Paul Francis Gadd (born 8 May 1944), known as Gary Glitter, is an English rock and pop singer and songwriter who had a string of chart successes in the 1970s with glam rock hits including “Rock and Roll parts 1 & 2?, “I Love You Love Me Love”, “I’m the Leader of the Gang (I Am)” and “Hello, Hello, I’m Back Again”.

Glitter first came to prominence in the glam rock era of the early 1970s. He had one of the longest chart runs of any solo singer in the UK during the 1970s. Between 1972 and 1995 Glitter charted twenty-six hit singles which spent a total of one hundred and eighty weeks in the UK Top 100.His success as a live performer lasted well beyond the decade. He continued to record in the 1980s and 1990s, with his 1984 song “Another Rock N’ Roll Christmas” being one of the Top 30 Christmas hits of all time.He released seven studio albums, and at least 15 greatest hits collections or live albums. In 1998, his recording of “Rock and Roll” was voted as one of the Top 1001 songs in music history.

In 1999, Glitter was convicted of downloading four thousand images of child pornography in the UK, and was afterwards listed as a sex offender. His reputation was greatly tarnished, and, though he continued releasing new music, Glitter’s popularity declined sharply. He was permanently evicted from Cambodia in 2002 for suspected child sexual abuse offences.[5] He afterwards relocated to Vung Tau in Vietnam, and in March 2005 applied for permanent resident status.Later that year, he was arrested by Vietnamese authorities while trying to leave the country, and was tried and convicted of child sexual abuse charges in 2005-06. On appeal in 2007 his three-year sentence was reduced by three months. He was released from prison on August 19, 2008 and returned to London three days later, having been refused entry to other Asian countries.

Biography

Early life

Paul Francis Gadd was born in Banbury, Oxfordshire. His mother, a cleaner, was unmarried, and initially brought him up with the help of her mother; he never knew his father. He was hard to control and at the age of 10, along with his brother, he was taken into local authority care.

Although a Protestant, he was educated at a Roman Catholic school. He would frequently run away to London, to the clubs that would be the launching ground of his career.

Early work

At the age of 12 he was already performing live at London clubs. His career on the London club scene grew, as he appeared at such venues as the Two I’s, in Soho, and the Laconda and Safari Clubs. His repertoire consisted of early rock standards and gentle ballads, and he got his first break when a film producer, Robert Hartford Davis, who was looking to make an impact on the music industry, discovered Gadd and financed a recording session for the British Decca label. At 14, he recorded his first album.[8] 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 contract (with Parlophone), and a new producer – George Martin, who would begin making his name 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 reached an impasse. By 1964, while Martin’s work with The Beatles was conquering the world, Raven was reduced to playing the warm-up for the British television programme Ready Steady Go!. He did numerous TV commercials and film auditions, and in the course of those activities met arranger-producer Mike Leander who eventually helped revive his career.

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 group disbanded, Raven formed Boston International with saxophonist John Rossall, and this group spent the following five years touring the UK and Germany and recording occasionally. By 1970 several singles, including “Musical Man”, “Goodbye Seattle” and a version of George Harrison’s Beatles song, “Here Comes the Sun”, put Raven back into record stores. As the glam movement hit full swing in 1971, Gadd/Raven took the new name Gary Glitter, which he devised by playing alliteratively with letters of the alphabet, working backwards from ‘Z’. Other options included Terry Tinsel, Stanley Sparkle and Vicky Vomit.The style that would come to define Gary Glitter 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 released as the A and B sides of a single, which Glitter and Leander called “Rock and Roll, Parts One and Two”. “Rock and Roll (Part Two)” would prove to be the more popular side in many countries, although it took about six months before it made its full impact, going to number two on the British pop charts and reaching the Top Ten in the United States, one of the few British glam rock records to do so (T. Rex’s “Bang a Gong (Get It On)” was another). “Rock and Roll (Part One)”, however, was also a hit; in France it made number one and in the UK both sides were listed together on the charts.

