Electropop star Gary Numan on supporting Margaret Thatcher
As he re-releases two hit albums, Gary Numan talks to Chris Harvey about buying a plane, feeling like a misfit and why he left Britain
Gary Numan had just turned 21 when he released the album
Replicas with Tubeway Army 40 years ago. The image of him on the cover – black shirt and tie, bleached white hair – was striking, but the Essex misfit had limited expectations. “I didn’t see any songs on there that were capable of being hit singles,” he says. “There are no boxes ticked by Are
‘Friends’ Electric? You can’t dance to it, it has no chorus, it’s too long…”
It went to number one, with the now black-haired, kohl-eyed, unsmiling Numan a strange apparition on Top of the Pops. The song, drawing inspiration from Philip K Dick’s novella Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep, predated Blade Runner (1982) by three years, and established Numan in the minds of the nation as something approaching an android himself. He would later reveal that he had Aspergers’. “I’m not good with emotional things,” he tells me. “I feel things differently.”
It’s a wet day in Cardiff, and Numan, looking slackly reptilian, is reclining on a sofa in ripped jeans and T-shirt a few hours before he takes the stage as part of his 40th anniversary tour. The opaque blackness of his hair clings to his pale skin as unnaturally as an oil spill to a gull. He’s 61 years old, chatty, with London estuary vowels that wouldn’t sound out of place in pubs from Selsey Bill to Canvey Island. He’s so normal, you have to remind yourself that you’re in the presence of the first electropop superstar, who influenced everyone from Depeche Mode to Marilyn Manson.
Less than six months after Replicas, Numan went solo, released another chart-topping album, The Pleasure
Principle, and had a hit, Cars, that broke into the top 10 in America. Fame arrived so suddenly, it was a blur. Numan travelled by Concorde, bought houses, cars, planes; a trained pilot, he owned three of the latter at one point.
But there were dark days waiting for Numan in the late Eighties and early Nineties. He tried updating his synth-heavy sound with everything from saxophone to funk guitar. But even he had stopped believing his records were any good – “I couldn’t sell albums and fair enough if you’re going to put out s--- like that!” he told the Quietus website in 2012. Having spent wildly, he was broke and in debt. Cutting back to a budget of £600 a month and setting up paid-for phone lines for his fans just about kept the wolf from the door, but his girlfriend, Gemma O’neill (now his wife), was still paying for their groceries. She’s relaxing on a nearby sofa, also dressed in black. Gemma always accompanies him on tour. She was a member of Numan’s fan club before they started dating. She’d first been introduced to him by her dad – who worked in the music industry – when she was 12. “I just fancied him straight off,” she says. She started going to his gigs, meeting him again when she was “14, 16, 18”, staying a committed fan as she got older. She had a regular place where she would stand at the front, and would ask for photos with him after the shows. The road crew used to call her “fantasy tits”, Numan says. “In those early days of me, there’s lots of girls [who] come backstage, and that sort of thing goes on. She stood out because she was the prettiest of any of them. And the one that wouldn’t.”
But Gemma didn’t want to be one of the young women who hung around after concerts hoping for sex with the singer. “I was not a sex-mad teenager growing up,” she says. “Very disappointing,” concludes Numan.
Numan’s mother ran his fan club, and he asked her for Gemma’s number – “total breach of data security there,” he grins – and phoned her up. It was not something he did often. “I have phone phobias,” he says, “because I’m Asperger’s.” Eventually, he was able to convince her to let him take her out.
They have been together now for 27 years and married for 22, Gemma tells me. There’s a 10-year age gap between the couple. They have three daughters: the first, Raven, 16, through IVF, then Persia, 14, and Echo, 12. He’s a doting father. When Persia joined him to sing at the Royal Albert Hall last year, he couldn’t help slipping out of character, hugging her and flicking her hair.
Numan credits Gemma, not only with helping him come to terms with his Aspergers’, but with rekindling his career. Her views on his musical output led to arguments. “I was a fan and I saw him smothering his voice and stuff with session players and backing singers,” she says. “I personally wanted Gary Numan back.”
He recorded the album, Sacrifice (1994), on which he played most of the instruments himself, and the long journey back to prominence began. His 2017 album, Savage (Songs from a
Broken World), re-established him as an artist with something to say. Its harsh soundscapes felt as if they’d sprung directly from the desert planet of Arrakis in Frank Herbert’s Dune.
The decision to pour images of a desolate planet into his songs came after he heard Donald Trump refer to climate change as a hoax. Numan and his wife had moved to Los Angeles in 2012, and in California, he says, global warming “hits you in the face every single day”.
“It’s one of those things where it’s so science-fiction, you can’t quite grasp that it is real.”
Numan left the UK, he says, after “a bit of a midlife crisis”, when he started to worry about ageing, his health and “getting frustrated by the weather, sat indoors”. An incident near their home in East Sussex, made up his mind. “Gemma was walking down the street with the kids and got surrounded by a group of lads [after she had told them off for something], 13 to 14 years old, who started abusing her in front of the children, saying things like, ‘show us your t---, love’. It seems like you can’t get away from that here, even if you go to the quietest little village in England.”
He’s been observing Brexit from a distance and thinks most people voted on gut instinct – “what they felt about immigration, what they felt about the queues at the NHS, whether they blame immigrants for having to wait for operations”.
The fact that Numan admitted to voting Tory in the landslide 1983 election and expressed admiration for Margaret Thatcher was one of the sticks used to beat him at the height of his fame. The company that printed his fan club magazines terminated the contract, proving that “cancel culture” was alive and well long before Twitter. “Most people voted Conservative when I did,” he says, ruefully.
But his fans, who called themselves Numanoids and copied his look, remain one of the most committed followings in all of music. They’re “absolutely lovely”, he says, although he admits there’s a small group of so-called fans who can be “vicious”. When Gemma lost her first baby, a fan wrote to him saying they were glad “as maybe now I’d write more music”.
“It frightens me, because I don’t live a secretive life, I go out and about all the time, so I’m there for the grabbing, or the stabbing, if I bump into the wrong person on the wrong day.”
His new album, Intruder, viewing humanity as a virus, will be his most eagerly awaited in years, although he’s only written two songs so far, he admits: one of them, the title track, he has been playing on tour, the other is about “the end of dragons. I like to believe that they were once real.” Gary Numan never really went away.
Gary Numan will play at London’s Roundhouse tonight and tomorrow. Tickets: roundhouse.org.uk. Reissues of his albums Replicas and The Pleasure
Principle are available now. Details: garynuman.com
Some of his fans scare him. ‘I’m there to be stabbed if I bump into the wrong person on the wrong day’