Gary Numan (born Gary Anthony James Webb on March 8, 1958) is a British singer, songwriter and electropop pioneer.
Numan rose to prominence at the tail end of the 1970s, initially recording under the band name Tubeway Army. After recording an album's worth of punky demos (released in 1984 as The Plan), he was signed by Beggars Banquet Records in 1978 and quickly released two singles, neither of which charted. A self-titled, New Wave oriented debut album later that same year sold out its limited run and introduced Numan's fascination with dystopian science fiction and, more importantly, synthesisers. Tubeway Army's third single, the cinematic " Down in the Park" (1979) failed to chart but it would prove to be one of Numan's most enduring and oft-covered songs. Almost from nowhere, Tubeway Army reached number one in 1979 with the powerful single " Are 'Friends' Electric?", the parent album Replicas simultaneously climbing to number one in the album charts.
A few months later he repeated the feat with " Cars", which became a top ten hit in America as well, and the 1979 album The Pleasure Principle, both released under Numan's own (assumed) name, which he had plucked from an advert in the " Yellow Pages". Topping both single and album charts simultaneously was noteworthy enough; doing so twice in the space of six months was astonishing. A sell-out tour followed. The Pleasure Principle was a rock album with no guitars; instead, Numan used synthesisers fed through guitar effects pedals to achieve a phased, heavy metal tone. Self-produced in a fortnight for very little money, The Pleasure Principle sounded like nothing else, and remains one of Numan's most highly regarded efforts today.
