley gigs, or had me hooked from the start. I think they were even more emotional than me.” Numan was born Gary Webb to a British Airways bus driver father and a seamstress mother and lived in Wraysbury in Berkshire, down the Heathrow flight path. His first ambition was to fly planes before a careers speech at Ashford High School in Surrey changed his mind. “The man said, ‘Only one in a thousand people can be a pilot,’” he recalled. “Which is actually bullshit, terrible advice! But there were about 800 people in the school. I thought “There’s no way it’s me.” So I said, “Right, I’m going to be a pop star.” It was a childish thought, but from that moment on the school became an unnecessary obstacle.” As well as becoming a pop star, he got his pilot’s license in 1980 and founded the flight charter company Numanair. “You accept that you are naturally unlikely”… Numan struggled with anxiety. Photo: Matt Frost/Sky UK The documentary reveals a letter from Numan’s headmaster calling him “the most annoying student I’ve had in 21 years of teaching”. The singer was expelled twice – first from Ashford and then from Brooklands College in Weybridge. When he was 15, a child psychologist referred him to Asperger syndrome, a then little-known autism spectrum disorder. “He didn’t actually diagnose it, but he mentioned it,” she says. “It would have been considered a stigma back then. My mum definitely took it that way and was very upset about it.” Numan was given anti-anxiety medication Nardil and Valium for a year, but it was never followed up and he continued to struggle to make or keep friends. In his first band, at school, he turned up to rehearsals one day to find someone else singing. “Then every person in or around the band stopped talking to me or left,” he recalls. “I always tried to be friendly, so I couldn’t understand it. Finally, one of their friends said, “Nobody wants to know you anymore.” It was traumatic, but you accept that there is something wrong with you, that you try to be friendly but by nature you are not likeable, and so you become isolated. Then you write songs about it.” Adapting a name from one he found in the Yellow Pages (Neumann Kitchen Appliances) and very convincingly hiding his background horror behind an image and a persona, he put his alienation and love of science fiction into futuristic songs like Cars (where “I feel safer than anything. I can lock all my doors. It’s the only way to live”) and I, Disconnect from You. The singer has always been more fascinated by technology and noises than conventional music, preferring the electric guitar bought by his steadfastly supportive parents to the acoustic “because it had dials and switches”. Numan was fronting the Tubeway Army, with whom he made his first two albums, when he encountered a Minimoog synthesizer: “I had a eureka moment. I thought, “That noise sounds great. How can I bring that to the song?’” He set out to convert all of his band’s guitar-based punk songs into electropop. Soon after, the memorable synth hook for Are “Friends” Electric?, written on an old pub piano bought by his parents, emerged through “my bad playing. I gave a wrong note and it sounded better.” Just a year after signing to Beggars Banquet, the 1979 single sold a million copies. By the 1990s, however, his albums received little or no reviews. “Which was even worse! In 1995 I did a single called Absolution which only sold 3,000 copies,” he reveals. “Less than my debut single when I was a complete unknown. That means 997,000 people were fucked!” Then in the 00s, he was mashed up by the Sugababes and increasingly recognized as a key figure in electronic pop. Numan’s resurrection began after he met Gemma O’Neill, a fan who connected with the singer after her mother died of cancer. They have now been together for 30 years and married for 25, and he credits her with helping him see himself more positively and be more relaxed in conversations. “Little nudges under the table or big conversations after we’d been out somewhere,” she says. “‘Why did you say that? That’s why that person left.’ Socializing will always be stressful for me, but I’m more than happy to hide in her shadow when we’re out. It’s given me a confidence I never had before.” ‘It gave me confidence’… Numan with wife Gemma O’Neill. Photo: Sky UK/Gary Numan Resurrection His wife also helped him recognize where his music had gone wrong. “I would think of myself as the weak link in my albums,” he explains. “I was bringing in guitar players and other people to do the vocals. He said, “You may not be the best keyboard player or guitar player in the world, but you have a sound that people love.” She was right.” The couple went through “very traumatic” IVF and lost a baby (they now have three teenage daughters), but their only serious period of turmoil was when they both experienced depression. “She was coming out of hers just like I was going into mine,” he says. “I was thinking about not getting a divorce, but getting away for a while because everything was negative.” Instead, Numan wrote Lost, a beautiful song on Splinter (Songs from a Broken Mind), the 2013 album that returned him to the Top 20. “I fully intended to reveal how bad it was and how right I was,” he smiles. , “but all that came out was how brilliant she was. That might be dramatic, but I think it saved us.” Numan admits that when 2017’s Savage (Songs from a Broken World) went to No 2 in the UK album chart, followed by 2021’s Intruder, he “cried like a baby because it meant so much”. His next “small hurdle” is another No. 1, but some concerns remain. He is concerned about global warming and the environment, and after the family relocated to Los Angeles in 2012, he worried about the rise of Donald Trump. Now, his biggest fear is that one day he won’t be here for his children, so he writes about “being dead or coming back as a ghost and trying to communicate.” “I don’t write happy songs,” he smiles. “I write about what bothers me. I’d rather not worry, but it’s all good. If I had stopped worrying, I would have only made one album.” Gary Numan Resurrection airs on Sky Arts and NOW TV on August 13
