Gary Numan has said the way he got together with his wife might be “illegal” now, as he reflected on how they met when she was an avid fan.
The 68-year-old musician, who rose to fame in the late Seventies and early Eighties with hits such as “Cars”, has been married to partner Gemma O’Neill, 58, since 1997.
Their relationship has been well-documented, with O’Neill – who was raised in Sidcup, Kent – once recalling to The Independent how she’d developed a crush on Numan when she was 11, as a fan of his music.
By the early Nineties, she had become a familiar face at his concerts and they struck up a rapport: “That’s how I attracted her, which I think is illegal now,” Numan told The Times.
When O’Neill’s mother died suddenly, she stopped coming to the shows; Numan used his fan club to get her phone number to see if she was alright.
“I rang her up and said, ‘Hello, it’s me,’ and she put the phone down – she thought it was somebody playing a cruel trick,” he said.
He then called her again, and she asked him several questions about him and his music to get him to prove his identity.
Numan invited O’Neill on a road trip to a radio interview, and took her to dinner: “I took her to a Little Chef because I’m very down to earth,” he said. “I don’t do all that flash, rich man, pop star stuff.”
The couple didn’t begin a serious relationship until O’Neill was in her Twenties.
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In The Independent interview, given the year they married, O’Neill recalled meeting Numan for the first time in person when she was around 12 and he was 22: “My dad worked at Warner Bros, which Beggar’s Banquet label [the record label Numan was signed with] belonged to, and he arranged for me to meet Gary and get a single autographed. I was completely overcome, I couldn’t talk – I was crying, and I told him I really loved him.”
Then, when she was 14, she told a teacher that she and her friend didn’t need jobs because they were going to marry Numan and David Bowie, respectively.
Numan, for his part, didn’t recall meeting O’Neill the first time – they didn’t meet again until around 1986, when she was around 18.
“I had my first photo with him done then,” O’Neill said. “After that it was a bit easier. If you went to the airshows and stayed near his aeroplane he’d walk past. I’d ask for an autograph, or a photo, and I was always very polite – never obsessive or weird.
“I’d get a little bit embarrassed, keeping on asking. But he knew my name by 1988 – he’d seen me so often, he just knew who to sign the autographs to, I was really happy about that.”
She said their day out was “really cute”. “I was so clumsy, I spilt tea on his mobile phone, and spilt dinner down myself – I remember cutting something on the plate and half of it went into my lap, and I was just, ‘Oh, nooo,’” she said. “Then he took me home, and I was really hoping he’d ring again.”
O’Neill said they didn’t begin a serious relationship until almost a year after that first day out: “He had been going out with his former girlfriend for a long time, it was a troubled relationship, and it finished.”
“She’s changed me a lot,” Numan told The Independent the year he married O’Neill, with whom he now shares three daughters. “I’m much nicer now than I used to be, though I’ve got a long way to go. She mustn’t change one bit; all of the changing has to come from me. I think she’s perfect – not just with me, but with the friends around her, her family, my family.”
In the interview with The Times, he also opened up about the devastating loss of his brother, John, who collapsed and died in the street moments after saying goodbye at Numan’s Leeds show, in November last year.
“He went round the corner and died within seconds,” said Numan, who had been sitting in his tour bus, oblivious as to what was taking place yards away. “I heard the ambulance go past… I didn’t realise it was for John.”
Numan said he had been plagued by the thought of his brother dying alone, but was later contacted by a woman who said she and others had been with him after he collapsed: “That helped a lot.”
Numan is playing a summer tour that will conclude with a show at Crystal Palace in August.
