Gary Numan Digest Sun, 16 Mar 97 Volume 1 : Issue 314 Today's Topics: ADMINISTRIVIA Could a US tour actually happen? Cyber-Tec and Paul Green Gary Numan in the Sunday Times Gary opening for OMD Information Society "A.F.E?" cover London Times Article Numan in The Times Sunday Times & U.S. Tour Tape Giveaway The Sunday Time Article on Gary : March 9 1997 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Thu, 13 Mar 1997 21:49:25 -0800 (PST) From: Derek Langsford Subject: ADMINISTRIVIA To: numan@cs.uwp.edu Sorry about the lateness of Gary's answers. I mailed the February questions to him March 5 and have still to get the answers. He must be busy with the upcoming US trip details. Many subscribers are getting sloppy again. PLEASE identify yourselves when asking a question of Gary with your name, town/city, County/State and Country. I don't ahve time to chase after you and I don't want to instigate a policy of no details no question forwarded. Give Gary the courtesy of knowing who is asking him these questions. And please mail then to me with the right subject, which is: Gary's Qs not "Garys Q", or "Question", or anything else for that matter. It isn't that difficult. I have my mailbox set up to sort out emails with "Gary's Qs" in the subject line and put them in a separate mailbox so it is easier for me to collate the questions to send to Gary. I would appreciate your cooperation, Derek ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Derek H. Langsford "Numanews" San Diego, California, USA The Gary Numan Digest email numan-request@cs.uwp.edu to subscribe -----------------------------------------------------------------------------wp. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 15 Mar 1997 10:49:33 -0500 From: tlwalter@accs.net (Troy Walters) Subject: Could a US tour actually happen? To: numan@cs.uwp.edu I hope this isn't just some speculative message: AMERICAN TOUR IN JULY A POSSIBILITY (News date: Mar 14) Plans are underway, but a long way from being confirmed, for Gary to tour the US and Canada this coming July. Much is still to be sorted out and no venues have been named as yet but the tour is likely to be in, should it go ahead of course, 1000 capacity clubs and will probably include the following cities: New York Toronto Washington DC Boston Detroit Chicago Minneapolis Seattle Vancouver San Fransisco [Francisco] Los Angeles San Diego The 'Kinsmen' filming schedule has now moved back to later in the year so, should suitable agents and promoters be found, this tour is a very real possibility. [Message copied from NuWorld site] It would seriously break my heart if it's all hyped up and then does not happen. Fingers crossed and gas tank filled -- I'll be traveling along! -- Troy L. Walters tlwalter@accs.net http://www.accs.net/users/tlwalter -- Beware of the IDGAF Syndrome... (c) ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 13 Mar 1997 21:59:54 -0800 (PST) From: Derek Langsford Subject: Cyber-Tec and Paul Green To: numan@cs.uwp.edu A while ago, Al Crawford mentioned a CD from Cyber-tec Records UK on which some Numan lines were quoted. The name Paul Green was mentioned and Al wondered if this was the same Paul Green who ran a Numan cassettee Fanzine many years ago from which this Digest emerged. Well, I received a letter from Paul, who I've kept in touch with on and off, and indeed he is the guy behind Cyber-tec. The label has bands such as Cyber-tec Project (of which Paul is a member), Ground Zero, Sacrilege 242, Electro Assassin, TVOD and K.Nitrate. Their email address is: cyber-tec@man.ac.uk and they have a web site at http://www.mcc.ac.uk/cybertec Paul hopes one day to put out something by Gary on the label. Derek -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Derek Langsford Ph.D. Environmental Management Specialist County of San Diego, Dept. of Planning and Land Use 5201 Ruffin Road, Ste. B San Diego, CA 92123 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 14 Mar 1997 21:32:41 +0000 From: Tony Jackson Subject: Gary Numan in the Sunday Times To: numan@cs.uwp.edu Hi, Someone mentioned transcribing the Times article from last Sunday onto the digest. It is rather long so rather than take up a lot of space I have honed up the old typing skills and put it into a Word document. If anyone wants a copy feel free to e-mail me. Plain text version also an option..... TJ ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 15 Mar 1997 11:46:31 -0600 From: machman@interaccess.com (Jeff Tolva) Subject: Gary opening for OMD To: numan@cs.uwp.edu Hi all! Does anyone know what venue in Bournemouth Gary opened for OMD on December 11, 1993? I have a bootleg tape of Gary's part of the show and would like to put a venue name on it as well, but as this was an OMD tour and NOT a Gary Numan tour, I have no idea where it's from. Does anyone know? Jeff Tolva (The Machman) ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 14 Mar 1997 17:11:35 PT From: "Mark Stanton, Industrial Design & Visualization" Subject: Information Society "A.F.E?" cover To: numan@cs.uwp.edu Thought I'd mention that I heard Information Society's cover of "Are 'Friends' Electric?" last weekend. Although I heard it in a club with a horrible sound system, I thought it sounded like a good cover... with the 'speaky' bits more like 'singy' bits now. Does anyone know anything about the Numan cover by Molly Half Head? Which record is it on? What label? Is it on CD? Mark. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 13 Mar 1997 14:57:39 -0800 From: theartdept@worldnet.att.net (rod) Subject: London Times Article To: numan@cs.uwp.edu Hello. The March 9, 1997 Sunday London Times article can be found in the net at www.sunday-times.co.uk in the Style section. It may be deleted next Sunday when a new edition will appear. There is a photo of Gary and Gemma which I could not grab, but here is the text. You're welcome. Best wishes, Rod the art dept@worldnet.att.net **************************************************************************** ************* Shock of the Numan Gary Numan, a star of the 1980s, looks set to be 1997's most surprising hit= RACHEL COOKE meets him (picture here) Gary's passions: with his fianc=E9e Gemma today Shock of the Numan =46or a man who used to pose as a robot, Gary Numan leads an unexpectedly cosy existence. Not only does he pick me up from the station in a small purple car that has lots of cushions arranged along the back seat, he is also wearing a fluffy grey chenille sweater, worn not with leather bondage trousers but a pair of old jeans. He looks more like a man who spends his weekends putting up shelves than messing around with a synthesiser. Numan, the pasty star of the early 1980s and the man who brought us hits such as Cars and Are Friends Electric?, lives with his fianc=E9e Gemma, thre= e cats and two dogs, in a large white house in the middle of the rolling Essex countryside not far from Stansted Airport. It is called Dunvegan, although this has nothing to do with Numan's dietary requirements. Far from it. "I don't like any vegetables," he says, with some passion. "I don't like any foreign food - curry, pizza, pasta, Chinese, Thai, Mexican. Ugh! I eat peas, but they have to be processed marrow-fat. I stick to sausage and chips when we go out." Not, you might think, a typical pop-star diet. After all, these days, even Liam Gallagher has been known to enjoy the occasional lobster supper. But Numan has never been much like other pop stars. In the early days, his mother Beryl was responsible for his publicity, and his father Tony is still his manager. Numan does not drink, smoke or hang out at the Groucho Club in London and, despite the fact that he once had an album and a single at the top of the charts simultaneously, he has managed to avoid being either hip or critically acclaimed. All this, however, may be about to change: a Numan revival is on the way. A tribute album, featuring ultra-cool acts such as Damon Albarn of Blur, Saint Etienne, Beck and the Orb (secret Numanoids the lot of them) will appear at the end of May, while Numan is to star as a nightclub owner in a =A34m British thriller. He is also the subject of a forthcoming biography. Things have been picking up for a while, albeit slowly. Last year, thanks to its use in a lager commercial, his 1979 single Cars was rereleased and gave 38-year-old Numan his first hit in 15 years. He also appeared on Channel 4's music show The White Room. But it remains the case that he does not have a recording contract at the moment - something he hopes the renewed interest in him will soon remedy. "It's very flattering, and exciting," he says. "But I try not to get too worked up. It could easily be a flash in the pan." Numan is a shy man and, for one whose stage persona was so surly and arrogant, a surprisingly sensitive one. "Oh yeah," he says, "I did surly. But that was because I can't dance. Besides, I hated the way everyone always looked so happy on Top of the Pops, so I decided to do sinister. It suited the mood of my songs better. Unfortunately, I'm too