Four decades after walking away from fame, synthpop’s pioneering superstar is filling stadiums once again. The ex-Tubeway Army frontman talks about overcoming death threats, panic attacks and losing 997,000 fans
had both rocketed to No 1, as had the albums Replicas, The Pleasure Principle and Telekon. But he was unprepared for fame.
So Numan walked away, announcing a “farewell” concert at Wembley Arena in 1981 and retiring from live performance . “I wanted to get back to making music and to who I was before it all started,” he says. “The mistake was going public. I should have just quietly stopped touring and no one would have noticed. Instead, I upset everybody and destroyed my career.”Photograph: Matt Frost/Sky UK
Numan was born Gary Webb to a British Airways bus driver father and dressmaker mother and lived in Wraysbury in Berkshire, beneath the Heathrow flight path. His first ambition was to fly planes before a careers talk at Ashford grammar school in Surrey changed his mind. “The man said: ‘Only one in a thousand people get to be a pilot,’” he remembers. “Which is actually bullshit, terrible advice! But there were about 800 people in the school. I thought ‘There’s no way that’s going to be me.
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