Gary Glitter (born Paul Francis Gadd, May 8, 1944 in Banbury, Oxfordshire) is a rock & pop singer who came to prominence in the glam rock era of the early 1970s. His reputation was greatly tarnished and his popularity quickly declined following a child pornography conviction, although he continued to record and release new work until his arrest and conviction on child abuse charges in 2006.
He had one of the longest chart runs of any solo singer during the 1970s. His success as a live performer lasted well beyond the 1970s, and the chant from his hit "Rock and Roll (Part 2)" is a perennially popular stadium anthem at sports events, particularly in the United States. Glitter's 1973 number 1 "I'm The Leader Of The Gang (I Am!)" also remains one of the better-known songs of its era. He continued to record in the 1980s and 1990s, with his 1984 song "Another Rock And Roll Christmas" being one of the top 30 Christmas hits of all-time. In the UK alone Glitter scored more than 20 hit singles in the UK Top 75, and released more than twenty albums.
In 1999, Glitter was convicted of child pornography offences classifying him as a sex offender under UK law. He went to live in Vũng Tàu in Vietnam in March 2005 and applied for permanent resident status. Glitter is currently in prison in Vietnam, convicted for sexually abusing two girls of 10 and 11 years of age, after being arrested on November 19, 2005.
Biography
Early work
Gary Glitter as a name may have been brand new when he hit the British charts running on the glam-rock rails, in 1972, but the man behind the stage name and act was no overnight sensation. Paul Francis Gadd had been performing the British club circuit since his mid-teens in the late 1950s, appearing in such legendary British clubs as the Two I's in Soho and the Laconda and Safari Clubs. At the time, his repertoire consisted of early rock standards and gentle ballads, and he got his first break when a film producer looking to hit the music industry, Robert Hartford Davis, discovered him and financed a recording session for the British Decca label. Under the stage name Paul Raven, he released his first single, "Alone in the Night" in January 1960.
A year later, he had a new manager (Vic Billings), a new recording deal (with Parlophone), and a new producer – George Martin, who would begin making his name for keeps a year later when he signed and began producing the Beatles. The Martin sessions produced two singles, "Walk on By" and "Tower of Strength," but neither sold very well and Raven's recording career hit an impasse. By 1964, while Martin's work with the Beatles was upending the world, Raven was down to playing the warmup for the British television legend Ready, Steady, Go. He did numerous television commercials and film auditions, but somewhere in the middle of that activity he met arranger-producer Mike Leander – and, in due course, it turned his music career around.
Gary Glitter
First, Raven joined the Mike Leander Show Band in early 1965. Then, he was deputised to produce a few recording sessions, by such artists as Thane Russell and a Scottish beat group, the Poets. Finally, after Leander's band fell apart, Raven formed Boston International with saxophonist John Rossall, and this group spent the following five years touring between the U.K. and Germany and recording occasionally. By 1970, "Musical Man" and a version of George Harrison's Beatles song, "Here Comes The Sun," put Raven back into record stores, and the style that would come to mark Gary Glitter---he took the name in 1971 as the glam movement hit full form, by playing alliteratively with letters of the alphabet, working backward from Z---had taken its basic shape.
The song that at last made Gary Glitter's name and career began as a fifteen-minute jam, whittled down to a pair of three-minute extracts, which Glitter and Leander called "Rock and Roll, Parts One and Two". Like Stevie Wonder's debut hit, "Fingertips Pt. 2", "Rock and Roll (Part Two)" would prove the hit, although it took about six months before it made its full impact, going to number two on the British pop charts and hitting the top ten in the United States, one of the few British glam rock records that did (T. Rex's "Bang a Gong (Get It On)" was another).
Mainstream success
"Rock and Roll (Part Two)" proved not to be a fluke. For the next three years, Glitter challenged The Sweet, Slade and T. Rex as glam's chart dominators. As he took his image seriously enough to own a reported (and extremely expensive) thirty glitter suits and fifty pairs of his trademark silver platform boots, he also released several British top ten hits, making "I'm The Leader of the Gang (I Am)" his first to hit number one in the summer of 1973 and "I Love You Love Me Love", its follow-up, his second. He even sent a completely atypical ballad, "Remember Me This Way", to number three. He had twelve consecutive top ten singles, from 1972's "Rock and Roll (Parts One & Two)" through "Doing Alright With The Boys" in the summer of 1975.
"Rock and Roll (Part Two)" also caught on as a popular sports anthem in North America. Often used as a goal song or celebration song, fans chant out "Hey!" along with the chorus. Some teams have stopped using the song in recent years, in light of Glitter's court convictions (see below), though it remains heavily played.
But (like many other European stars) he never made the same impact in the U.S., where glam rock (as a curiosity at best) never really took powerful hold, despite its obvious influence on such successes as Alice Cooper, Kiss, and Aerosmith, or such punk acts as the New York Dolls. The closest Glitter came to another U.S. hit was by way of a cover recording, the punk-blues group Brownsville Station following up their first top 10 hit, "Smokin' In The Boys' Room", with a randy cover of "I'm The Leader of the Gang (I Am)". After Doing Alright With the Boys Glitter released a cover of the Rivingtons' rhythm and blues legend, "Papa Oom Mow Mow", but it got no higher than number 38 on the British charts. After his next releases stalled likewise, Gary Glitter announced his retirement from music in early 1976. His first true hit package, simply titled Greatest Hits, followed that year and even though it entered the UK Top 40 best-sellers charts, its sales may have been hurt due to a similar budget album, entitled I Love You Love Me Love, issued by Hallmark Entertainment the following year.
