Gary Numan

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British synth-pop pioneer Gary Numan relates some interesting paranormal experiences in his recent autobiography (R) evolution (Constable, 2020). As a Middlesex teenager in the early 1970s, Numan (then plain Gary Webb) and a friend would often venture into London on the tube, usually disembarking at Piccadilly Circus. On one occasion, they were following an old man “dressed with more than a hint of the 1940s about him, including a hat”, towards what they presumed was an exit. At the top of a long escalator, the old man turned left, into what Numan and his friend, following closely behind, found was a dead end, with no egress that the old man could have disappeared into. Numan used the ghost’s sartorial style as the basis for the outfits he wore on the covers of his early 80s albums Dance and I, Assassin (pp 21-22). Numan also describes this story in an interview in FT273:76 ( April 2011).

The other major incidents took place in 1981. That year, Numan was living in a house at Virginia Water, Surrey. One afternoon, both Numan and his housemate “heard a young girl’s voice call out gently, ‘Gary’”. Thinking it was a female fan who had snuck into the house, the pair searched inside and outside the house thoroughly, finding no sign of an actual girl, even though they heard the voice a couple more times. Shortly after this, the house exhibited mild signs of haunting, with doors opening by themselves and lights turning themselves on and off. Numan would leave lights on in the house before leaving for studio sessions, and would often return in the early hours to find the house swathed in darkness. Freaked out, Numan stayed with his parents for a few days before returning to the house, which now had a different ‘feel’ to it, the haunting apparently having ceased. Numan subsequently lived there for several more years with no further ghostly experiences to report. (pp.109-110).

While recording the Dance

album in mid-1981, Numan and his then girlfriend were again driving home from the studio in the early hours of the morning when they had a UFO/UAP encounter. Numan relates that the small road they were on was “very quiet, as if we were the only car on it” (the ‘Oz factor’ at work?). As they crossed a motorway, both saw “a huge light coming out of the clouds, shaped like an upside-down pyramid, with the pointy end just touching the surface of the road”. In the low cloud Numan could see that the light was coming through the clouds from what appeared to be “a perfect square shape, like the base of a pyramid, but only the edges”. Numan and his girlfriend stopped the car and got out, expecting to hear a helicopter, but there was “no noise at all”. The phenomenon disappeared when they were getting back into the car (p.114). This experience is particularly interesting in light of the fact that Numan was fond of using pyramid iconography in his stage shows and album covers (the sleeve of Numan’s classic 1979 album The Pleasure Principle

features a besuited Numan at a desk next to an ornamental pyramid, glowing red). This might suggest that a sleepdeprived Numan had some kind of hypnagogic vision using a symbol of personal significance, although this doesn’t explain why his girlfriend witnessed the same image. Folie a deux,

perhaps?

Dean Ballinger

Hamilton, New Zealand¯ drugged would have ingested it in a drink. Perhaps a reader with medical knowledge could comment.

The postcard and account of Besom Jamie [ FT416:77] reminds me of the itinerant Bottle Men of Nairobi, Kenya. I lived there in the early 1960s, and these chaps made at least part of their living from collecting bottles from the more affluent neighbourhoods and selling them on, or getting the deposit back. I think it was a precarious existence; we gave shelter to one of these men for a few days. I am not aware of any postcards featuring them; the cards feature white sandy beaches, elephants, lions and local tribespeople, but the Bottle Men remain unrecorded.

Dave Miles

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