One evening in a London studio, Gary Numan pressed a key on a synthesiser someone had left standing in the corner. The sound filled the whole room, and something in him clicked. His band, Tubeway Army, had been playing guitar-based punk up to that point. After that evening he started rebuilding the songs around this new electronic sound. That one decision helped changed a whole era of British pop music.

As a boy Gary liked being alone. He built toy planes, took apart radios, and studied switches and wiring for hours at a time. His parents didn't have much money, but they never pushed him toward a "safer" career. Instead, they spent a good part of their savings on an old piano and some music equipment.

In school Gary argued with teachers, broke things when he got upset, and struggled to sit still or follow the rules. He was expelled from one school, then another, and later asked to leave a technical college as well. When he was about fifteen, his parents took him to see a psychologist. The specialist mentioned Asperger syndrome, but no one followed up with a full evaluation afterward. Almost nobody in the family understood the term at the time, and his mother worried it meant she had failed as a parent. So the subject was quietly dropped, along with a short course of medication that helped for a while and then stopped.

For years, Gary carried these school memories around without a clear explanation for them. Ordinary conversation is still not easy for him. Eye contact is one part he has never found natural. He has said he counts the seconds while looking at someone, because he had to work out for himself what feels normal to other people.

He also missed social signals for a long time. In the studio he could turn down another musician's idea flatly, with no softening at all, and people read that as arrogance rather than what it actually was - a plain, direct way of speaking.

His wife, Gemma, changed a lot of this. She has a brother with Asperger's, and she started noticing the same patterns in Gary not long after they met. She began explaining things after the fact: why a comment had landed badly, what someone's face had actually meant, when a joke wasn't the right response. Sometimes she would give him a small signal, a touch under the table, before he said something that might come out wrong.

His stage persona grew out of the discomfort. Early in his career he had no idea how a performer was supposed to move or connect with a crowd, and the anxiety of it was real. Instead of faking an ease he didn't feel, he built a still, distant, almost mechanical character. Audiences read it as science-fiction cool. It was really stage fright, turned into something he could wear.

"Are 'Friends' Electric?" reached number one in the UK in 1979 and sold close to a million copies. "Cars" followed soon after and became a hit around the world. Numan later trained as a pilot and started his own charter flying business, keeping the childhood fascination with planes running alongside the music. He came back with the album Splinter in 2013, which returned him to the UK Top 20, and Savage reached number two in 2017 - the same year he received the Ivor Novello Inspiration Award.

Asperger's helps him to stay focused. Once something interests him, he can study it for hours without getting bored, the same way he once studied plane engines and studio wiring as a kid.