Mainstream success

“Rock and Roll” proved not to be a fluke. For the next three years, Glitter, backed by The Glitter Band on stage, challenged Sweet, Slade and T.Rex for domination of the charts. He took his image seriously enough to own a reported thirty glitter suits and fifty pairs of his trademark silver platform boots. He also released several British Top Ten hits, with “I’m the Leader of the Gang (I Am)” being his first single to reach number one in the summer of 1973, and “I Love You Love Me Love”, its follow-up, his second. Even an atypical ballad, “Remember Me This Way”, went to number three. He had twelve consecutive Top Ten singles, from 1972’s “Rock and Roll (Parts One and Two)” to “Doing Alright With the Boys” in the summer of 1975.

“Rock and Roll (Part Two)” caught on as a popular sports anthem in North America. Often used as a goal song or celebration song, fans chanted out “Hey!” along with the chorus. In light of Glitter’s court convictions (see below), some teams have stopped using the song, though it remains heavily played.

Despite his success in the UK, Glitter never made the same impact in the U.S., where, at best, glam rock was seen as a curiosity. Glitter had one more entry on the U.S charts with “I Didn’t Know I Loved You (Till I Saw You Rock ‘n Roll)”; after that, however, the closest Glitter came to another U.S. hit was a cover recording of “I’m the Leader of the Gang (I Am)” by the punk/blues group Brownsville Station.

After “Doing Alright With the Boys”, Glitter won the award for “Best male artist” at the Saturday Scene music awards hosted by LWT. His next release was 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 subsequent releases stalled in similar fashion, Gary Glitter announced his retirement from music in early 1976. That same year, his first true hits package, simply titled Greatest Hits, was released. It entered the UK Top 40 best-sellers charts, although 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.

Comeback

Glitter’s career took a downturn towards the end of the 1970s, leading to his first bankruptcy. He was said to have begun drinking heavily, even admitting later that he pondered suicide. Under financial pressure, 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, and some of its artists who still respected Glitter’s work, to do that - he had been an influence on post-punk, new wave, britpop and hair metal as well as early punk rock itself. This helped provide the opportunity 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” (UK No.25) and “Another Rock N’ Roll Christmas” (#7).

Glitter’s comeback was boosted in the 1980s by various guest spots and collaborations, leading to his becoming a cult figure with students. In 1982 he appeared on the British Electric Foundation album Music of Quality and Distinction Volume One (UK #25) along with fellow pop/rock luminaries Sandie Shaw and Tina Turner. In 1988, The Timelords’ “Doctoring the Tardis,” a Doctor Who tribute that sampled “Rock and Roll (Part Two)”, reached the number one spot. In due course, Glitter re-cut “Rock and Roll” with producer Trevor Horn and also “I’m the Leader of the Gang (I Am)” with 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. In 1989, Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers put a large sample of “Another Rock and Roll Christmas” on their Number 1 UK hit “Let’s Party”.

Glitter spent the next decade mostly as an in-demand live performer, and his back catalogue of recordings proved durable enough that several compilations sold well. Glitter appeared in several humorous billboard and poster advertisements for British Rail, in one of which he was shown attempting to look younger (and quite clearly failing) in order to obtain a Young Persons Railcard. He also issued a new studio album Leader 2 in 1991 which sold reasonably 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. He also cut a single, a new version of “The House of the Rising Sun”. British rock group Oasis used a sample from Glitter’s 1973 chart hit, “Hello, Hello, I’m Back Again” on their 1995 multi-million selling album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, one of a number of acts that borrowed from his song book.

“Rock and Roll (Part Two)” by this time was being used heavily as a crowd-rouser at numerous sporting events, and it was featured in the hit films The Full Monty, Happy Gilmore, Meet the Fockers and The Replacements with Keanu Reeves.

Personal life

In July 1963, aged just 19, Gadd married Ann Murton. The following year they had a son, also called Paul, and in 1966 a daughter, Sarah. The marriage broke down in 1970 and they were divorced in 1972.

In February 2001, he had another son, Gary Jr, with Yudenia Sosa Martínez, born 1973, with whom he was then living in Cuba.
Business interests

In 1991 Glitter opened a restaurant in London’s West End. Glitter’s Snack Bar was promoted under the slogan “Leader of the Snack”. It was successful at first, but business eventually slowed and the restaurant closed in the late 1990s.

