Understanding why David Bowie hated Gary Numan
David Bowie was one of the ultimate musical icons. A true iconoclast, who oozed chameleonic cool, he was the first person to understand that reinvention is the key to artistic longevity, and from the taboo-busting glam rock of the early 1970’s to the jazzy hues of later in his career, he left no stone unturned in his quest for creative enlightenment.
Unsurprisingly, Bowie helped to change popular culture for the better, and inspired numerous other legends ranging from Chris Cornell to Shirley Manson, with one of his most famous and influential disciples being the electronic pioneer Gary Numan.
However, Numan’s relationship with Bowie did not pan out as he had hoped, with the ‘Cars’ mastermind’s androgynous appearance and experimental music naturally making many commentators draw somewhat lazy parallels between the two. Unfortunately for Numan, who was a diehard fan of Bowie, this idea was something that the former Spiders from Mars frontman also bought into. When the two crossed paths on The Kenny Everett Christmas Show in 1980, Numan’s love for his hero was to be stained forever.
Speaking to Uncut in 2019, Numan answered questions from fans, and one asked him about that notorious day at London’s Victoria Station in May 1976, when the cocaine-addled Bowie arrived and is alleged to have made a Nazi salute. Numan was in attendance at the time and discussed just how much of a diehard Bowie fan he was before mentioning the Kenny Everett affair.
Numan said: “I was there all day and never saw him! I was 18. I’m pretty sure I was wearing a green boiler suit. I just remember being there with lots and lots of Bowie fans and everyone went mad, screaming with exciting, but I couldn’t see him. In the ’80s, I did the Kenny Everett show and Bowie was on, too. I was a massive fan, I had seen him countless times; I had an embarrassing array of bootlegs.”
He continued: “The chance to even be remotely near him was an honour. But he asked for me to be thrown out of the studio and then taken off the programme, which was very disappointing. But as the years have gone by, I understood far more the way he saw things then. He was still a young man, with ups and downs in his own career, and I think he saw people like me as little upstarts. But later he said some nice things about me, so that made the whole thing better!”
However, when speaking to the NME in 2021, Numan went into more detail about that ill-fated appearance on The Kenny Everett Christmas Show in 1980 and explained that Bowie had him thrown off because he felt he was copying him.
“It bothered me at the time because I was a massive fan and he’d been such a big part of my life for so many years so I was pretty disappointed – and the fact I got taken off the show afterwards,” Numan recalled. “But I later came to realise we all go through periods when we’re more fragile or paranoid and not sure how we fit into all of this.”
Asked whether it was jealousy that spurred Bowie’s actions, the ‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’ man replied: “I think there was an element of that. I never got to meet him afterwards and ask, but my feeling was at that moment I was the current big thing in weird make-up and I don’t think that period was the best for him. I know many people that met him and he was lovely, and I wish I’d met that version.”
