Night Flight reports that back in 1982 the 7-Up company was looking for a cutting edge artist to shill its sugar-water, and their ad execs somehow decided upon soliciting Gary Numan for the task of writing and recording some hip “new-wave jingles.”

And so it came to pass that the agency offered Gary £10,000—a non-trivial sum for 1982—for three 30-second pieces of music. The catch was the lyrics for each would be written by someone at the agency. That was a bit dodgy, but Gary still agreed to go through with it.

When the music arrived, the Americans at 7-Up were appalled—not because they didn’t like the music (although that was rumored to be true in some tellings of this tale) but because Mr. Numan failed to show up to the meeting as requested to present his new, er, pop masterpieces. Feeling snubbed, 7-Up declared that they would never, ever work with Numan again and stalked out.

Was this a case of rock star buffoonery? Actually, no. It was something quite serious.

The day Gary was supposed to present his vision for the future of 7-Up in the UK, he was on his way back from a music industry meeting in Cannes.  On final approach to Southampton Airport, his single-engine Cessna 210 Centurion—one of the aircraft in his newly-founded airline, Numanair—ran out of gas and had to make an emergency crash-landing on a road in Hampshire. (Contrary to the legend, Gary was not at the controls but a passenger on this flight.) Everyone walked away from the incident but the airframe was destroyed.

All this happened as 7-Up and the agency waited for Mr. Numan to show up. Even after the crash became the lead item on the news across Britain that night, 7-Up wouldn’t revisit the situation. That’s why we never got a chance to see this commercial.

 

Numan, pictured here in a Numanair plane.
 
The uploader of the below clip of Numan’s jingles states that “when the recordings were sent to the Americans they had not heard any music like this, and they were expecting something in a punk style as that had just arrived over there. So these recordings were never used.”

However, a comment on the YouTube clip from Paul Gayter, one of the ad men responsible, clears up the real reason why Numan’s jingles were rejected:

I was the ad guy who wrote the idea/lyrics to this song (Yikes!) The true story as to why the client didn’t buy these ads is much stranger and funnier. Gary was supposed to present the music to 7-UP. He actually didn’t show up, so a truly unhappy client said “We’ll never work with him again!” The funny thing is it wasn’t until I arrived home later that night, that I discovered the true reason for the no-show…he was the MAIN news headline, for having to crash land his plane on a motorway!

So Numan’s career as a soft-drink pitchman died on that day in Hampshire, but he has remained active musically and in the world of aviation (as a pilot with many thousands of hours of flight time to his name) to this day.

Here’s Numan’s 7-Up tracks. I think these are actually really great skeletons and could have easily been fleshed out into legit songs after being rejected by the soda company brass: