[The Minimoog Model D] was just the most exciting thing. I don’t even know how to describe it. I thought it was a game-changing machine. I didn’t realize at the time that other people had already discovered it. I knew about Kraftwerk. I knew about [Brian] Eno’s work with David Bowie. But I didn’t know about this. I think because of the way I found it and because I was trying to convert punk songs into electronic songs, the music itself–by accident, not by any great cleverness of mine–was also a type of music that I hadn’t heard. The Eno stuff was grandiose, almost classical, but electronically classical. Kraftwerk seemed synthetic. To say there was no soul to it is insulting and I don’t mean it like that, but there was nothing organic about it. This had synth, but it had drums and bass and the vocals, so it kind of merged two worlds together, quite by chance.
Those early days of electronic music merging with pop were wonderful. I was in my late teens and early 20s at the time, the perfect time to develop musical tastes.
Source: Gary Numan Thinks The Music Industry’s Collapse Is A Beautiful Thing – Fast Company
h/t Peter Cohen