small to look scary. I think I looked more scared than scary, which, of course, I was." =46ame, it seems, brought him more pain than pleasure. "A few people seemed to really like me," he says. "But the majority didn't. In the first 12 months I had 18 death threats. I couldn't work out what I had done wrong. All my dreams had come true, but everything was tarnished by what people were saying about me. Becoming famous is like losing your virginity - it's not at all the way you think it will be." While his singles sold, and the fans - decked out in the same ludicrous pancake make-up and red lipstick as their idol - flocked to see him play live, one piece of bad publicity followed another. First, he was arrested for the possession of an offensive weapon, although he was later cleared. "It was a rounders bat, not a baseball bat, and I was playing with some friends while I waited for a burger," he says. Then a former girlfriend sold a story to the papers about Numan's supposed obsession with guns. "I wasn't obsessed," he says. "Well . . . I owned four. Is that obsessed? The thing is, I was living in America; it's a different culture there." =46inally, there were his well-documented difficulties with aeroplanes. A fanatical flier, Numan is now a fully qualified stunt pilot and his Harvard, which he uses for displays, is housed near his home. In the early 1980s, he and another pilot tried to fly around the world - a feat that, after two aborted attempts, he finally achieved in 1983. Unfortunately, people were only interested in the failures: "When we arrived home there wasn't a single person waiting to welcome us back," he says. "Yet, when I was involved in a crash and another pilot was at the controls, it was still reported as my fault." The electronic Numan sound came to him more by accident than design. He had originally written a lot of guitar-based songs but, on arrival in the recording studio, found that the previous inhabitants had left a Mini Moog behind. Numan fell in love with it, and recorded the songs on a synthesiser instead. As for his mask-like appearance, that was more to do with wanting to hide than about being the new David Bowie. "I wasn't even a Bowie fan," he says. "I was into T Rex and because it was rumoured that there was friction between Marc Bolan and Bowie, I couldn't allow myself to like him on principle." Besides, Numan's style was often as much to do with practicalities as fashion. Take 1982's gangster look: it was adopted because, after he had a hair transplant, he needed a look that would incorporate a hat. He is almost frighteningly open about this aspect of male vanity, insisting enthusiastically that having a transplant was the best decision he ever made, telling me that he would be bald otherwise and going into all sorts of intimate details. "I had two of the old punch-graft transplants in the 1980s, and then in 1993 I had the new microsurgery," he says. "The old-style transplants were a bit gory. They literally drill out tubes of skin and put 10 to 30 hairs in each hole. It's like planting bulbs. Very painful. But the new surgery is great. They move the follicles, so all this is my own, growing hair." He runs his hands across his somewhat wiggly hairline. He and 27-year-old Gemma, purveyor of nail extensions (yes, she really does have claws), will marry in August, and hope to have children. Numan says he owes everything to her - even his latest pared-down album, recorded in his tiny studio at home. "It's only since I met her that I've realised what a complete prat I was to everyone else," he says. "Oh yeah, my parents love her. It would be a nightmare if they didn't." It helps, of course, that she is a devoted fan, who declared, aged 10, that one day she would marry Gary Numan. Needless to say, she has been back to school to tell her teachers all about the engagement. After our interview, the pair invited me to join them in the pub for supper. You won't be surprised to hear that Gary plumped for the skinless sausages and crinkle-cut chips. And to start? He had - what else? - a lovely plateful of white bread and butter. