Gary Numan entered the music industry as frontman of the new wave band Tubeway Army.
68 Facts About Gary Numan
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Gary Numan faced intense hostility from critics and fellow musicians in his early career, but has since come to be regarded as a pioneer of electronic music.
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Gary Numan developed a signature sound consisting of heavy synthesiser hooks fed through guitar effects pedals, and is known for his distinctive voice and androgynous "android" persona.
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Gary Numan Anthony James Webb was born on 8 March 1958 in Hammersmith, London.
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Gary Numan's father was a British Airways bus driver based at Heathrow Airport.
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Gary Numan was the only child until he was seven when his family adopted his cousin John, who would become a musician and play in Numan's backing band.
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Gary Numan joined the Air Training Corps as a teenager and then briefly held various jobs including forklift truck driver, air conditioning ventilator fitter, and accounts clerk.
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When Gary Numan was 15, his father bought him a Gibson Les Paul, which became his most treasured possession.
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Gary Numan briefly played in various bands and looked through ads in Melody Maker for bands to join.
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Gary Numan later picked the surname Numan from an advertisement in the Yellow Pages for a plumber whose surname was Neumann.
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Gary Numan came to prominence in the 1970s as lead singer, songwriter, and record producer for Tubeway Army.
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At this point Gary Numan was recording his next album with a new backing band.
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At the peak of success, Gary Numan opted to premiere four new songs in a John Peel session in June 1979 rather than promoting the current album and the Tubeway Army group name was dropped.
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The Pleasure Principle was a rock album with no guitars; instead, Gary Numan used synthesisers connected to effects units to achieve a distorted, phased, metallic tone.
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Telekon, the final studio album that Gary Numan retrospectively termed the "Machine" section of his career, reintroduced guitars to Gary Numan's music and featured a wider range of synthesisers.
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However, Gary Numan's success began to wane as he was outsold by the Human League, Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, and even his prior support act, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.
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Warriors was the last album Gary Numan recorded for Beggars Banquet Records, and was supported by a 40-date UK tour.
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Gary Numan subsequently issued a series of albums and singles on his own record label, Numa.
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In 1987, Gary Numan performed vocals for three singles by Radio Heart, a project of brothers Hugh and David Nicholson, formerly of Marmalade and Blue, which charted with varying success.
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Gary Numan would reopen the record label in 1992, but it was again shuttered in 1996.
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In 1991, Numan ventured into film-scoring by co-composing the music for The Unborn with Michael R Smith.
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Gary Numan supported Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark on a 1993 arena tour.
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Gary Numan thus sought a grittier, more industrial tone for his songwriting on the album Sacrifice, on which, for the first time, he played almost all the instruments himself.
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Sacrifice was the last album Gary Numan made before shutting down Numa Records permanently.
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Gary Numan toured the US in support of Exile, his first stateside concerts since the early 1980s.
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In 2005, Gary Numan took control of his own business affairs again with the launch of his recording label, Mortal Records.
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Gary Numan launched a Jagged website to showcase the new album, and made plans to have his 1981 farewell concert issued on DVD by November 2006 as well as releasing the DVD version of the Jagged album launch gig.
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Gary Numan undertook a brief Telekon 'Classic Album' tour in the UK in December 2006, performing at Rock City, the Kentish Town Forum and Club Academy.
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Gary Numan sold out a 15-date UK and Ireland tour in spring 2008, during which he performed his 1979 number-one album Replicas in its entirety, and all the Replicas-era music including B-sides.
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In November 2007, Gary Numan confirmed via his website that work on a new album, with the working title of Splinter, would be under way throughout 2008, after finishing an alternate version of Jagged and the CD of unreleased songs from his previous three albums.
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Gary Numan released his subsequent album, Splinter, in 2013.
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Gary Numan was set to perform a small number of American live dates in April 2010, including a Coachella Festival appearance in California, but had to cancel because air travel in Europe was halted by the Icelandic volcanic ash cloud.
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Gary Numan toured Australia in May 2011 performing his seminal album The Pleasure Principle in its entirety to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary.
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Gary Numan lent his vocals to the track "My Machines" on Battles's 2011 album Gloss Drop.
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Gary Numan was chosen by Battles to perform at the ATP Nightmare Before Christmas festival that they co-curated in December 2011 in Minehead, England.
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Gary Numan provided narration for Aurelio Voltaire's 5th short film in his ChimeraScope series, Odokuro in 2011, which won 12 awards and was shown as a selection at numerous film festivals between 2011 and 2013.
