Creativity Quote by Gary Numan

Being a Bowie fan in pre-punk Britain wasn’t just a taste; it was a visible risk. Gary Numan’s memory lands because it treats fandom as a kind of social exposure: you didn’t simply listen to the “wrong” music, you wore it, styled it, signaled it. Bowie’s androgynous glam era offered permission to experiment with identity, but that permission came without protection. Numan’s blunt “It was horrible” punctures any romantic nostalgia about outsider culture. This isn’t the glamorous mythology of the misunderstood kid who triumphs; it’s the bodily reality of being chased down a street for looking like you’d stepped out of the approved script for masculinity.

The line “before punk” matters as a timestamp and a critique. Punk later built an aesthetic and a community around antagonizing the mainstream; it made deviance legible, even marketable. Numan is describing an earlier moment when glam’s weirdness had less of a subcultural safety net. Bowie fandom could read as softness, queerness, art-school pretension, all of it ripe for policing by bored, violent peers. “No end of trouble” sounds almost conversational, but it carries the exhaustion of someone who learned early that culture is enforced socially, sometimes physically.

There’s also an origin story hiding in plain sight. Numan would go on to build a persona around alienation and futurism; here, you can see why. The chase becomes formative: not just running from attackers, but running toward a new self, one that turns vulnerability into style and style into armor.