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 14 Mar 1997 14:51:36 +1000 From: a.fletcher@pathology.unimelb.edu.au (Ashley Fletcher) Subject: Numan in The Times To: numan@cs.uwp.edu (Gary Numan) Hi All The Times is on the net - so here it is: Shock of the Numan Gary Numan, a star of the 1980s, looks set to be 1997's most surprising hit. RACHEL COOKE meets him =46or a man who used to pose as a robot, Gary Numan leads an unexpectedly cosy existence. Not only does he pick me up from the station in a small purple car that has lots of cushions arranged along the back seat, he is also wearing a fluffy grey chenille sweater, worn not with leather bondage trousers but a pair of old jeans. He looks more like a man who spends his weekends putting up shelves than messing around with a synthesiser. Numan, the pasty star of the early 1980s and the man who brought us hits such as Cars and Are Friends Electric?, lives with his fianc=E9e Gemma, thre= e cats and two dogs, in a large white house in the middle of the rolling Essex countryside not far from Stansted Airport. It is called Dunvegan, although this has nothing to do with Numan's dietary requirements. Far from it. "I don't like any vegetables," he says, with some passion. "I don't like any foreign food - curry, pizza, pasta, Chinese, Thai, Mexican. Ugh! I eat peas, but they have to be processed marrow-fat. I stick to sausage and chips when we go out." Not, you might think, a typical pop-star diet. After all, these days, even Liam Gallagher has been known to enjoy the occasional lobster supper. But Numan has never been much like other pop stars. In the early days, his mother Beryl was responsible for his publicity, and his father Tony is still his manager. Numan does not drink, smoke or hang out at the Groucho Club in London and, despite the fact that he once had an album and a single at the top of the charts simultaneously, he has managed to avoid being either hip or critically acclaimed. All this, however, may be about to change: a Numan revival is on the way. A tribute album, featuring ultra-cool acts such as Damon Albarn of Blur, Saint Etienne, Beck and the Orb (secret Numanoids the lot of them) will appear at the end of May, while Numan is to star as a nightclub owner in a =A34m British thriller. He is also the subject of a forthcoming biography. Things have been picking up for a while, albeit slowly. Last year, thanks to its use in a lager commercial, his 1979 single Cars was rereleased and gave 38-year-old Numan his first hit in 15 years. He also appeared on Channel 4's music show The White Room. But it remains the case that he does not have a recording contract at the moment - something he hopes the renewed interest in him will soon remedy. "It's very flattering, and exciting," he says. "But I try not to get too worked up. It could easily be a flash in the pan." Numan is a shy man and, for one whose stage persona was so surly and arrogant, a surprisingly sensitive one. "Oh yeah," he says, "I did surly. But that was because I can't dance. Besides, I hated the way everyone always looked so happy on Top of the Pops, so I decided to do sinister. It suited the mood of my songs better. Unfortunately, I'm too small to look scary. I think I looked more scared than scary, which, of course, I was." =46ame, it seems, brought him more pain than pleasure. "A few people seemed to really like me," he says. "But the majority didn't. In the first 12 months I had 18 death threats. I couldn't work out what I had done wrong. All my dreams had come true, but everything was tarnished by what people were saying about me. Becoming famous is like losing your virginity - it's not at all the way you think it will be." While his singles sold, and the fans - decked out in the same ludicrous pancake make-up and red lipstick as their idol - flocked to see him play live, one piece of bad publicity followed another. First, he was arrested for the possession of an offensive weapon, although he was later cleared. "It was a rounders bat, not a baseball bat, and I was playing with some friends while I waited for a burger," he says. Then a former girlfriend sold a story to the papers about Numan's supposed obsession with guns. "I wasn't obsessed," he says. "Well . . . I owned four. Is that obsessed? The thing is, I was living in America; it's a different culture there." =46inally, there were his well-documented difficulties with aeroplanes. A fanatical flier, Numan is now a fully qualified stunt pilot and his Harvard, which he uses for displays, is housed near his home. In the early 1980s, he and another pilot tried to fly around the world - a feat that, after two aborted attempts, he finally achieved in 1983. Unfortunately, people were only interested in the failures: "When we arrived home there wasn't a single person waiting to welcome us back," he says. "Yet, when I was involved in a crash and another pilot was at the controls, it was still reported as my