Born in London’s Hammersmith back in March of 1958, Gary Anthony James Webb – better known to you and I as Gary Numan – was the son of a British Airways bus driver based at Heathrow Airport. Fact.
Funnily enough, his early ambition was to be an airline pilot. Although he never realised that dream, ‘Numan’ (a name he chose to take on board having seen an advert in the Yellow Pages for a plumber by the name of A Neumann) did go on to join the Air Training Corps as a teenager.
Post-Corps, he tried his luck as a fork lift truck driver, an air conditioning systems engineer and endured being a clerk in an accounts department.
Numan really rose to fame and fortune in the late 1970s with his band Tubeway Army and their seminal track Are Friends Electric?, which was released in the summer of 1979.
The single took seven weeks to reach the top spot in the UK charts, its parent album Replicas subsequently attaining the same status in the opus league.
Success in the UK and the States
It was a few short, sharp months later, though, that Mr Numan released what many fans believe to be his biggest and best ode.
The magnificent Cars was a phenomenal success both here (peaking at Number One in the UK charts) and reaching ninth spot Stateside come 1980.
Cars featured on The Pleasure Principle, an album released without the Tubeway Army ‘stamp’.
Plenty of music critics dubbed The Pleasure Principle a rock album with no guitars… Groundbreaking at the time, Numan used synthesizers fed through guitar effects pedals to achieve a distorted and oddly metallic noise.
To this day, Cars remains Numan’s most enduring song. In 1987 it became a smash hit all over again thanks to a remix by Zeus B Held. Then, in 1996, the track provided the soundscape to an advert for Carling’s fine lager.
Four years later, massively popular DJ Armand Van Helden (you don’t know him, right?) sampled the track and mixed it into the Koochy single which had all the young clubbers (quite literally) raving.
In July 2009, Numan appeared as a special guest at the ‘Wave Goodbye’ gig by Nine Inch Nails at London’s O2 Arena. Before Numan made his entrance, Nails frontman Trent Reznor explained how ‘our Gary’ was “vitally important and a huge inspiration” to him during the past 20 years.
Numan then played a couple of songs with Reznor and Co, one of which was… Yes, you’ve guessed it… Cars.
A genuine musical pioneer
Plenty of people in this world are called pioneers, sometimes with very good reason and others without much in the way of foundation. Gary Numan most definitely falls into the former category.
Numan pioneered commercial electronic music. His clever use of science fiction themes and the rather heady combo of – at times – aggressive punk-fuelled ethics with electronica have since been widely imitated… but, I would respectfully suggest, never bettered.
This tune goes out to all security, policing and law enforcement personnel who spend much of their week patrolling in a car or vehicle of some kind.
Not only is the track called Cars, but it also happens to be one of those songs that you can really drive to… Enjoy!