71 Facts About Gary Numan

Gary Numan entered the music industry as frontman of the new wave band Tubeway Army.

Gary Numan developed a signature sound consisting of heavy synthesizer hooks fed through guitar effects pedals, and is known for his distinctive voice and androgynous "android" persona.

Gary Numan received an Ivor Novello Award, the Inspiration Award, from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers, and Authors in 2017.

Gary Numan's father was a British Airways bus driver based at Heathrow Airport.

Gary Numan was seven when his family adopted his cousin John, who would become a musician and play in Numan's backing band.

Gary Numan joined the Air Training Corps as a teenager and briefly held various jobs including London Heathrow Airport bus driver, forklift truck driver, air conditioning ventilator fitter, and accounts clerk.

When Gary Numan was 15, his father bought him a Gibson Les Paul guitar, which became his most treasured possession.

Gary Numan briefly played in various bands and looked through advertisements in Melody Maker for bands to join.

Gary Numan later picked the surname Numan from an advertisement in the yellow pages for a plumber whose surname was Neumann.

Gary Numan came to prominence in the 1970s as lead vocalist, songwriter, and record producer for Tubeway Army.

At this point Gary Numan was recording his next studio album with a new backing band, having recruited keyboardist Chris Payne and drummer Cedric Sharpley.

At the peak of success, Gary Numan opted to premiere four songs in a John Peel session in June 1979 rather than promoting the current album and the Tubeway Army group name was dropped.

The Pleasure Principle was a rock album with no guitars; instead, Gary Numan used synthesizers connected to effects units to achieve a distorted, phased, metallic tone.

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 synthesizers.

However, Gary Numan's success began to wane as he was outsold by the Human League, Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, and his prior support act, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.

Warriors was the last album Gary Numan recorded for Beggars Banquet Records, and was supported by a 40-date UK tour.

Gary Numan subsequently issued a series of albums and singles on his own record label, Numa.

In 1987, Gary Numan performed vocals for three singles by Radio Heart, a project of brothers Hugh and David Nicholson, which charted with varying success.

Gary Numan would reopen the record label in 1992, yet it was again shuttered in 1996.

In 1991, Numan ventured into film-scoring by co-composing the music for The Unborn with Michael R Smith.

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.

Sacrifice was the final studio album that Gary Numan made before shutting down Numa Records permanently.

Gary Numan toured the US in support of Exile, his first stateside concerts since the early 1980s.

In 2005, Gary Numan took control of his own business affairs again with the launch of his recording label, Mortal Records.

Gary Numan launched a Jagged website to showcase the 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.

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.

Gary Numan sold out a 15-date UK and Ireland tour in spring 2008, during which he performed his 1979 number-one studio album Replicas in its entirety, and all the Replicas-era music including B-sides.

In November 2007, Gary Numan confirmed via his website that work on a new studio 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 studio albums.

Gary Numan released his subsequent album, Splinter, in 2013.

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.

Gary Numan toured Australia in May 2011 performing his album The Pleasure Principle in its entirety to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary.

Gary Numan lent his vocals to the track "My Machines" on Battles's second studio album Gloss Drop.

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.

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.

In June 2014, Gary Numan collaborated with Jayce Lewis on the track "Redesign" which originally featured on the Welshman's Protafield album Nemesis The same album was re-released as a Special Edition under Lewis's solo name in 2018.

Gary Numan provided vocals for the song "Long Way Down", composed by Masafumi Takada with lyrics written by Rich Dickerson, for the survival horror video game The Evil Within, which was released on 14 October 2014.

Gary Numan performed a sold-out, one-off live show in London in November 2014 at the Hammersmith Apollo supported by Gang of Four.

Gary Numan collaborated with the industrial pop group VOWWS for "Losing Myself in You" on their debut studio album The Great Sun.

On 6 May 2016, Gary Numan was one of several collaborators on Jean-Michel Jarre's eighteenth studio album Electronica 2: The Heart of Noise, with the track "Here for You", cowritten by Jarre and Gary Numan.

On 10 May 2016, Gary Numan was named the recipient of the 2016 Moog Innovation Award by Moog Music.

On 18 May 2017, Gary Numan received an Ivor Novello Inspiration Award from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers, and Authors.

In 2017, Gary Numan released the single "My Name Is Ruin" and went on a European tour September.

Gary Numan was the winner of the 2017 T3 tech legends award.

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.

Gary Numan discussed its genesis with writer 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.

Gary Numan performed at the Cruel World Festival in Pasadena, California on 20 May 2023.

In October 2023, Gary Numan performed a series of eight acoustic gigs, playing songs from his repertoire in a new way in smaller, intimate settings.

In February 2024, Gary Numan announced a UK tour to celebrate the 45th anniversary of his 1979 albums Replicas and The Pleasure Principle.

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", though his stage presence later became more intense and extroverted.

Later in the 1980s, Gary Numan adopted a new visual image for each new album, such as the Mad Max-influenced image for Warriors, the white-skinned, white-clad "Iceman" with blue hair and make-up for the 1984 Berserker album and tour, the white suit and red bow-tie image for The Fury, and a Blade Runner-influenced image for Strange Charm.

Gary Numan's starting point is usually a piano to work out melodies and chord structures.

Gary Numan cited the album, and particularly the song "Slow Motion", as the blueprint for what he wanted to achieve.

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.

Gary Numan maintains a cult following and has sold over 10 million records.

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".

Gary Numan has been credited as a key influence by fellow English musician Kim Wilde as she was working on her debut single "Kids in America" with her brother Ricky.

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 and Britpop, including Afrika Bambaataa, Fear Factory, Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, Stephin Merritt of Magnetic Fields and Damon Albarn of Blur.

From early in his career Gary Numan was very close to his family.

In 1997, Gary Numan married Gemma O'Neill, a member of his fan club from Sidcup, south-east London.

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.

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.

Gary Numan was an outspoken supporter of the Conservative Party and Margaret Thatcher after her election as Prime Minister.

Gary Numan later expressed regret for giving his public support, calling it "a noose around my neck".

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.

Gary Numan joined the Air Training Corps as a teenager, when he wanted to be either a pilot or a pop star.

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.

In November and December 1981, Gary Numan successfully flew around the world in his Piper PA-31 Navajo with co-pilot Bob Thompson on their second attempt.

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.

Gary Numan gained a display pilot's licence and flew the machine on the UK air display circuit.

Gary Numan held licences for piston and turbine helicopters and had a fixed wing multi engined rating.

Gary Numan was an aerobatic flying instructor and was appointed by the Civil Aviation Authority as an air display pilot evaluator.