fault." The electronic Numan sound came to him more by accident than design. He had originally written a lot of guitar-based songs but, on arrival in the recording studio, found that the previous inhabitants had left a Mini Moog behind. Numan fell in love with it, and recorded the songs on a synthesiser instead. As for his mask-like appearance, that was more to do with wanting to hide than about being the new David Bowie. "I wasn't even a Bowie fan," he says. "I was into T Rex and because it was rumoured that there was friction between Marc Bolan and Bowie, I couldn't allow myself to like him on principle." Besides, Numan's style was often as much to do with practicalities as fashion. Take 1982's gangster look: it was adopted because, after he had a hair transplant, he needed a look that would incorporate a hat. He is almost frighteningly open about this aspect of male vanity, insisting enthusiastically that having a transplant was the best decision he ever made, telling me that he would be bald otherwise and going into all sorts of intimate details. "I had two of the old punch-graft transplants in the 1980s, and then in 1993 I had the new microsurgery," he says. "The old-style transplants were a bit gory. They literally drill out tubes of skin and put 10 to 30 hairs in each hole. It's like planting bulbs. Very painful. But the new surgery is great. They move the follicles, so all this is my own, growing hair." He runs his hands across his somewhat wiggly hairline. He and 27-year-old Gemma, purveyor of nail extensions (yes, she really does have claws), will marry in August, and hope to have children. Numan says he owes everything to her - even his latest pared-down album, recorded in his tiny studio at home. "It's only since I met her that I've realised what a complete prat I was to everyone else," he says. "Oh yeah, my parents love her. It would be a nightmare if they didn't." It helps, of course, that she is a devoted fan, who declared, aged 10, that one day she would marry Gary Numan. Needless to say, she has been back to school to tell her teachers all about the engagement. After our interview, the pair invited me to join them in the pub for supper. You won't be surprised to hear that Gary plumped for the skinless sausages and crinkle-cut chips. And to start? He had - what else? - a lovely plateful of white bread and butter. Hope not too many people have posted this. Ashley (Australia) Ashley Fletcher a.fletcher@pathology.unimelb.edu.au ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 14 Mar 1997 20:53:22 +0000 From: Michael & BethAnn Damrath Subject: Sunday Times & U.S. Tour To: Gary Numan Hello fellow Numanites! There sure has been alot going on in the Numan camp these days! The London Sunday Times article was quite a read. How did such a positive, pleasant news piece like this slip through? If any of you have not had a chance to read it, check it out. For your convenience, I have transcribed the entire piece on a page at my website: http://home.earthlink.net/~damrat/Numan/sundaytimes.html I hear alot of you contemplating trips across the big puddle to see Gary play. The latest news seems to be that you might not have to go that far. Gary has reported that he is planning a possible North American Tour! I can scarcely believe it myself, it is too good to be true. We can only wait and see... Great things are afoot! Michael J. Damrath damrat@earthlink.net http://home.earthlink.net/~damrat ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 13 Mar 97 18:49:48 From: "Joey Lindstrom" Subject: Tape Giveaway To: "numan@cs.uwp.edu" I'm still giving away copies of "Ghost Of A White Face Clown", the Gary Numan tribute tape put together (and donated by) The Northwest Elektro-Industrial Coalition. if you've got web access, check out the contest page at: http://www.netway.ab.ca/worldwidewebb/we_have_a_technical/ If not - you can play right here. The contest works quite a bit like the fill-in-the-blank lyrics contests that appear in the Gary Numan Fan Club newsletters. I supply a line from a Numan song, you fill in the blanks with the appropriate lyrics. Get all ten, mail your entry to me, and you're in this month's random drawing. Six people managed to complete all ten lyrics last month, and after a random drawing was made, a tape was mailed to Jean-Francois Mainguet of France. You could be next! Here's the March entry form - be aware that I've slipped one VERY difficult one into this month's form. That's the only clue you get. :-) 1) ___ ___ ___ On Two Legs 2) I'll