Return to fame
Glitter's collapse was so complete that he was said to have begun drinking heavily, even admitting in due course that he pondered suicide, all under financial pressures, and not even a pair of Top 40 hit singles ("It Takes All Night" and "A Little Boogie Woogie in the Back of My Mind") could lift him all the way back. It took the post-punk audience to do that: some of the audience which grew in the wake of the mid-1970s still respected Glitter's work. This helped open a path for Glitter to cut a dance medley of his greatest hits, All That Glitters, which charted in 1981; within three years, he was playing eighty shows a year at colleges and clubs, and had chart hits "Dance Me Up" and "Another Rock and Roll Christmas".
When Doctor and the Medics invited Glitter to join them on their own television performances in 1983, Glitter joining the group for their version of Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky", which the Medics had redone in something resembling Glitter's signature rave-and-riff style, the Glitter comeback seemed to be on in earnest. And by 1988 The Timelords' "Doctoring the Tardis," a Doctor Who tribute that sampled "Rock and Roll (Part Two)", took the top spot. In due course, Glitter re-cut "Rock and Roll" with producer Trevor Horn and also re-cut "Leader Of The Gang" with female punk-rock outfit Girlschool. In the late 1980s his hit singles were used to compile the Telstar released C'mon, C'mon ... It's the Gary Glitter party album.
Glitter spent the next decade mostly as an in-demand live performer, and his back catalog of recordings proved durable enough that several compilations sold well. He was a surprise hit at the 1994 World Cup concert in Chicago which was telecast live to forty-six countries. He played the Godfather in a 1996 revival of the Who's Quadrophenia. And he cut a single, a new version of "The House of the Rising Sun". British Rock group Oasis used a line from Glitter's 1973 chart hit, "Hello, Hello, I'm Back Again" on their 1995 multi-million selling long playing album Morning Glory, just one of the many acts that was borrowing from his song book.
"Rock and Roll (Part Two)" by this time was being used heavily as a crowd-rouser at numerous American (and other) sporting events, and it was featured in the film hit, The Full Monty.
1997 child pornography conviction
In November 1997, Glitter was arrested after child pornography images were discovered on the hard drive of a personal computer he had taken to a Bristol branch of PC World for repair. One image was of a child being tortured. It had a dramatic impact on Glitter's career: British shops no longer carried his records, concerts were cancelled abruptly, his parents legally changed their surname, even his segment in the Spice Girls' film, Spiceworld, was cut.
Glitter was convicted of possession of child pornography in 1999 and classified formally as a British sex offender, serving two months of a four-month sentence. He was also charged with having sex with an underage girl, Allison Brown, when she was 14 years old. Glitter was acquitted of this charge after it emerged that Brown had sold her story to the News of the World and stood to earn more money from the newspaper on Glitter's conviction.
Career moves after 1999 jail release
Glitter reportedly moved to Cuba in 2000 but moved on to Cambodia after the British press revealed his Cuban whereabouts. An uproar over his presence compelled Cambodian authorities to expel him from the country. In September 2001 he released a new album, On, that included material written before his conviction. That material was to have been part of Lost On Life Street until that album's release was canceled following his arrest.
By December 2004, Glitter was said to be back in Cambodia, buying a home there, after releasing a new single, "Control." In 2005, Remember Me This Way, the documentary movie filmed at Glitter's career peak in 1973 (and originally released in 1974), was released for the first time on DVD. Glitter's music itself still had an audience, further demonstrated by three new album releases, although all of them contained past recordings from the vaults, rather than new product. The first two new albums were issued at the same time, The Remixes and Live In Concert (the latter of which was a 1981 recording); these were only for sale on the internet. A new collection of Glitter's chart hit singles followed, The Best Of Gary Glitter. [1].
2005 Vietnam underage-sex conviction
On November 16, 2005 British and Vietnamese press reported that Glitter was being sought for engaging in underage sex – one of the two girls involved was reported to be twelve years old [2].
On November 19, 2005, Glitter was arrested in Ho Chi Minh City trying to board a flight to Thailand, over alleged sexual relationships with a twelve year-old girl and a fifteen year-old girl. The age of consent in Vietnam is sixteen. According to the Associated Press, six females in Vietnam between the ages of 11 and 23 have admitted to having sex with Glitter.
According to Rolling Stone, Glitter was turned over to provincial police from Ba Ria-Vung Tau and returned to Vung Tau. Glitter had actually applied for permanent Vietnam residence before he fled his home November 12, Rolling Stone said, with police alleging he had sexual relationships with two girls under eighteen.
