To my surprise, fans were only too happy to talk, as long as their names are changed: “We want people to realise that we’re not these subterranean figures in basements with child porn,” says Smith, “we’re ordinary people, with families and marriages and children who like a bit of glam rock.” The only condition is that we don’t meet in public, which is how I’ve ended up in a Birmingham hotel room on a Saturday morning with six Gary Glitter fans reminiscing about their favourite gigs. Paul Gadd, AKA Gary Glitter, arrives at court in London in 2014. I have friends and family who don’t want to see me come to harm by meeting people who would be like: ‘You listen to Gary Glitter, you must be a fucking paedo.’ But that’s one of the reasons we’re putting ourselves out there, to chip away at that stigma.” “I’d be lying if I said it didn’t concern me. “I mean, it’s not a constant barrage, but obviously I’ve seen people writing in saying, ‘Oh, if I ever find out where you live, you’re in for it’, so I know those threats are out there,” says Smith. I was intrigued by what it was like to see your idol turn into a public hate figure before your eyes how a continued, defiant love of Glitter’s music affected his fans’ lives why anyone would want to expose themselves to the kind of abuse the page inevitably attracted, despite its assurances that it “celebrates the music … we do not condone his crimes”. I got in touch with the group because I was intrigued by this odd netherworld of fans who still refer to Glitter as “The Leader”, make their own Glitter calendars and T-shirts and arrange meetups to watch videos and discuss the old days, albeit clandestinely: “I think,” says Smith, “people are still concerned about going out in public and meeting up and going: ‘Hi everybody! Here for the Glitter fan convention?’” The compilers told me they had omitted Rock And Roll Part 2 and I Love You Love on the not-unreasonable grounds that the furore that including them might provoke would overshadow the whole project. I stumbled across it while writing about one of the glam box sets Smith mentions: Universal’s lovingly assembled Oh Yes We Can Love. The Gary Glitter’s Ganghouse Facebook page currently has nearly 7,000 likes. My attitude has always been, we’ll decide for ourselves, thanks very much.” You know, we’ll decide on your behalf what you can and can’t listen to. It’s treating the public like kids, really. It’s not played on the radio, it’s not on glam compilation albums or box sets, there wasn’t a single picture of Gary in the glam exhibition at the Tate Liverpool. “What really inspired me to start the page was that I knew this was music that really excited me, and I realised it was being omitted from history, written out of history. But that’s not a criticism of the music, the performance, the songs, or the production.
Child abuse, child pornography, these are terrible things that people deserve to go to jail for. I knew what Gary Glitter had been convicted of. And that never stopped me from appreciating his music. “Before that, one of my favourite artists was Jerry Lee Lewis, and obviously he’s a guy that comes with a reputation, he married his cousin and shot his bass player. One, called Gary Glitter’s Ganghouse, was set up in 2011 by 33-year-old Richard Smith, who discovered Glitter’s music long after the singer’s convictions: deeply improbable as it may seem, Gary Glitter is still apparently capable of attracting new fans. Today, Thomas is part of an apparently burgeoning community of die-hard Glitter fans who congregate around a number of Facebook pages. It’s not your fault if you like it or not. The type of music, the artist, the song, it chooses you. But he knew of at least one other Glitter fan who had been beaten up – “and he’s a big lad too” – so he decided to take action: deleting the videos and setting up another page under a pseudonym, where “all my friends are Glitter fans”. Teasing or threatening? “There’s a fine line, isn’t there?” he frowns. You know, we’ll decide on your behalf what you can and can’t listen to “A lot of my mates started getting a bit funny about things when they saw Gary Glitter videos on my Facebook page.” It’s treating the public like kids, really. “I started getting a bit of shit,” he says. Perhaps understandably, not everyone was terribly enamoured of Thomas’s renewed interest in, arguably, one of the most reviled figures in British pop history. I saw there wasn’t that many videos on YouTube and I started uploading a couple of Gary Glitter tracks myself.” Years later, however, he found himself idly typing Glitter’s name into YouTube.
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