ALL THAT GLITTERS

These appear to be troubling times for the younger version of me. I was, after all, a bit of an “outsider” myself, because, whilst I wasn’t an “only” child, I was far enough removed from my sister in age for both of us to have grown up effectively in that way. Consequently, I was always a bit of a “loner”, preferring to spend my weekends and holidays building models or drawing pictures rather than scrambling around in mud and getting horribly physical or confrontational or competitive with all of the other lads.

From the age of eight I was the quintessential “Latch-Key Kid” and had a front door key on a chain around my neck to let myself in at the end of the school day, or to allow me to come and go as I pleased during the school holidays, and so my closest friends were the ones on the telly which I used to switch on for company when I got home...

Consequently my “idols” were not the footballers or the pop stars of the time. Most of the music that I was exposed to was from my sister’s record collection and so I was always about a decade out of tune with whatever it was that the other kids were listening to at the time. Also, I never even went to a football game because I didn’t have “mates” who did that sort of thing (and I still haven’t been to one, to be honest), and I didn’t buy a “pop” record until surprisingly deep into my teenage years, when one particular “Top of the Pops” triggered something in me, and I went out and bought singles by “Nazareth” and “Judas Priest” the following weekend.

But for this “Latch-Key Kid”, my best friends (and the thing that kept me the most company) were my friends on the telly, which was my constant companion during those long summer days of cutting out bits of cardboard at the dining room table, or painstakingly using my technical pens to make black dotted works of art. Science-Fiction on TV was my favourite, and its heroes seeped into many of my drawings, and its spacecraft were reflected in the inferior versions which I built for myself. I still believe that the Eagle from “Space:1999” is the best spaceship design ever, and that the best truck never made was the “SHADO Mobile…”

All those hours spent alone with the daytime TV in an era before “Daytime TV” is why I’m so familiar with obscure little TV shows from the 1970s like “Paint Along With Nancy”, “The Amazing World of Kreskin”, “The Sullivans”, “A Family at War”, “The Galloping Gourmet” and “Crown Court”. In a three channel era, it was either that or the test card, or, God help me, the Test Match, with which I was still far too young to be enthralled, even though I do think that it must have seeped in during those years. After all, if it was good enough for the BBC, then it must have had something going for it…

And this is now my problem. I grew up as a bit of a “BBC Fan” even though I knew that I was unlikely to ever get to such a faraway place as London and actually work there. Once upon a time, in my mind at least, the BBC stood for the very best that Britain could produce, and I would have defended it with every breath of my being, even though they never thought that I was made of the right stuff to actually work for them. If even I wasn’t good enough, the thought might have gone if I was that arrogant, then they must be very good indeed…

So this is now my dilemma. Will ALL of the people who I picked out to be my own personal heroes turn out to have been the “bad” ones…? Did I have an inbuilt detector for finding the very worst people to “admire” in the way that, for a certain period in my life, I always seemed to always fancy the women who turned out to be the gay ones…? (At least, that’s what they told me, anyway…)

I found this the other week. It’s my first year “Music Project” from when I started in secondary school in 1975 and has spent the best part of forty years rotting away in an old box file with various other bits and pieces from that time of my life. It is, without a doubt, a complete pile of crap, culled from various articles in “Look-In” and not really being about “music” at all but, hey, we had to write something…

I remember very clearly that during the school trip we took to Switzerland during my last year at Primary school, I had bought a “Look-In Special Edition” magazine about pop music when I was mooching about in whichever airport it was in London that we flew from, and I read it alongside my copy of “Doctor Who and the Giant Robot” which I had been bought as a gift for my holiday reading whilst I was away…

All that talk of pop stars within that magazine seemed unbelievably “grown-up” to me, someone to whom the “pop” world was all a bit of a mystery. Then, as now, many of the faces were unfamiliar, but I was interested enough not to throw the thing away, and I carefully stacked it amongst my other comics once I got home.

Consequently, I still had my copy of it some six months later when I had made the shift to “Secondary School” and when the project was set. Three of us (because I was never a complete “loner…”) were a little bit bewildered by having been set a “Music Project” seeing as we knew very little about music at that point in our lives, and we decided that we would use this magazine as the very backbone for the “research” of our projects. Each of us picked out one performer from within its pages. I think that the other two chose David Essex and Alvin Stardust (how progressive we were) and I was rather left with Gary Bloody Glitter to write about…

Christ! I never even liked the guy or his music all that much, even if I can still hum a few bars if caught unawares… I’m petty sure that I can remember the slight sense of annoyance that I didn’t choose first because I seem to remember that I would have preferred to write about David Essex, but those are the breaks when you’re young and foolish and able to be talked out of things by the stronger personalities which surround you.

Anyway the project got done, and then got stuffed in an old filing box and forgotten about for 37 years. The Glitter career faded as a “new wave” of musicians came along, as they always do. Then he had a kind of ironic revival in the 1980s and I went along to a couple of “Christmas Gang Shows” which were actually a lot of fun and, later still, I laughed when I saw the “wig” poster campaign which he did for “British Rail Young Person’s Railcards” a few years after that.

And then he turned out to have been this monster.

You can bet I didn’t write anything about that back in 1975, but I’m beginning to look at all of the pictures of all of the things that I quite liked back in those days and wonder what the hell was really going on behind all of the publicity pictures and the glamorous Q&A profiles…

What’s your star sign, Gary…? What’s your favourite colour…? How many pairs of Glitter Shoes do you own…? Do you like having sex with under age girls…?

Well, at least we’ve now got a definitive answer to one of those questions, haven’t we…?