YMMV / Gary Numan

• Audience-Alienating Era: Numan's shift to synth-funk from Warriors to Machine + Soul is looked at by fans, critics, and Numan himself as a creative low point.
• Awesome Music: Lots and lots and lots. "Cars", "Are 'Friends' Electric?", "M.E.", "Love Hurt Bleed", etc... There is pretty much not a single Gary Numan song that is not awesome in some way or another.
• Friendly Fandoms: With Devo. They're both synthesizer-heavy New Wave Music acts who are perceived as one hit wonders (though only stateside in Numan's case), have dedicated cult followings, and have influenced many later musicians.
• Heartwarming Moments: For all the talk over the years of Gary being robotic, alien, what have you, Gary very much has a human heart — watch him perform "My Name Is Ruin" with his daughter, Persia. Even through a song about vengeance and post-apocalyptic survivalism, he is absolutely beaming with pride at his little girl. Gary's fans, it should be noted, universally adore Persia.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • "Asylum", which is a predictable one, and on the Live album "Bombers", which is more depressing than the Tubeway Army version.
  • "Down in the Park" from Replicas is a chilling ballad about a futuristic park in which Machmen (androids with human skin) and machines rape and kill human beings to entertain spectators who, along with their numerically-named robotic "friends", view the carnage from a nearby club. The narrator seems to be either one of the spectators themselves or just someone who's been Conditioned to Accept Horror, and the detached way he describes the scene is chilling in itself.
• Signature Song: "Cars", universally. "Are Friends Electric?" may also count in the UK.
• Tear Jerker:
  • "A Child with the Ghost" from the album Berserker is about Gary's friend and bass player Paul Gardiner, who had succumbed to his heroin addiction earlier in the year.
  • "Little Invitro" from the album Pure is about the failed IVF attempts ending in miscarriages that Gary and his wife dealt with. While "A Prayer for the Unborn" is Gary showing anger at God over the deaths of what would have been his children, "Little Invitro" can be seen as Gary and his wife blaming themselves. The guitar at the end of the song is the embodiment of agony and torment, and the song has only been played live once or twice.
  • "If We Had Known" from the EP "The Fallen" is, by its loose reference to the poem "The Rainbow Bridge", about the loss of a pet. In the months leading up to the release of "The Fallen", he had lost a cat and two dogs in that time, including one who died of complications following a surgery to fix their breathing issues.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: He has reinvented himself several times, from post-punk, to electronic, to jazz and blues and funk, to electronic rock, but has maintained a darkwave/gothwave/industrial sound since 1994. Invariably, at every turn, another group of his Numanoids tune out.
• Values Resonance: "Are 'Friends' Electric?" is a surprisingly relevant concept in the digital era.
• Win Back the Crowd: Numan really did believe that all the sampler-heavy synthpop, sax solos and female backup singers would do this. It was his move to solo industrial rock in 1994 that ended a decade of career stagnation and did indeed fulfill this trope.

---