Glitter also launched his own record label in the early 1990s, Attitude Records, after he lost his deal with Virgin Records. Glitter had signed to Virgin after leaving Arista Records in 1984 after twelve years with the label. Attitude records was merged into Machmain Ltd later in the 1990s, a music company owned by Glitter.

Child pornography arrest and conviction

In November 1997 Glitter was arrested after child pornography images were discovered on the hard drive of a Toshiba laptop that he had taken to the Bristol Cribbs Causeway branch of PC World for repair.

As a result, he was lampooned in both US and UK media over the allegations. Additionally, his appearance in the Spice Girls’ film Spiceworld The Movie was cut. Nevertheless, a truncated edit of the scene, featuring a version of Glitter’s “I’m the Leader of the Gang (I Am)”, was still included in the film.

The following years held further trouble for the singer. Glitter was convicted of possession of child pornography on 12 November 1999 and formally classified as a sex offender, serving two months of a four-month sentence in Horfield Prison in Bristol.

He was also charged with having sex with an underage girl, Alison Brown, around twenty years earlier, 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 2000 jail release

After British press revealed his whereabouts in Spain, Glitter reportedly attempted to move to Cuba in 2000 but was thwarted after the Cuban Consulate in London was tipped off and his picture and real name sent to all Cuban ports. He then went to Cambodia where there was an uproar over his presence which led Cambodian authorities to expel him in 2002, determining that he was ‘a threat to the security of a country and to the national image of Cambodia’. He had been jailed for three nights in that country on suspicion of sex offences, but was not convicted of any crime. In the same year, Snapper records re-promoted The Ultimate Gary Glitter, a two-CD anthology of Glitter’s music first issued in 1997 (days after his arrest), which covers his commercial breakthrough in 1972 through that point; again it was moderately successful.

In September 2001 he released a new album, On, that included material written before his 1999 British conviction. That material was to have been part of a project called Lost on Life Street until that album’s release was cancelled following his arrest.

By December 2004, after releasing a new single, “Control”, Glitter was in the news again concerning his behaviour; NGOs had been petitioning the government with their own evidence aimed at arresting Glitter. Glitter moved to Vietnam.

In 2005 Remember Me This Way, the documentary filmed at Glitter’s career peak in 1973 (and originally released in 1974), was issued 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.[14] In 2006 his back catalogue was made available via the Internet from sites such as iTunes and eMusic.

Vietnam underage-sex arrest and conviction

In late 2005, Gary Glitter was arrested and charged with molesting two under-aged girls, aged 10 and 11, at his home in Vung Tau, Vietnam. He originally faced possible child rape charges carrying the death penalty, but prosecutors did not find enough evidence for those charges. Early in 2006, he was convicted of committing obscene acts with minors and sentenced to three years imprisonment. On one of two appeals, in 2007 this was reduced by three months.

Arrest and trial

On November 12, 2005, Gary Glitter fled his home, despite having applied for permanent residence in Vietnam. Three days later, he was arrested in Ho Chi Minh City while trying to board a flight to Thailand. Six girls and women in Vietnam, aged 11 to 23, stated that Glitter had sex with them; the age of consent in Vietnam is eighteen.

After his arrest, Glitter was turned over to provincial police from Ba Ria-Vung Tau and returned to Vung Tau and held on suspicion of having sex with the two under-age girls. Glitter was held in jail throughout the criminal probe, which was completed on December 26, 2005. The charge of rape was dropped for “lack of evidence” (according to Glitter’s lawyer), although the singer admitted that an eleven-year-old girl had slept in his bed. Glitter could have faced the death penalty by firing squad if convicted of child rape. After having received compensatory payments from Glitter, the families of the girls appealed to the courts for clemency for him.
Glitter was tried on charges of committing obscene acts with two girls, aged 11 and 12, and could have faced up to fourteen years in prison if convicted. The trial opened on March 2, 2006 and ended the next day, upon which Glitter was found guilty as charged and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment.Prosecutions for sex with minors are not unusual in Vietnam, but the intense media interest in the Glitter case made a lengthy custodial sentence inevitable.

The sentence included mandatory deportation after serving his sentence and payment of 5 million Vietnamese dong (US$315) to his victims’ families.[23] Glitter continued to deny any wrongdoing, saying he believes he was framed by British tabloid newspapers.[24] He announced he planned to spend part of his sentence writing an autobiography, which he began during his pre-trial detention.

