prolific songwriter, Numan has written about 400 songs. His starting point is usually a piano to work out melodies and chord structures. Most of the songs on his early albums were written on a piano his parents had bought him: later in his career he has used a piano preset on the computer as a starting point. However, his biggest hit "Cars" was unconventionally written on a bass guitar. Numan's recognizable vocals have become one of his trademarks, along with his androgynous "android" stage persona. Legacy Within the UK's burgeoning synth-pop scene, Numan was the first artist to achieve mainstream notoriety. His music and live performances met with censure from critics; he also faced condemnation from the Musicians' Union, who claimed he was putting "proper" musicians out of work. Andy McCluskey of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD) observed "nasty, nasty, vitriolic journalism" directed at Numan, who was dismissed as "pretentious" and "pseudo-intellectual". He nevertheless generated an army of fans calling themselves "Numanoids", providing him with a fanbase which maintained their support through the latter half of the 1980s, when his fortunes began to fall. He maintains a cult following, and has sold over 10 million records. Numan is considered a pioneer of electronic music; Nightshift identified Numan, and fellow late 1970s debutants OMD and the Human League, as "the holy trinity of synth-pop". He has been credited as a key influence by fellow British musician Kim Wilde as she was working on her debut single "Kids in America" with her brother Ricky. Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal of Tears for Fears, another new wave act of the 1980s, cited Numan's style as one that inspired them while recording their debut album The Hurting. Since the 1990s Numan has been cited as a major influence by a variety of bands and artists from hip hop to industrial rock, including Africa Bambaataa, Fear Factory, Nine Inch Nails, and Marilyn Manson. Fear Factory produced a cover of "Cars" (featuring a prominent guest appearance by Numan himself) for the digipak version of their 1999 album, Obsolete. Numan had become acknowledged and respected by his peers, with such musicians as Dave Grohl (of Foo Fighters, with whom he covered Down in the Park on 1996's Songs in the Key of X, and Nirvana), Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails, whose 2018 leg of the Cold and Black and Infinite tour concluded with a guest