Trade New ___ ___ ___ 3) ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ And Takes Me Away 4) It's Far Too Risky ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ 5) No Hand Of Friendship ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ 6) The ___ ___ ___ Is As Black As His Soul 7) ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ Will Tear Me Apart Again 8) Join The Army ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ 9) I'm Alone In My Room ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ 10) ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ Like She Broke Mine? If you're not a "Numan Expert", please note that *ALL* of these can be found in my "Tracks" page (lyrics library) at The World Wide Webb. You can go directly to "Tracks" at the following URL: http://www.netway.ab.ca/worldwidewebb/noisenoise/tracks/ Good luck, and happy hunting! And don't forget, if you don't win this month, there'll be additional contests in both April and May. /--------------------------------------------------------- / Joey Lindstrom numanoid@netway.ab.ca lindstrj@cadvision.com / http://www.netway.ab.ca/worldwidewebb/ / "There's a reason 'Wheel Of Fortune' is on right after 'Jeopardy'. Once / you've been forced to choke down the foul-tasting tequila shot of your / own abject ignorance, it's nice to be able to bite into the refreshing / lime wedge of other people's incredible fucking stupidity." / - Dennis Miller ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 13 Mar 1997 10:12:26 +0100 From: Michael_Rush/DUB/Lotus@lotus.com Subject: The Sunday Time Article on Gary : March 9 1997 To: numan@cs.uwp.edu March 9 1997 Gary Numan, a star of the 1980s, looks set to be 1997's most surprising= hit. RACHEL COOKE meets him Rock: The Critical List Social Diary: Tara Palmer-Tomkinson =A9 Gary's passions: with his fianc=E9e Gemma today Shock of the Numan For a man who used to pose as a robot, Gary Numan leads an unexpectedly cosy existence. Not only does he pick me up from the station in a small purple car that = has lots of cushions arranged along the back seat, he is al= so wearing a fluffy grey chenille sweater, worn not with leather bondage trousers but a pair of old jeans. He looks more like a man who spends his weekends putting up shelves than messing around with a synthesiser. Numan, the pasty star of the early 1980s and the man who brought us hits such as Cars and Are Friends Electric?, lives with his fianc=E9e Gemma, three cats a= nd two dogs, in a large white house in the middle of the rolling Essex countryside not far from Stansted Airport= is called Dunvegan, although this has nothing to do wit= h Numan's dietary requirements. Far from it. "I don't like any vegetables," he says, with some passi= on. "I don't like any foreign food =AD curry, pizza, pasta,= Chinese, Thai, Mexican. Ugh! I eat peas, but they have to be processed marrow-fat. I stick to sausage and chip= s when we go out." Not, you might think, a typical pop-star diet. After al= l, these days, even Liam Gallagher has been known to enjoy the occasional lobster supper. But Numan has never been much like other pop stars. In the early days= , his mother Beryl was responsible for his publicity, and= his father Tony is still his manager. Numan does not drink,= smoke or hang out at the Groucho Club in London and, despite the fact that he once had an album and a single= at the top of the charts simultaneously, he has managed to= avoid being either hip or critically acclaimed. All this, however, may be about to change: a Numan revival is on the way. A tribute album, featuring ultra-cool acts such as Damon Albarn of Blur, Saint Etienne, Beck and the Orb (secret Numanoids the lot of them) will appear at the end of May, while Numan is to star as a nightclub owner in a =A34m British thriller. He is also= the subject of a forthcoming biography. Things have been picking up for a while, albeit slowly.= Last year, thanks to its use in a lager commercial, his= 1979 single Cars was rereleased and gave 38-year-old Numan his first hit in 15 years. He also appeared on Channel 4's music show The White Room. But it remains the case that he does not have a recording contract at = the moment =AD something he hopes the renewed interest in h= im will soon remedy. "It's very flattering, and exciting," he says. "But I t= ry not to get too worked up. It could easily be a flash in the= pan." Numan is a shy man and, for one whose stage persona was so surly and arrogant, a surprisingly sensitive one= "Oh yeah," he says, "I did surly. But that was because = I can't dance. Besides, I hated the way everyone always looked so happy on Top of the Pops, so I decided to do sinister. It suited the mood of my songs better. Unfortunately, I'm too small to look scary. I think I looked more scared than scary, which, of course, I was.