Gary Numan: Listen to My Voice

By Richard Cosgrove

Gary Numan is widely recognised as being the most important electronic pioneer in music history. Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl, hip-hop innovator Afrika Bambaataa, and Oscar winner and Nine Inch Nails auteur Trent Reznor are among legions of musicians who cite his music as having been important in their own evolution. However, Numan’s journey from punky pub performer to Godfather of Electronica hasn’t been a smooth one.
Listen To My Voice chronicles his life as he rises to become the hottest pop star of 1980, retires a year later at the age of twenty-one, falls from favour and hits rock bottom during the 1980s, struggles to regain relevance during the 90s and eventually battles his way back to the top of his game where he remains to this day. For more than four decades Numan has been built up, torn down, praised, ridiculed, buried, resurrected, and ultimately respected.
This is his story, listen to his voice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Haven Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Oct 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781949515602

Book preview

Gary Numan

Listen to My Voice

Richard Cosgrove

Published 2023

NEW HAVEN PUBLISHING LTD

www.newhavenpublishingltd.com

[e-mail]

All Rights Reserved

The rights of Richard Cosgrove, as the author of this work, have been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be re-printed or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now unknown or hereafter invented, including photocopying, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the Author and Publisher.

Cover Photo© Wikimedia

Cover Design © Pete Cunliffe

Copyright © 2023

All rights reserved © Richard Cosgrove

ISBN: 978-1-949515-60-2

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Intro & Acknowledgements*

Chapter 2: New Thing From London Town*

Chapter 3: The Plan*

Chapter 4: Tubeway Army*

Chapter 5: Replicas*

Chapter 6: The Pleasure Principle*

Chapter 7: Telekon*

Chapter 8: Living Ornaments*

Chapter 9: Dance*

Chapter 10: My Centurion*

Chapter 11: I, Assassin*

Chapter 12: Warriors*

Chapter 13: Berserker*

Chapter 14: The Fury*

Chapter 15: Strange Charm*

Chapter 16: Metal Rhythm*

Chapter 17: Outland*

Chapter 18: Machine + Soul*

Chapter 19: Sacrifice*

Chapter 20: Exile*

Chapter 21: Pure*

Chapter 22: Resurrection*

Chapter 23: Jagged*

Chapter 24: Here in the Black*

Chapter 25: Dead Son Rising*

Chapter 26: Splinter*

Chapter 27: Savage*

Chapter 28: Intruder*

Chapter 29: Outro*

About the Author

Chapter 1

* Intro & Acknowledgements *

Intro

It’s cold outside.

Well maybe not today, depending on when you’re reading this, but back in May 1979 it certainly was as the United Kingdom was in the grip of the snowiest May on record. As families gathered around the television on Thursday 24th May to watch Top of the Pops on BBC1, a nationwide ritual back in the days when there were only three channels to choose from, they were hit with another icy blast as the usual mirth and merriment was interrupted by a black clad, androgynous teenager with a cold, robotic voice and a thousand-yard stare.

With those three words Gary Numan introduced himself to the nation and for a whole legion of young music lovers, myself included, life would never be the same.

Until that moment the music scene hadn’t produced anyone quite like Numan, and over four decades later there still hasn’t been anyone who has created as impressive a legacy as he has while managing to elicit such passionate reactions from the general public and the press, both positive and negative.

No-one would have believed, least of all Numan himself, that this somber, serious young man would become an electronic pioneer, that his song Are Friends Electric? would become iconic, or that he was embarking on a journey that would see him catapulted to mega stardom, retire at the tender age of twenty one, and then produce a body of work as broad and divisive, even among his own fans, as anything that the likes of Bowie or Prince did.

We certainly never imagined that forty-five years after his debut album was released that he would be revered as one of the most influential musicians of his generation, inspiring the likes of hip hop legend Afrika Bambaataa, who utilized drum breaks from Numan’s early work at the start of the rap scene, Nine Inch Nails auteur and Oscar winner Trent Reznor, who acknowledges that his band wouldn’t be here without the influence of Numan’s Telekon, and artists as diverse as Blur, Foo Fighters, Marilyn Manson, Fear Factory, Shakatak’s Bill Nelson and pop trio Sugababes who have covered, cannibalized or collaborated with him over the years.

