He’s considered to be a pioneer of electronic music with an instantly recognisable repertoire.
Yet Gary Numan has admitted that he doesn’t consider himself to be a musician, instead thinking of his talent as being an ‘arranger of noises’.
The 64-year-old performer also revealed that he considers his children to be more musically gifted than him, revealing their Piano lessons Sydney playing skills put his to shame.
Quirky: Gary Numan has admitted that he doesn’t consider himself to be a musician, instead thinking of his talent as being an ‘arranger of noises’
Gary said on Paul McKenna’s Podcast: ‘On my passport, it used to say musician, and I was genuinely embarrassed by that.
‘Genuinely, because I’m not a very good musician at all.
I’ve always seen myself as an arranger of noises.
‘I find really interesting noises and I find a way of making them musical and merging them into a musical landscape, so to speak, that’s really what I do.’
Gary – who shares daughters Raven, 18, Persia, 16, and Echo, 15, with wife Gemma – added: ‘I play guitar averagely at best, keyboards even worse than that…
‘I’ve got three teenage kids who all play piano way better than I do and [music has] been my life.’
Iconic: Gary first appeared on the British pop scene in the late Seventies and earned himself the nickname of the ‘godfather of synth’ (pictured in 1979)
He continued: ‘I play well enough to be able to write simple melodies and then my skill, if you like, if there is one, is merging the sounds that I find with these layers of melodies.
‘So it ultimately ends up being a fairly decent bit of music, but it’s putting lots of little pieces together.
‘I don’t have the ability to do the big, grand thing in one go so I kind of add bits over time.’