= " Fame, it seems, brought him more pain than pleasure. "A= few people seemed to really like me," he says. "But the= majority didn't. In the first 12 months I had 18 death threats. I couldn't work out what I had done wrong. All= my dreams had come true, but everything was tarnished by what people were saying about me. Becoming famous is like losing your virginity =AD it's not at all the w= ay you think it will be." While his singles sold, and the fans =AD decked out in = the same ludicrous pancake make-up and red lipstick as thei= r idol =AD flocked to see him play live, one piece of bad= publicity followed another. First, he was arrested for = the possession of an offensive weapon, although he was late= r cleared. "It was a rounders bat, not a baseball bat, an= d I was playing with some friends while I waited for a burger," he says. Then a former girlfriend sold a story to the papers abo= ut Numan's supposed obsession with guns. "I wasn't obsessed," he says. "Well . . . I owned four. Is that obsessed? The thing is, I was living in America; it's a= different culture there." Finally, there were his well-documented difficulties wi= th aeroplanes. A fanatical flier, Numan is now a fully qualified stunt pilot and his Harvard, which he uses fo= r displays, is housed near his home. In the early 1980s, = he and another pilot tried to fly around the world =AD a f= eat that, after two aborted attempts, he finally achieved i= n 1983. Unfortunately, people were only interested in the= failures: "When we arrived home there wasn't a single person waiting to welcome us back," he says. "Yet, when= I was involved in a crash and another pilot was at the controls, it was still reported as my fault." The electronic Numan sound came to him more by accident than design. He had originally written a lot o= f guitar-based songs but, on arrival in the recording stu= dio, found that the previous inhabitants had left a Mini Moo= g behind. Numan fell in love with it, and recorded the so= ngs on a synthesiser instead. As for his mask-like appearance, that was more to do with wanting to hide than about being the new David Bowie. "I wasn't even a Bowie fan," he says. "I was int= o T Rex and because it was rumoured that there was friction between Marc Bolan and Bowie, I couldn't allow= myself to like him on principle." Besides, Numan's style was often as much to do with practicalities as fashion. Take 1982's gangster look: i= t was adopted because, after he had a hair transplant, he= needed a look that would incorporate a hat. He is almost frighteningly open about this aspect of ma= le vanity, insisting enthusiastically that having a transp= lant was the best decision he ever made, telling me that he would be bald otherwise and going into all sorts of intimate details. "I had two of the old punch-graft transplants in the 1980s, and then in 1993 I had the new microsurgery," he= says. "The old-style transplants were a bit gory. They literally drill out tubes of skin and put 10 to 30 hair= s in each hole. It's like planting bulbs. Very painful. But = the new surgery is great. They move the follicles, so all t= his is my own, growing hair." He runs his hands across his somewhat wiggly hairline. He and 27-year-old Gemma, purveyor of nail extensions (yes, she really does have claws), will marry in August= , and hope to have children. Numan says he owes everything to her =AD even his latest pared-down album,= recorded in his tiny studio at home. "It's only since I= met her that I've realised what a complete prat I was to everyone else," he says. "Oh yeah, my parents love her.= It would be a nightmare if they didn't." It helps, of course, that she is a devoted fan, who declared, aged 10, that one day she would marry Gary Numan. Needless to say, she has been back to school to tell her teachers all ab= out the engagement. After our interview, the pair invited me to join them i= n the pub for supper. You won't be surprised to hear that Gar= y plumped for the skinless sausages and crinkle-cut chips= And to start? He had =AD what else? =AD a lovely platef= ul of white bread and butter. Social Diary: Tara Palmer-Tomkinson = ------------------------------ End of Gary Numan Digest ******************************