My own Numan journey began with that groundbreaking Top Of The Pops performance, and over the last four decades and change I’ve been a faithful devotee, from the punk of Tubeway Army to the sterile robotics of Replicas, from the lounge/jazz of Dance and I, Assassin to the industrial pop of Strange Charm and Metal Rhythm, from the electro funk of Outland and Machine+Soul to the dark course correction of Sacrifice and Exile, and the phoenix like resurrection of Splinter, Savage and Intruder.

On Saturday 15th April 2023 Numan played his 1,000th show under his own name at the Electric Ballroom in Camden Town, London. That show was my own 27th time seeing him, and while this pales into insignificance to the number of shows some of the hardcore fans have attended, I hadn’t realized until I began planning this book that I’ve seen him on almost every tour since my first proper gig, his 142nd, at Nottingham’s Royal Concert Hall on Saturday 22nd October 1983.

Ever since that fateful Thursday night in 1979 Numan’s music has been a big part of my life, and I’m proud to say that I’ve been there every step of the way, through thick and thin, the highs and lows, and have seen Numan built up, torn down, praised, ridiculed, buried, resurrected, and ultimately respected.

As he heads towards the end of his fifth decade as a performer, Numan has steadfastly marched to the beat of his own drum machine. He’s risen, fallen, experimented, innovated, floundered, and recovered, but in all that time he’s only ever asked one thing of his fans and critics alike.

Listen to my voice.

Acknowledgements

Since 1979 I’ve considered myself a huge Numan fan and have long wanted to see a definitive biography of the man. Ray Coleman wrote an excellent one way back in 1982, but since then there hasn’t been another, which given his importance to the history of music in the last four decades is surprising.

So, I decided to write one myself, to give a critical, yet positive, recanting of Numan’s career up to and including his 1,000 th show in April 2023.

What I didn’t want to do was provide a detailed inventory of his output, as both Numan and I consider Paul Goodwin’s Electric Pioneer to be the definitive resource for this. Electric Pioneer contains everything you could possibly want to know about the minutia of Numan’s output and proved to be an invaluable resource in confirming release dates for singles and albums.

Neither did I want to give an exhaustive recollection of his life in general, save where it impacted his career, as this has been well serviced by Numan himself in his two autobiographies – 1997’s Praying To The Aliens and 2020’s (R)evolution - and by Ray Coleman in his biography.

All four of these informative and entertaining books have been valuable sources in the creation of my own biography of Numan, and I thank the three authors profusely for having provided such rich research material.

I’d also like to thank a handful of people without whom this book wouldn’t have happened.

My partner and twin flame Mamta, for her constant encouragement to write and to pursue my dreams.

My late Mum, Barbara, who bought me the ticket for my first Numan gig, and who always believed that I could do anything I put my mind to.

My Dad, who likewise has always encouraged me to chase my dreams and has been a constant support in whatever crazy dream I’ve subsequently chased.

My Step-mum Monica who has listened to me rave about all things Numan (among many, many things) over the last quarter of a century.

My various friends who I’ve persuaded to attend Numan gigs with me over the years, including but not limited to Bob Carr, Andy Brown, Mark Porter, Alan Wareham, Rob Wonder and Nick Webber.

And finally, my publisher at New Haven Publishing, Teddie Dahlin, who signed me up to write this book and in doing so made a dream come true.

Thanks for reading.

Richard Cosgrove

Chapter 2

* New Thing From London Town *

At 10.30pm on 8th March 1958, Anthony and Beryl Webb welcomed their son Gary Anthony James into the world at Hammersmith Hospital, London.

Like any other parents, Tony and Beryl doted on him, so when the young boy who would become Gary Numan developed a fascination with machines and technology at an early age Tony fed this obsession by putting together a wooden panel with various old dials and switches that he had lying around.

Numan’s imagination was fired up as he played with the console and he imagined that he was a pilot, a ship’s captain and even a space explorer.

When he was four, Numan recalls seeing Hank Marvin on TV and being captivated by the electric guitar that he was playing, wanting one of his own. Seeing their son’s interest in the instrument, but with the family’s budget not stretching to an electric, Tony and Beryl bought him an acoustic guitar on which he taught himself a few chords and which would plant the seeds for his eventual music career.

Thought he loved his guitar, Numan’s real passion even at this early age was aeroplanes, which he considered to be the most exciting of all machines and he often begged his parents to take him to Heathrow to see the planes take off and land.

At the age of five, Tony and Beryl took him to a small local airfield called Fairoaks where he was able to get up close to some of the small aircraft.