On November 21, 2005, the Daily Telegraph reported Glitter's young girl friends had actually been twelve and eighteen years old (not fifteen) — but that the 61-year-old singer's alleged involvement with the twelve-year-old could mean death by firing squad if convicted of child rape, and that he could also be jailed for up to twelve years if found guilty of performing lewd acts on the underaged girl. A November 21, 2005, story on E! Online reported the ages of the two alleged victims as twelve and fifteen.
On November 24, 2005 the Mainichi Daily News reported police had requested four more months of detention for Glitter while they complete investigations; their criminal probe was completed on December 26, 2005 with the charge of rape being dropped, according to Glitter's lawyer, for "lack of evidence" [3] [4]. Glitter admitted, however, that an 11-year-old girl slept in his bed, as reported by the Associated Press [5] on December 9, 2005.
After having received compensatory payments from Glitter, the families of the girls have appealed to the courts for clemency for him.
On December 26, 2005 police finished their investigation and passed the case to provincial prosecutors for review for trial. On January 6, 2006 Glitter was charged with committing obscene acts with two girls of 10 and 11 years of age, facing three to seven years in prison on each count if convicted. The trial opened on March 2, 2006. [6][7][8] [9]
On March 3, 2006 Gary Glitter was sentenced to three years' imprisonment after being found guilty of obscene acts with two young girls. At his trial, Judge Hoang Thanh Tung described in graphic detail the offences committed by Glitter, who ejaculated onto the stomach of one of the girls and had another urinate into his mouth.[10] It is possible that he will be eligible for release after serving one-third of his prison term, or one year. That would include the four months he spent in jail from November 2005 to March 2006. Glitter was also ordered to be deported after serving his sentence and to pay 5m Vietnamese dong (US$315) to his victims' families. [11]. Glitter himself still denies any wrong doing, saying he believes he was framed by British tabloid newspapers. [12] He plans to spend part of his sentence writing an autobiography, which he began during his initial 3 months of incarceration. Glitter is now going to appeal over his 3 year prison term.
Selected discography
Singles
1970s
- 1972 "Rock and Roll (Parts 1 and 2)" #2 UK; #7 U.S.; #1 France
- 1972 "I Didn't Know I Loved You (Til I Saw You Rock 'N' Roll)" #4 UK; #35 U.S.
- 1973 "Do You Wanna Touch Me? (Oh Yeah)" #2 UK spent 3 months in the UK top 20
- 1973 "Hello Hello I'm Back Again" #2 UK, Spent 2 months in the top 10
- 1973 "I'm The Leader Of The Gang (I Am)" #1 UK 4 weeks at Number 1, Spent 2 months in the top 10
- 1973 "I Love You Love Me Love" #1 UK Spent 3 months in the top 10
- 1974 "Remember Me This Way" #3 UK Spent six weeks in the top 20
- 1974 "Always Yours" #1 UK Spent two months in the top 20
- 1974 "Oh Yes! You're Beautiful" #2 UK Spent two months in the top 20
- 1975 "Love Like You and Me" #10 UK
- 1975 "Doing Alright with the Boys" #6 UK
- 1975 "Papa Oom Mow Mow" #38 UK
- 1976 "You Belong To Me" #40 UK
- 1977 "It Takes All Night Long" #25 UK
- 1977 "A Little Boogie Woogie in the Back of Mind" #31 UK
- 1978 "365 Days"
- 1979 "Superhero"
1980s
- 1980 "Gary Glitter EP" #57 UK
- 1980 "When I'm On, I'm On"
- 1980 "What Your Mama Don't See"
- 1981 "All That Glitters" #48 UK
- 1981 "And Then She Kissed Me" #39 UK
- 1984 "Dance Me Up" #25 UK
- 1984 "Another Rock and Roll Christmas" #7 UK
- 1985 "Love Comes"
- 1987 "Rock & Roll Part 3"
- 1988 "KLF - Doctorin' the Tardis The Timelords Featuring Gary Glitter #1 UK
- 1988 "Frontiers of Style"
1990s
- 1991 "Ready to Rock"
- 1992 "Rock On" #58 UK
- 1992 "Through The Years" #49 UK
- 1995 "House Of The Rising Sun" #15 NZ
- 1995 "Hello, Hello I'm Back Again (Again!) #50 UK
2000s
- 2001 "You" Fan Club Single - Mail Order Only
- 2004 "Control" Fan Club Single - Mail Order Only
- 2005 "Field of Dreams"
Studio albums
Live Albums
- (1974) Remember Me This Way (live/soundtrack)
- (1988) The Gang, The Band, The Leader
- (1990) Live And Alive
- (2005) Live In Concert
Compilations
- (1976) Greatest Hits
- (1977) I Love You Love Me Love
- (1979) Always Yours
- (1981) Golden Greats
- (1987) C'mon, C'mon ... It's The Gary Glitter Party Album
- (1992) Many Happy Returns
- (1995) 20 Greatest Hits
- (1997) The Ultimate Gary Glitter (AKA 25 Years Of Hits)
- (1998) Rock And Roll - Gary Glitters Greatest Hits
- (2005) The Remixes
- (2006) The Best Of Gary Glitter
See also
External links
Further reading
