![]() 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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