Singer Gary Numan is looking back at his first interaction with his now-wife, Gemma O’Neill, when she was a 12-year-old fan of his music.
In an interview with The Times published on Wednesday, June 24, Numan, 68, explained that he met O’Neill, now 58, at a fan event around 1980. He was 22 at the time, while she was 10 years his junior.
The now-married couple reconnected years later, when O’Neill was 18 and he was 28. The “Cars” singer said he contacted a fan club that O’Neill was part of in 1992 so that he could get her phone number and offer his condolences for her mother’s death.
“That’s how I attracted her, which I think is illegal now,” he quipped.
Recalling the phone exchange, Numan said O’Neill “put the phone down” because “she thought it was somebody playing a cruel trick.” When he called her back, she quizzed the former Tubeway Army frontman to make sure it was really him.
Numan then took O’Neill on their first date.
“I took her to a Little Chef because I’m very down to earth. I don’t do all that flash, rich man, pop star stuff,” he explained.
Numan and O’Neill tied the knot in 1997 and went on to welcome daughters Raven, 23, Persia, 21, and Echo, 19.
O’Neill previously shared her perspective on the start of her romance with Numan in a 1997 interview with The Independent.
“My big brother Shane was always buying albums. One day, I went past his bedroom and saw the back cover of Gary’s first Tubeway Army album,” she recalled. “I thought, ‘I like the look of that bloke,’ so I took the album, started playing it — and I was hooked. I was a huge music fan: him, Toyah, and Siouxsie and the Banshees were my people.”
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O’Neill continued, “I was 11, and it started as a schoolgirl crush — a big crush. You know, when you’re at that age. I first met Gary around my 12th birthday. My dad worked at Warner Bros, which the Beggar’s Banquet label 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.”
O’Neill recalled talking to a school counselor about her future and telling them that she didn’t need a career because she would “marry Gary Numan.” She remembered their first date as “really cute” and noted that as they saw each other more, her “schoolgirl crush turned quite quickly into real feelings.”
“I kept my feet firmly on the ground, though — I remember thinking, ‘This is really, really nice, he’s really, really friendly, and it’s lovely, but if it stops tomorrow I’m going to be all right about it,” she shared.