BBC interview

In May 2006, Gary Glitter gave his first interview in more than eight years to BBC News. He denied doing anything wrong saying “to my knowledge I have not had sex with anyone under 18?. He also said “I know the line to cross”. When asked what he thought of adults having sex with children he said “It certainly is a crime … I don’t have the words, I would be very angry about that.” He said he did not think too much about the future for now, other than winning his appeal. Glitter was criticised about his comments: Christine Beddoe, director of End Child Prostitution, Pornography and Trafficking, said that Glitter was trying to “minimise what he has done” and added “We must allow children to tell their story and not just have the words of Gadd.”

In his interview Glitter said he was “not a paedophile” and as far as his music was concerned said “I felt after I left prison in England that maybe there was a slim chance I could put my life back on track and have a career, but after some time, the people that surrounded me, lawyers etcetera and managers, said: ‘We don’t think so, as the media have already made such a big deal about this’.” He continued to blame the press for his downfall and called them “the worst enemy in the world”, alleging press payment of local girls in a bar to arrange a photo-scoop ‘entrapment’. Glitter did not comment about his previous conviction for possession of child pornography several years earlier.

In the week following the broadcast of the interview, the BBC received hundreds of complaints from viewers, but the network pointed out they had made it quite clear during the broadcast that Glitter had been convicted of the crimes and that “he was strongly challenged on his protestations of innocence.”

Appeal

On 15 June 2006, in a closed hearing, the People’s Supreme Court of Appeals heard Glitter’s appeal for a reduced sentence, after a four-week delay for unspecified reasons. The ruling by the three-judge panel was announced at around 10 am that day, with the appeal being rejected.

Although he remained calm throughout the forty minute reading of the verdict, upon leaving the courthouse, he shouted angrily to reporters that there was “no justice here in Vietnam. They did not listen to the defence at all.”

On 7 February 2007 it was announced that his sentence had been reduced by three months.In anticipation of his release, the Philippines barred Glitter from entering that country as of 16 May 2008.
Cardiovascular disorder

On 20 January 2008 the News of the World reported that the singer had suffered a severe heart attack. These reports were denied, although it was confirmed that he had been diagnosed with heart problems.

“Glitter was admitted to our hospital with acute diarrhoea,” said Nguyen Huu Quang, the director of the hospital in Binh Thuan Province, near the prison where the singer was serving out his sentence. “While we were treating him, we found out that he also has a cardiovascular disorder.”

Release

Glitter’s Vietnamese lawyer, Le Thanh Kinh, said that his client intended to return to the UK, although he had also expressed interest in moving to either Hong Kong or Singapore.In the UK it was reported that he would be placed on the Sex Offenders Register on his return. British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said he should be given a Foreign Travel Order (FTO) banning him from overseas travel: “We need to control him, and he will be [controlled] once he returns to this country.”

Glitter was released from Thu Duc prison in southern Binh Thuan province on 19 August 2008. He was escorted under police guard to Tan Son Nhat Airport in Ho Chi Minh City and put on board a flight to London via Bangkok. At Bangkok he claimed that he had tinnitus and a heart condition, and refused to board the flight to London despite the efforts of British police sent to escort him, although they had no jurisdiction to take action. He was refused entry to Thailand and threatened with deportation to the UK. On the evening of 20 August he took a flight to Hong Kong, where he requested medical treatment saying he was suffering a heart attack. However the Hong Kong authorities also refused to admit him and he returned to Thailand the next day.

At least nineteen countries, including Cuba, Cambodia and the Philippines, announced that they would refuse to admit Glitter, and on 21 August the Thai authorities stated that he had agreed to return to the UK.He arrived back in the UK at Heathrow Airport at 7:10am on August 22, 2008, where he was met by British police officers.

Plans after prison release

On 25 June 2008 the Daily Telegraph reported that Gary Glitter plans to record a new album on his prison release. He is quoted as saying “I have an incomplete album that I want to finish. I have been thinking about the plan during my days in jail, I have sung rock’n'roll for forty years. After jail, I will continue to rock’n'roll.”After his release from prison, Glitter said that he was planning to write a book to prove his innocence.