As a surprise, they had booked them a pleasure flight during which Numan was allowed to sit next to the pilot, and which fuelled his own dreams of one day piloting his own plane, a dream which was to be realised in a spectacular way some two decades later.

When Numan was six, The Webb family moved out of the rented house they had been sharing with Tony’s brother Lionel, his wife Val and their two children Clive and Garry and into a three-bedroom council house at 53 St Anne’s Avenue in Stanwell, Middlesex.

At around the same time Numan was chosen to be involved in the National Child Development Study of all children born between 3rd and 9th March 1958 which would look at different areas of their lives, such as health, education, family, and employment, and involved then being interviewed every few years and given various tests and assessments.

It was during one of these assessment interviews when he was eleven that Numan was asked to write an essay on what he thought he would be doing at the age of 25. He wrote that he believed that he would be a famous stage personality, the star of an extravaganza. Little did he know how close to the mark he was.

After several years at St Anne’s Avenue, the Webb family moved to 615 London Road, Ashford, Middlesex. This was a significant move for Tony and Beryl as it was the first house that they owned as opposed to rented, the culmination of Tony’s strong work ethic which would come in very handy when Numan’s career began to take off.

It was here that Numan met the Robson brothers from the next street over, both of whom were to become very important in his life. Garry Robson was Numan’s very first bandmate, the two boys sitting in Numan’s bedroom with their guitars, the former slapping the back of it like bongos while the latter strummed. Garry would later design a logo that has since become an iconic part of Numan lore, while his brother Nicky would prove to be a valuable ally to Numan during some of the leaner years in his career.

Numan also had a group of friends in his own street who, like himself, were big fans of The Monkees. They would put on shows in neighbours’ front room under the name the Monkee Juniors, miming to Monkees records to earn money to buy chocolate from the corner shop. Numan’s friend Chris had bagged the role of Davy Jones so, as Gary had a guitar, he got to be Mike Nesmith, complete with a perfect replica of the guitarist’s green bobble hat that Beryl had made for him.

Numan was such a big fan of the Monkees that when he reached that important milestone of the first record you buy with your own money (mine was Are Friends Electric?), he had decided that it would be one of their albums. However, displaying the generous nature to his family and friends that would be the bedrock of his life, but would also be his downfall on more than one occasion when extended to others in the future, when he spotted an album by Hank Williams Junior that he knew his mum would like he bought that for her instead.

At the age of seven, Numan found himself with a new baby brother when Tony’s brother John committed suicide and his wife was declared unfit to look after their children. The family decided that rather than see the children scattered to the wind, they would each take one of them in and so five-month-old Donovan joined the Webb family.

Tony and Beryl didn’t just give Donovan a home, though, they decided to adopt him and renamed him John in memory of his late father. John Webb would eventually grow up to play an important role in Numan’s career as we’ll see in due course.

Numan accepted his new brother without question and was very protective of him. When Numan first began to get famous, John was at Halliford Boys’ School in Shepperton and had to endure the other boys calling his brother gay (no doubt due to his earring, more of which later), and taunting John that he must be the same.

On several occasions Numan threatened to turn up at the school and sort them out, but John dissuaded him, figuring that his older brother had enough problems of his own with his skyrocketing career. The bullying really affected John, though, so much so that he ended up leaving with no O-levels to go and work for Numan, and ultimately following in his musical and aviation footsteps.

Though it would be music that would eventually be the bigger part of Numan’s life, his love of aeroplanes and flying was nurtured by Tony taking him to watch them take off and land from the Queens Building at Heathrow when he worked for British Airways. Numan also enjoyed laying on the grass in the back garden of his grandmother Bobby Lidyard’s house. Bobby’s son Jess would eventually play a significant role Numan’s early career.

Numan’s love of all things aviation was further fuelled by the Webb family holidays to Spain, when at the age of ten he would try and get into the cockpit to watch the pilots fly the planes.

In 1970, after doing well in his Eleven Plus exam, Numan was one of only eight pupils from his school to be invited to go to Ashford Grammar School. This was a source of great pride for Tony and Beryl as to get into a school like Ashford Grammar usually guaranteed a first-rate education and good job prospects.

However, following an incident where a maths teacher had embarrassed Numan by making him wash ink from the walls after he hadn’t understood a question, he lost faith in the system and began to walk a more rebellious path.

This coupled with the fact that some of the classrooms offered a distant view of Heathrow meant Numan found it hard to concentrate on school and instead dreamed of becoming either a pilot or a pop star, unaware that ultimately, he would be both.

