The plane crash that saw Gary Numan lose his chance at commercial fortune
The year is 1982, and Gary Numan has already cemented himself as a musical icon of the decade. Releasing his smash hit ‘Cars’ in the latter half of 1979 after the dissolution of his new wave group Tubeway Army, Numan quickly became a stalwart of the singles chart as an artist at the very top of his game.
Also around this time, boardrooms at the 7Up Company were attempting to find new ways to market their liquid sugar, and somehow, they landed on the idea that Gary Numan was the best person to do that. Considering that Numan was not a run-of-the-mill pop star, he was born out of the punk scene and appeared moody and mysterious on television, the move carried a certain level of bewilderment. Even more surprising, however, is that Numan agreed to take part.
Cult comedian Bill Hicks famously declared, “Do a commercial and you are off the artistic roll call forever”, a sentiment that was shared by many of Numan’s early punk contemporaries who viewed ‘selling out’ as a cardinal sin. Perhaps the princely sum of £10,000 swayed the new wave star to agree to make three 30-second jingles for 7Up adverts.
The jingles themselves are a strange listening experience. They have that classic Gary Numan sound – think ‘Cars’ but, instead of discussing the joys of automobile ownership, espousing how great 7Up is – but also have the unmistakable reek of corporate syntax. This is the rest of the fact that Numan was only allowed to write the music; the lyrics were taken care of by marketing executives at the soda company, who were owned by an American tobacco corporation at the time.
So, why have you never seen these adverts air on television? Executives at 7Up were furious with Numan when he did not show up to present his work in person. Feeling cheated, they swore that they would never work with the musician again. The reason for Numan’s absence, however, was not just pop star arrogance or his way of making a statement; it was actually because he had been in a plane crash the very same day.
Numan had been flying back to Southampton from a meeting in Cannes when his Cessna 210 Centurion, which formed part of his recently founded airline ‘Numanair’ crashed and landed in Hampshire after running out of fuel. Luckily, there were no fatalities in the crash aside from the singer’s chances of working with a fizzy pop company.
Despite the crash making headline news, 7Up kept their promise of not working with the star again, and the adverts were lost to the pages of pop history. In 2009, however, the jingles were uploaded to YouTube and Paul Gayter, one of the people responsible for the ad, shared the story of how these strange adverts came to be and why they were eventually scrapped.