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In June 2014, Gary Numan collaborated with Jayce Lewis and his Protafield project on the track "Redesign" featured on Protafield's Nemesis Album.
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Gary Numan provided vocals for the song "Long Way Down", composed by Masafumi Takada with lyrics written by Rich Dickerson, for the video game The Evil Within, which was released on 14 October 2014.
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Gary Numan performed a sold-out, one-off live show in London in November 2014 at the Eventim Apollo supported by Gang of Four.
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Gary Numan collaborated with the industrial pop group VOWWS for "Losing Myself in You" on their debut album The Great Sun.
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On 6 May 2016, Gary Numan was one of several collaborators on Jean-Michel Jarre's album Electronica 2: The Heart of Noise, with the track "Here for You", cowritten by Jarre and Gary Numan.
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On 10 May 2016, Gary Numan was named the recipient of the 2016 Moog Innovation Award by Moog Music.
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On 18 May 2017, Gary Numan received an Ivor Novello Inspiration Award from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers, and Authors.
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In 2017, Gary Numan released the single "My Name Is Ruin" and went on a European tour September.
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Gary Numan was the winner of the 2017 T3 tech legends award.
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Gary Numan was scheduled to appear at the Cleveland House of Blues that evening but cancelled the show for being "inappropriate" in light of the day's tragedy.
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Gary Numan discussed its genesis with author Guy Mankowski, who has a chapter on Gary Numan's legacy in his book Albion's Secret History: Snapshots of England's Pop Rebels and Outsiders, as part of an interview series on influential English artists for Zer0 Books.
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Gary Numan performed at the Cruel World Festival in Pasadena, California on May 20,2023.
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Gary Numan joined the Air Training Corps as a teenager, when he wanted to be either a pilot or a pop star.
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Gary Numan indulged his passion for motor racing in 1981 by sponsoring Mike Mackonochie who drove a Van Diemen RF81 in Numanair livery in the Formula Ford 1600 class.
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In November and December 1981, Gary Numan successfully flew around the world in his Piper Navajo with co-pilot Bob Thompson on their second attempt.
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In 1984, Gary Numan bought a Harvard T-6 trainer aircraft registered G-AZSC and had the aircraft painted to resemble a Japanese Zero fighter.
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Gary Numan gained a display pilot's licence and flew the machine on the UK air display circuit.
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Gary Numan held licences for piston and turbine helicopters and had a fixed wing multi engined rating.
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Gary Numan was an aerobatic flying instructor and was appointed by the Civil Aviation Authority as an air display pilot evaluator.
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Gary Numan became enamoured by the idea of "being cold about everything, not letting emotions get to you, or presenting a front of not feeling".
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Gary Numan's starting point is usually a piano to work out melodies and chord structures.
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Gary Numan nevertheless generated an army of fans calling themselves "Numanoids", providing him with a fanbase which maintained their support through the latter half of the 1980s, when his fortunes began to fall.
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Gary Numan maintains a cult following, and has sold over 10 million records.
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Gary Numan is considered a pioneer of electronic music; Nightshift identified Gary Numan, and fellow late 1970s debutants OMD and the Human League, as "the holy trinity of synth-pop".
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Gary Numan has been credited as a key influence by fellow British musician Kim Wilde as she was working on her debut single "Kids in America" with her brother Ricky.
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Since the 1990s Gary Numan has been cited as a major influence by a variety of bands and artists from hip hop to industrial rock, including Africa Bambaataa, Fear Factory, Nine Inch Nails, and Marilyn Manson.
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Gary Numan was an outspoken supporter of the Conservative Party and Margaret Thatcher after her election as Prime Minister.
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Gary Numan later expressed regret for giving his public support, calling it "a noose around my neck".
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Gary Numan has previously said that he considers himself neither left- nor right-wing and that he did not support Tony Blair or David Cameron.
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In 1997, Gary Numan married Gemma O'Neill, a member of his fan club from Sidcup.
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At age 15, after a series of outbursts in which he would "smash things up, scream and shout, get in people's faces and break stuff", Gary Numan was prescribed antidepressants and anxiolytics.
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Gary Numan published his autobiography, Praying to the Aliens, in 1997, in collaboration with Steve Malins, who wrote the liner notes for most of the CD reissues of Gary Numan's albums in the late 1990s, as well as executive producing the Hybrid album in 2003.