HMV pulls Lostprophets from the shelves

I suppose, pragmatically, there's not a person in the country who would want to buy a Lostprophets record in public now, and in that sense HMV's decision to remove their records from stores makes sense.

On the other hand, it's an interesting precedent that HMV has set, now it's decided that conviction for some child abuse crimes makes an artist's work unacceptable. But only some - Roman Polanski's drugging and rape of a girl, for example, is not a a bar to the chain selling his work; and their Gary Glitter artist page even mentions his convictions while still offering a chance to buy his tracks.

I don't think it's a bad move to have a policy on this. It's just not clear what HMV's policy is.

Mail fumes that Glitter gets gold

As part of its 1970s season, BBC Two re-repeated one of the 1977 Top Of The Pops that have been delighting BBC Four viewers since the start of the year. They chose one with Gary Glitter in - understandable, as nearly the rest of the year's selections to date have been Manhattan Transfer or Lynsey DePaul doing Rock Bottom forever.

The Daily Mail doesn't understand:

Convicted sex offender Gary Glitter stand to get paid thousands of pounds in royalties after the BBC aired a repeat of him performing on Top of the Pops in 1977.
Viewers were left outraged by TV chiefs' decision to rerun the BBC2 programme featuring the disgraced pop star, 68, on Saturday night.
Many expressed their disgust on social networking sites that Glitter, who has been convicted of possessing child porn and abusing two young girls, would receive money from the airing of the TV programme.

Oddly, though, they struggle to find "many", relying on a handful of tweets:

Kristian Carter ‏tweeted: 'Gary Glitter on TOTP. First line "Cuddle me close. Hold me tight." Awkward turtle.'

Another viewer Cath Elliot wrote: 'Gary Glitter on #totp77 is making my skin crawl.'

Neither of those quotes actually seem to have anything to say about the issue of Glitter earning royalties. In fact, the entire Mail thesis is based on one tweet:

RedLiverbirdLou wrote on Twitter: 'Why are BBC2 giving Gary Glitter airtime? They should be ashamed! I don't pay my licence to watch Peado's!'

Peados. Presumably some sort of hairstyle on a vegetable?

Well done, though, RedLiverbirdLou - your single Tweet has generated an entire Daily Mail article. Presumably her equally impassioned call for a vet to be sent for to help the meerkat on Planet Earth Live is going to result in a full-page piece in tomorrow's paper: "Viewers call for medical intervention as BBC watches creature die".

Glitter on Twitter wasn't Gary Glitter

Get ready for a shock: the Gary Glitter twitter account wasn't actually Gary Glitter at all.

I know, I know. You'll need a moment or two to process this SHOCKING NEWS.

So, what was the motivation behind pretending to be a paedophile on the internet?

To, erm, prove that the internet is full of paedophiles pretending not to be.

@OfficialGlitter was a fake account. But imagine if it hadn’t have been. I’ve got almost 20,000 followers now. That’s 20,000 people I can send private and direct messages to. That’s hundreds of thousands of photos I can view. Imagine for a second, I set up a profile saying I was a “Justin Bieber Fan Club”. How many young girls would follow me? I hazard a guess at a few thousand. The scary thing is that most parents wouldn’t bat an eye-lid at their child following a profile that seems to promote their favourite singer.

I can't help thinking that if you really don't want paedophiles lurking about misleading children, offering online advice about the best way to do it might be a little self-defeating.

The person who pretended to be Glitter - "Ben" - also fumed that his eye-catching social experiment, erm, caught people's eyes:

Another interesting point that shocked me, was how very little effort it took to get the UK Media to freely promote this fictional “comeback tour”. Supposedly trusted and reliable media sources were providing me with free publicity and promoting awareness of the fictional Glitter tour/album/book.

The following sites brought in a massive increase in followers to the page within the first 24 hours by featuring a story/article on the Twitter page:

NME Magazine, Huffington Post, The Daily Sun, The Metro, ITN, Music Rooms.net, Yahoo.com, WebProNews.com, Vice.com and StereoBoard.com

How low do the media have to sink to sell newspapers or boost ratings? Do they actually have to lower themselves to promoting a convicted paedophile’s twitter page which could have potentially brought sales for Glitter’s (fictional) books or music? They would be responsible for putting money into Glitter’s pocket.

Ben seems a bit confused here. His 20,000 followers somehow proves something, he admits that a lot of those came about because of media coverage, and says that's bad, but at the same time:

I’d like to thank everyone who knew about this experiment and the people who helped me bring this matter to the public.

Didn't the main way this 'experiment' worked was by the media bringing the Glitter account to the public's attention?

Ben wanted to create a public outcry over the presence of Glitter on Twitter to make his point. Without the media covering the account, there would have been no outcry; no 'proof'. He's suggesting that the press should have ignored the Glitter account, but at the same time says it's great that there was an anti-Glitter furore. It's a bit like this hadn't really been thought through, isn't it?

And surely the notoriety of Glitter meant "his" account got attention in the way a common-or-garden paediophile (even one being Justin Beiber's fan club) would never have picked up? Doesn't that undermine the claims?

