The song did really well in the US which was quite rare for a glam rock artist to have achieved at that time so it was a huge deal. Most people with be familiar with Rock And Roll Parts One And Two. Years followed where he continued on trying to hit the big time and suddenly it had arrived with the released of Rock And Roll Parts One And Two which was a massive hit and even up to this day has been featured in various movies and at stadiums in the USA. He worked hard trying to get his music career off the ground and was very ambitious even at the tender age of 15, Paul was performing in clubs around London and cut a record (Alone In The Night) using the name 'Paul Raven'. He fell in love with the whole scene and decided that he was going to be a singer. He was a dreamer who had fantasies of running away and becoming famous, as soon as he discovered the London night life, he would sneak off and hit the clubs. Paul always felt like an outsider and was quite shy in his younger years, he felt that he related more to the kids who'd also had difficult upbringings or no proper parental guidance. Both he and his brother were taken into care of the state. He never knew his father and from a young age, Paul was a handful and his mother struggled to control him. His life was something of a rags to riches tale, with him having a difficult upbringing, his mother struggled to make ends meet and did what she could on the wages that she earned from her job as a cleaner. Paul (Gary) didn't just arrive on the music scene and become a star over night, he actually struggled in the beginning and went through various different images and styles of music until he settled on what would become Gary Glitter. As much as people would not like to admit, Gary was a pioneer and very much a focal point of the Glam Rock era and influenced everyone from Johnny Rotten to The Sisters of Mercy. He's been arguably described as the King of Glam Rock in the past. When you mention the name 'Gary Glitter' in this day and age people recoil in horror but there was a time, especially in the UK where Gary (real name, Paul Francis Gadd) couldn't walk down the street for hundreds of adoring fans surrounding him. It is time for this kind of thing to stop.(Paul Gadd aka Gary Glitter. You cannot imagine the relief when we were sparred the playing of badly-tuned violins or the clonking of xylophones. On a separate note, the accidental music was dreadful and unnecessary. There was nothing about the flip side of the coin, most notably the fact that justice has been known to make mistakes, or at the very least jailed people whose convictions are later questioned: Tim Evans (who was hanged), the Guildford Four or Barry George (convicted but later cleared of the Jill Dando murder). Furthermore there is the fact that this programme seemed only to "interview" those in favour of the death penalty, like Ann Widdecombe or Gary Bushell. This was a Britain that was so alternative that you expected the Prime Minister to be Robert Mugabe or Osama Bin Laden. Quite aside from the fact that Glitter is charged with crimes committed beyond British jurisdiction, the fact that he is given only 30 days to appeal is quite frankly unbelievable. I was somewhat led to believe that this programme would raise the issue of the death penalty as a matter of debate, but the real debate will have to be the mishandling by the programme makers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |