Numan’s exhaustive, entertaining and often poignant life story is refreshingly uncool
In Dylan Jones’s recent oral history of the new romantic movement, Sweet Dreams, Gary Numan stands out like a sore pale thumb. He fell into electronic
music by accident after early fumblings in punk (other bands like the Human League and OMD had long been plugging away at their primitive synthesisers). He became the first Briton to have a No 1 synth-pop single (Are “Friends” Electric?, with Tubeway Army in May 1979), before repeating the feat four months later, solo, with the advertising evergreen Cars.
His hero David Bowie shunned him, and the music press weren’t keen on him either, but Numan had the last laugh. The music he made then – shiny, icy and immediate, inspired by his science-fiction short stories – endured. Heavily sampled in early 00s pop hits like Sugababes’ Freak Like Me and Basement Jaxx’s Where’s Your Head At?, it was also admired by harder, industrial acts like Nine Inch Nails and goth-rocker Marilyn Manson (Numan’s music moved in this direction later in his career, and expanded his fanbase).