I lost my whole thing for Bowie within five second of reading what he had said. The man had been, outside of my family, the biggest thing in my life. I'd had fights over him, I'd got beaten up because of him. If there was a Bowie influence running through my songs, it wasn't intentional, although I would be stupid to deny it because he was such a big part of my life.To have some who you hold in such high reagard say something so dismissive and so petty about somebody else's life I thought was pathetic, really. I understand it much more now because I'm 40 years old and I've had my ups and downs and I can understand much more of what was going on in his mind. That would have been about seven or eight years into his fame. If I'd gone back to when I was seven or eight years into mine, I guess that I might have mad similar problems if someone had come along in the mid-1980's who had a really big electronic hit. It didn't actually happen, but if it had, I might have felt a bit bitter about it, and I might have said something a bit scathing in an interview.

Gary Numan,
interview by David Buckley in Strange Fascination