Believing that it would help him progress towards becoming the former, he joined the Air Training Corps, hoping to be able to fly in some aeroplanes but after being in the Corp for a year and only spending fifteen minutes in a plane he left, disappointed.

At the age of thirteen Numan became fascinated by T-Rex and Marc Bolan, calling him ‘Quite possibly one of the best pop stars that this country has ever had’. The model aircraft kits that had previously adorned his bedroom were replaced by twelve-inch mirror tiles and disco lights, and Numan would pull down the blinds, put on a record and become all of his heroes at once, not realising that he was already preparing himself for the pop star life that was just a few years away.

His parents had bought him his first electric guitar, a cheap old model that didn’t even have a conventional jack plug, and his cousin Richard taught him a few chord shapes, but he was never interested in becoming an accomplished musician. Instead, he figured out a way to plug the guitar into a variety of effects pedals and began conducting early experiments in making noises.

Marc Bolan played a Gibson Les Paul, and so when Gary spotted one for the seemingly bargain price of £37 in a shop on Shaftsbury Avenue, he told his parents and they agreed to buy it for him, the first of many things they would provide to support his nascent music career.

Arriving at the shop, Numan noticed that the guitar had Columbus written on it, rather than Gibson, but the shopkeeper explained that it was due to a manufacturing flaw that the Gibson logo wasn’t engraved on the neck, but that underneath it was a genuine Gibson.

Numan believed him and proudly boasted to his friends of having a genuine Gibson until he found out that the shopkeeper’s story was a lie, and that he had a cheap copy. It didn’t matter, though, as he loved the guitar and had begun writing songs on it.

Ever since he was very young, Numan had always written stories and poetry and began to match some of his words with a few easy chords. Due to his love of science fiction, many of the songs were very sci-fi based, laying the lyrical foundations for his first two albums. He’d also written about what it would be like to be a pop star and later revealed that many of the ideas for his spectacular stage sets had been inspired by these early missives.

Around this time, Numan’s behaviour at school had become so disruptive that it had begun to cause real concern among the teachers. The school called Tony and Beryl in to discuss Gary’s behaviour, which was a surprise to them as the Gary they saw at home was nothing like the rebellious hellion the headmaster was describing. Having reached his wits end and describing Gary as the unruliest pupil in the worst class he’d come across in 27 years of teaching, the headmaster suggested that Numan see a child psychologist.

Beryl took him to see a Dr Vorster, who had several sessions with Gary before admitting that he needed more specialist help than he could provide and referred him to the child psychiatry department at St Thomas’s hospital in London.

Here Numan remembers seeing a lady doctor who seemed able to pinpoint the cause of his issues, which in later years turned out to be Asperger’s syndrome, and he was put on Nardil and Valium for a year. The latter tablets had ‘Roche 5’ written on them which a few years later would inspire the line Here I am, more Roche 5 than pain on the song My Shadow In Vain.

The medication was effective in keeping Numan’s temper in check, but it didn’t help him see eye to eye with the education system which he saw as an obstacle to him becoming either a pilot or a pop star.

His dreams of being a pilot, however, were dashed for the foreseeable future following a meeting with a career’s guidance officer in his final year at Ashford Grammar School. The officer told him that only one in a thousand applicants went on to become pilots, and so reasoning that as the school only had a thousand pupils, and that he was aware that he wasn’t anywhere near the most academically minded of them, Numan promptly gave up any hope of becoming a pilot.

He later found out that the careers guidance officer had given him incorrect information, and that it was one in a thousand people rather than applicants who became pilots, but the damage had been done, and Numan had made up his mind that he was going to be a pop star.

Numan’s growing interest in music as a career, and his ever-decreasing faith in the education system school, led to him being asked to leave Ashford Grammar and being sent to Stanwell Secondary Modern to complete his compulsory education.

While there, his parents bought him a genuine Gibson Les Paul with a sunburst finish from a shop in Ealing called Tempo’s. Tony paid £395 for it, a not inconsiderable sum at the time, and for a while Numan was once again the envy of his friends.

However, lightning struck twice when his friend Gary Stevenson (who would go on to be a renowned record producer, working with the likes of Go West and ABC) told him that he had been reading a book called The Gibson Story and that there were some guitars that played perfectly but had some cosmetic defects. These were identified by a small number 2 stamped into their neck.

