Gary Glitter, the glam rock singer whose stadium chant outlived his disgrace

Gary Glitter

Photo: AVRO / CC BY-SA 3.0 nl, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 8, 1944 Banbury
Occupation	Singer

Somewhere in an arena tonight a tom-tom pattern will start, a guitar will stamp on the off-beat and thousands of people will shout “Hey!” on cue. Few of them could name the man who made that noise. Gary Glitter built one of the loudest careers in British pop on a chant with almost no words, then destroyed his own name so thoroughly that the BBC stopped repeating his performances and a studio cut him out of a pop comedy. The song carried on without him. What is left of Gary Glitter is a question that his victims, his former audience and the companies that own his catalogue have each had to answer: what happens to music once the man who made it is in prison for abusing children?

He never knew his father. His mother, unmarried, worked as a cleaner in Banbury, the Oxfordshire market town where Paul Francis Gadd arrived on 8 May 1944, and at ten he and his brother were taken into local authority care. He kept running away to London, and by 15 he had a record out: a film producer, Robert Hartford-Davis, paid for a Decca session, and Alone in the Night appeared in January 1960 under the name Paul Raven.

The next decade was a long run of near-misses. Parlophone put him with George Martin, who produced Walk on Boy and Tower of Strength; neither sold. In 1965 he joined the Mike Leander Show Band, then formed Boston International with the saxophonist John Rossall. As Paul Monday he released singles between 1968 and 1970, and he sang the part of a priest on the 1970 concept album of Jesus Christ Superstar. He was in his late twenties, a journeyman singer who had never had a hit.

The invention came in 1971. Gadd and Leander, his producer and co-writer, settled on Gary Glitter after rejecting Terry Tinsel, Stanley Sparkle and Vicky Vomit, and cut a 15-minute studio jam down into a two-sided single for Bell Records. Rock and Roll (Parts 1 and 2) split the idea in half: Part 1 carried the vocals, Part 2 kept only the stomp, the handclaps and the shouted syllables. Released in 1972, it reached No. 2 in Britain, Part 1 went to No. 1 in France, and the near-instrumental Part 2 climbed to No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100.

For three years he could not miss. Eleven consecutive singles reached the UK top ten between 1972 and 1975, and three went to No. 1: I’m the Leader of the Gang (I Am) and I Love You Love Me Love in 1973, then Always Yours in 1974. Touch Me, his second album, reached No. 2 and became his best seller; the live Remember Me This Way was recorded at London’s Rainbow Theatre. Backed by the Glitter Band, he played glam rock as pantomime: silver suits, platform boots, a bare chest and a wink. By his own count he sold more than 20 million records, and he placed 26 hit singles on the UK chart, twelve of them in the top ten.

He announced his retirement in early 1976 and was declared bankrupt in 1977, blaming Britain’s top tax rate. The second career was built on nostalgia. A dance medley, All That Glitters, charted in 1981; Another Rock and Roll Christmas reached No. 7 in 1984; within three years of the comeback he was playing 80 shows a year. Other musicians kept his catalogue in circulation. The Timelords sampled Rock and Roll (Part 2) for Doctorin’ the Tardis, a UK No. 1 in 1988, and Oasis borrowed a line from Hello, Hello, I’m Back Again for Hello in 1995, which made him a credited co-writer.

The career ended in a computer shop. In November 1997 a technician in Bristol repairing his laptop found images of child sexual abuse. At Bristol Crown Court in November 1999 he admitted downloading more than 4,000 such images, was jailed for four months and placed on the sex offenders register. His cameo in Spice World had already been removed. He left Britain, moving between Spain, Cuba and Cambodia, which deported him in 2003, before settling in Vietnam. In March 2006 a Vietnamese court convicted him of obscene acts with two girls aged 10 and 11 and sentenced him to three years. When he landed at Heathrow in August 2008 he was placed on the register for life.

The case that defines him came out of Operation Yewtree, the police investigation opened after the Jimmy Savile revelations. Arrested in October 2012, he was convicted at Southwark Crown Court in February 2015 of attempted rape, four counts of indecent assault and one count of sexual intercourse with a girl under 13, offences against three schoolgirls in the 1970s. He was sentenced to 16 years, and his appeal was dismissed later that year.

The uncomfortable part of his legacy is how little the music needed him. Rock and Roll (Part 2) survived his disgrace because it barely contains him: no lyric, no face, only a beat and a crowd response. American sports arenas went on playing it; Billboard estimated in 2014 that hockey use alone brought in about $250,000 a year. When Joker put the track under its staircase scene in 2019, the outrage centred on whether the film was paying him. According to the Los Angeles Times he received nothing, having sold his rights, with the US publishing held by Universal Music Publishing Group. The argument over separating art from artist turned out to be partly an argument about contracts, and it left a harder fact in place: the song works best on people who do not know whose it is.

Released on licence in February 2023, halfway through his sentence, he was recalled to prison within six weeks for breaching its conditions. The Parole Board refused his release in February 2024 and again in June 2025, and his sentence runs until February 2031. In June 2024 the High Court ordered him to pay £508,000 in damages to a woman he abused when she was 12; he was declared bankrupt in 2025 after failing to pay.

In July 2026 prosecutors charged him with further non-recent sexual offences against a girl, alleged to have taken place between 1978 and 1981, which he denies. Appearing by video link from HMP Channings Wood in Devon, the 82-year-old pleaded not guilty on 2 September 2026, and a three-week trial has been set for November 2027 at Southwark Crown Court. Netflix had scheduled a three-part documentary series, Hunting Gary Glitter, for 14 October 2026, then postponed it weeks before release, citing new legal information, and has not given a new date.

The next scheduled date in his life is a courtroom one, in November 2027. Before then the chant will have been shouted in a great many arenas, by crowds who know every “Hey!” and nothing about the man who first recorded it.