Abdullahi Shelleng was born on 20 January 1942 in Shelleng, in the Numan Local Government Area of the former Gongola State (now Adamawa State).
Gary Numan | Numan Gumaa | Numan | Arthur Numan |
He is currently manager/tour manager for Los Mondo Bongo (celebrating the music of Joe Strummer) which includes Joe Strummer's post-Clash bandmates Pablo Cook (percussion) and Smiley Culture/Steve Barnard (drums) from The Mescaleros, as well as bassist Derek Forbes (Simple Minds), guitarist Steve Harris (Gary Numan) and vocalist Mike Peters (The Alarm), plus Ray Gange of Rude Boy film fame DJing.
Numan played in all of the group matches in France, although the quarter final game against Argentina was marred with his second yellow card of the game (after a tackle on Diego Simeone).
In what would become Numan's normal practice, the B-side was a non-album track, in this case "Do You Need the Service?"; the title referenced a line from the works of William S. Burroughs, the service in question meaning pest control.
Like many Numan songs from this period, it evokes a Burroughsian world of addiction, homosexuality and failed relationships, predating the writer's fascination with science fiction that took hold on the next and last Tubeway Army album, Replicas (1979).
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"Jo the Waiter" is one of Numan’s few acoustic guitar tracks, others being "The Monday Troop" and "Crime of Passion" (also written and recorded in 1978 but unreleased until 1985).
His father, Hoca Numan Efendi, who is also a scholar of Islam, was from the Yazır village of Gölhisar district of Burdur province, then in the Ottoman Empire, and now in Turkey.
Noman Çelebicihan (Numan Çelebi Cihan) (1885–1918) was a Crimean Tatar politician, lawyer, Mufti of Crimean Moslems, and writer.
The pair formed Tubeway Army, initially with Numan's uncle Jess Lidyard on drums.
The song signalled a different musical style for Numan, featuring jazz-influenced saxophone and fretless bass, as well as a new image comprising trilby hat and pinstriped suit, inspired by Humphrey Bogart and Howard Hughes.
"Stormtrooper in Drag" is included on numerous Gary Numan albums including the CD reissue of Dance and the compilations Exhibition (1983) and The Premier Hits (1996).
"River" and "Mistasax (2)" are Numan solo tracks that were used as B-sides to the Radio Heart singles "All Across the Nation" and "Radio Heart" respectively.
The album brings together the tracks from the July 1989 EP of Tubeway Army's 10 January 1979 and Numan's 29 May 1979 sessions for disc jockey John Peel's show and three tracks broadcast by BBC Radio 1 from the Year of the Child concert held at Wembley Arena on 30 November 1979.
The B-side was one of Numan's few non-original pieces, the first movement of Erik Satie's "Trois Gymnopedies," in an arrangement that added guitar, bass and synthesizer to the original's solo piano part.