‘Wouldn’t it be funny if yours was one of those’, he joked to Numan, who promptly checked the neck of his guitar when he got home from school that night and to his horror discovered a number 2 stamped into the neck. Rather than feel disappointed as he had the first time this had happened, though, it only made him love the guitar more, and he still uses it to this day on tour and in the studio, despite it having been broken and rebuilt several times.

Numan’s educational problems continued at Stanwell, and he was once again asked to leave, and so in a last-ditch attempt to get his son to complete his education with any kind of qualification, Tony enrolled him at the Brooklands Technical College.

To give him as much support in this as possible Tony would drop his son at the college every morning, so he was surprised when he got a call from the headmaster asking if Numan was still attending as they hadn’t seen him in three months.

It turned out that he had been there, but only for the music lessons, spending the rest of his time in a café in Weybridge with a female friend. It was during these music lessons that Numan was asked to write a four-part piece of music for piano. He did so, but the teacher wasn’t pleased, telling him that it was not acceptable because the sequence of notes that he had come up with was considered ‘unattractive’ in notation terms.

This rankled Numan for many years, as he believed that it was more important how the music sounded rather than how it was written, until he found himself discussing the incident with a band member who had a degree in music. He told Numan that not only was the teacher correct, but that Are Friends Electric would have failed a music degree exam for that very reason.

While at Brooklands in 1974 Numan saw his first live show, the British rock band Nazareth at the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park. It was the support band, Silverhead, who really caught his attention, though, in particular the stage presence of their singer Michael Des Barres which involved him bending his arms into unnatural positions thanks to him being double jointed. (Des Barres went on to sing with Duran Duran offshoot The Power Station and to co-write Animotion’s smash hit Obsession with legendary songwriter Holly Knight.)

Around the same time Numan finally discovered David Bowie. Due to his love of Marc Bolan, and Bolan’s rivalry with Bowie, Numan had avoided the Thin White Duke until he bought his Aladdin Sane album and was so impressed that he promptly started dying his hair and cutting it like his new idol’s.

He also decided to get his ear pierced (something Bowie didn’t do until 1991) at a shop on the Staines high street, but due to the way the seating in the shop was laid out, Numan ended up having his right ear rather than his left pierced. Unaware that at the time it was generally acknowledged that a piercing in the right ear was used by the gay community to identify themselves as such, it was to cause both Numan and his brother John a great deal of grief.

Numan had started going out and about with a group of friends, usually to either a gay club called Louise’s on Poland Street, one of the few clubs you could go to at the time if you looked different, or to Crackers in Wardour Street, where Numan persuaded the management to let him run a Bowie night.

Though there was safety in numbers when looking different, as Numan and his friends did, he unfortunately had first-hand experience of a violent attack when he was out with his girlfriend Jo Casey one night.

They were on their way to see a band at the Marquee when a group of men set upon him. He was beaten up quite badly, and a sharpened umbrella spike went into his ear, tearing something and resulting in a fountain of blood. He eventually got taken to the hospital before being released and returning to the Marquee where a second man took umbridge and was about to attack him but changed his mind at the last moment.

A couple of years later, on 3rd May 1976, Numan finally got to see Bowie perform live at the Empire Pool, Wembley (which would become Wembley Arena) on the Isolar Tour in support of the Station To Station album. Emulating Bowie’s Thin White Duke look, much as his own fans would begin to do with him in the not-too-distant future, he dyed his hair orange, spraying the front gold, and wore a white shirt and waistcoat, with a packet of Gitanes cigarettes which he had no intention of smoking in the pocket.

Wanting to get to the front, Numan vaulted the balcony railing from where his seat was to get to the main floor, inadvertently instigating a small riot that made page six of the following day’s Daily Mirror. He ended up front and centre and threw a green glow stick at Bowie, hitting him in the chest, which Bowie then picked up and held while he sang, making Numan’s night.

However, after the gig he tried to retrieve the glow stick and saw one of the security staff hand it to a girl, at which point he got upset and agitated and ended up being bundled out of the venue by security.

Numan was to encounter Bowie twice more in the next few years, the first time at a Human League gig at The Nashville Rooms on 16th February 1979. He was standing on a chair at the back of the room to see the band when Bowie and his entourage walked in close enough that he couldn’t resist leaning over and touching Bowie’s hair as he breezed past. The second time was at a taping of the Kenny Everett Show a few years later, but we’ll get to that in due course.

Throughout all this, Numan was writing