Many words have been used to describe synth-pop pioneer Gary Numan over his 30-odd-year career, but human isn't one of them. Since the late 1970s Numan has been the epitome of the alien-robot fallen to earth, the emotionless android engulfed onstage in a haze of dry ice and whose mechanically dehumanised music speaks of isolation and paranoia. It therefore comes as something of a shock to be greeted by him with an irrepressibly chirpy 'Allo, 'ow are ya?' It's even more surprising to discover that offstage, he goes by his real name, Gary Webb. West London-born Numan, now 52, has ridden a bumpy road from hyper-stardom to obscurity. Now he is enjoying a renaissance as cult inspiration to a new generation of musicians who have taken his futuristic musical template from three decades ago and made it sound, well, futuristic all over again. Recent name-checks from the likes of industrial rockers Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails, as well as new-rave boppers Klaxons and the surreal Mighty Boosh comedy team, have elevated Numan's credibility higher than when he was dominating the world's pop charts. 'Things are all going good for me again,' Numan cheerfully admits by phone from Turkey, where he is holidaying before taking to the road for a series of gigs that will take him to Macau for the enclave's debut Rockit music festival this weekend. 'I'm really, really happy now, and have been for a long time.' Such enthusiasm and joie de vivre is at odds with the image Numan cultivated over a career that began with a string of eerie synthesised chart toppers such as Are Friends Electric and Cars. His stage persona walked a tightrope between star and psychotic: black-clad and white-faced, he was glacially distant and aloof, an act that channelled the crushing loneliness he felt as a teenager, the anxiety he suffered as an adult and the dislocation from society he felt as a result of Asperger's disease. He took his cues from similarly disorientating music and literature: the driven synthetic motorik was part Krautrock band Neu! and part David Bowie, while the featureless jumpsuits paid a debt to Alex and his droogs from Anthony Burgess' gloomy future shock novel A Clockwork Orange. The image, however larger than life, was sincere, Numan insists. 'Asperger's contributed to the sense of remoteness - that's what I was like,' he says of the syndrome that affects sufferers' ability to empathise with others, a condition that was only diagnosed long after his first flourish with success. He controls the symptoms better these days, he says, but still has milder forms of the panic attacks and periods of paranoia that debilitate many sufferers. 'I still get hung up on things and get obsessed about certain things,' he says. Happily married for 13 years now to Gemma, a member of his fan club and one of the millions of devoted fans who would attend the singer's gigs in 'Numanoid' garb - black clothes replete with black lipstick and nail varnish - Numan is indeed a new man. 'My career started well but when it started to lose speed I started to panic,' he says in a torrent of quick-talk that's difficult to interrupt. 'I sort of lost track of who I was and what I was doing.' Numan's career did indeed start well. In 1979, Are Friends Electric introduced synthesisers to the British pop charts and sat in the No 1 spot for four weeks. His overnight sensation status was cemented a few months later with Cars, a song many thought was drawn from the fetishistic novel Crash by J.G. Ballard, another early literary influence. A string of hit singles and tours followed and for a few years Numan was the biggest name in British pop. He even managed to break down the notorious antipathy towards synth pop in the US. His descent began in the mid-1980s when the sound he'd helped popularise was gradually replaced by more upbeat acts. Numan had, like many of his post-punk peers including Joy Division and Human League, risen to prominence with dark and brooding songs that perfectly suited the bleak landscape of late 1970s Britain when the new Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher had set the country on a course of high unemployment and swingeing public spending cuts. Five years later, the economy was on the up and so was the tempo and attitude of popular music. Numan tried to fit in, with forays into dance and disco and collaborations with the likes of jazz funksters Shakatak. It was clear, however, that the once all-conquering Numanoid no longer set the pace, but was following it. 'The pursuit of commercial success is a great burden,' Numan confesses. 'I started making decisions that were not based on what I wanted to do but what I thought I should do. It was quite grim.' The tours got smaller, the albums sold in fewer numbers and Numan's lifestyle, including his unabashed pursuit of ostentatious wealth - shown in a hobby of buying, flying and, gleefully for the music press, crashing planes - didn't fit in with a new pop world that seemed as bent on bringing down Thatcher as it did with making music. 'I did do some things I regret now,' he admits. 'Some of those albums were just awful, terrible, rubbish. One of them, called The Fury, had a picture of me in a white tuxedo. What was I thinking? When you are going to have an album called The Fury, you can't be wearing a white suit and holding a glass of champagne. That's where it all started to fall apart.' These days, the sullen sneer and malevolent fixed stare that beamed emotionlessly from stages and pop videos are still there, if slightly softened by age. But underneath he's all sweetness and light. For a start, in his resurgent success he doesn't feel any antipathy towards a media that was against him during his prime. 'My albums were never really taken too well, but as time goes by they get reappraised,' he says, his voice betraying none of the trademark nasal tones that still mark his songs. 'Even the NME, which never had a good word for me when I started, recently ran a two-page appreciation of my work, which is weird. I never had a chip on my shoulder over that sort of thing. People just didn't connect with the music at first but I always felt people would get it in time.' Leading the pace among those who did eventually 'get it' were Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor and Manson (real name Brian Warner). 'Lots of people that I really admire have done covers of my stuff and that's had a massive effect on my career lately,' says Numan. Unsurprisingly for an artist who has rediscovered his muse, Numan finds himself on a creative roll, with new material in the works and a huge tour of the US planned to follow the success of his British tour playing his classic Pleasure Principle album in full. Less predictably - especially for someone so content with the world - the new music is darker and more malevolent. 'It's weird but I think being happy has opened the floodgates of creativity and what's come out is very dark stuff,' he says. 'It's not that it represents anything dark but it's really the sort of music I always wanted to play.' Gary Numan headlines the MIMA Rockit Festival at the Venetian Macao on Saturday night