More to the point, most of the positive followers appear to be older people with a nostalgic connection to Glitter. However much you might worry about their taste and ethics, this account wasn't proving to be a massive lure to children. What exactly did Ben think he's proved here?

Ben rails at the media promoting the tour and book and music of his made-up Gadd. But didn't his account also promote Glitter's music? Won't he have sparked a few sales and put a few quid in the old man's pockets just by his work alone?

More worryingly for Ben, he also revealed there's a lot of people in the UK who feel excited at the idea of a Glitter tour. He might have thought he was making a point about creeps online. Instead, he's done some valuable market research to help prep a Glitter comeback. Good work, Ben.

News of the World discovers that Gary Glitter still eats, breathes

Apparently believing it be some sort of public service, the News of the World has tracked down Gary Glitter:

EVIL pop paedophile Gary Glitter has adopted a cunning new disguise to dupe the public - he's had a Rolf Harris makeover and calls himself Darren.

By "Rolf Harris makeover", they mean that he's got grey hair and a grey beard. But "stopped dying his hair" doesn't, presumably, sound sinister enough for the paper.

Actually, "looking like Rolf Harris" isn't especially sinister, either, and means that the writer Lucy Panton switches her guff between trying to make yer bloods run cold, and knockabout humour:

Parents should study our pictures well. For the child abuser - who is on the sex offenders register - is still a constant danger and threat to innocent kids.
[...]
Glitter's new look in the style of Aussie artist, singer and TV presenter Rolf - catchphrase "Can you see what it is yet?" - is just the latest in a catalogue of images the beast has cultivated.

Why mention Rolf Harris' catchphrase at all? In fact, why mention Rolf Harris? Surely, if you really wanted to twist the knife, you'd draw the comparison with that other kindly old man with a white beard? "Unlike Santa, you wouldn't want your kids bouncing on his lookalike's knee"?

Lucy, it seems, can barely contain her contempt for the lengths Glitter is going to in order to disguise himself:

When he arrived at Heathrow he was clearly the Glitter we all know and loathe.

But now the fallen king of 1970s glam rock has ditched the silly hats, wacky goatee and raggedy clothes that made him stick out like a sore thumb.

It's a pleasing idea that a judge should force Glitter to always wear a jumpsuit and platforms, that the children of the nation might see him coming; I'm not so sure that having a goatee and old clothes would really have been making him "stick out like a sore thumb."

Unless, of course, the News of the World seriously wants its readers to believe that you can spot a paedo because they look a bit odd. Which, in the long run, would be a far greater disservice to a credulous readership than running photos of Glitter would be useful.

Gary Glitter: Another brick out the wall

You might have thought that government MPs would have more than enough proper child protection issues to occupy their time without creating work for themselves campaigning against a brick, but apparently Bob Wareing from West Derby has made getting Gary Glitter's memorial brick removed from the Cavern Club a priority.

It's not clear what this is going to achieve, exactly, but Bob seems to think he's performed a public service:

"I didn't think he was a good role model and I wouldn't myself have wanted to put his name up.

"I understand the club wanting to put across the history of the Cavern Club and really not leaving anything out. But on the other hand this is a special case."

Nobody, as far as I can ascertain, asked Bob Wareing to put Gary Glitter's name up anywhere.

The trouble with this, though, is it's a little subjective, isn't it? The argument for putting the brick there - it's a record of everyone who played at the Cavern, without any attempt to vouch for either their quality as artists or as people. Once you take it down, insisting that it's a "special case", and start to introduce a character test, it all becomes a little murky. For example, Glitter's brick is being replaced by one with Pete Wylie's name on it. Pete is a lovely man, but got mixed up in something nasty a few years back when his former girlfriend called the police on him. Does Bob Wareing want to adjudicate on if that should debar him from having a brick in his name?

Closest to the Beatles' own bricks, there's one for the Rolling Stones. But surely the "special case" of Bill Wyman's relationship with the underage Mandy Smith would mean that brick has to come out, too?

Come to that, Paul McCartney was convicted of drug possession by a Japanese court, wasn't he? Doesn't leaving that 'Paul' brick up there somehow condone scoffing at local drug laws? Should we fetch a chisel and pop that one out, too?

It is not to suggest that Glitter's behaviour is acceptable to leave his name in a historical role-call; it's not as if he played the Cavern after his fall from grace, and Bob Wareing would presumably not feel comfortable if anyone went into the library on William Brown Street and removed any reference in back numbers of the Echo to the Glitter date. It doesn't help the victims, and it's unlikely to spare the misery of a single child in the future. The suspicion is that this is little more than a spot of easy news coverage for Wareing. I really thought he was better than that.

Glitter shocker

More confusion stirred up by Gary Glitter, as The Sun and the Telegraph fly into a panic at the suggestion that children doing GCSE music might listen to Leader Of The Gang.

The sense of absurdity isn't entirely helped by a usually-sensible charity getting involved:

Dr Michele Elliot, director of children's charity Kidscape, has insisted that the papers be re-issued.

She said: "AQA need to get Glitter off there. It sends totally the wrong message to paedophiles' victims."

You might, Michele, want to think twice before calling for anyone to get Glitter off. If Elliott explains exactly why considering the structure of a piece of music sends any sort of message to "paedophiles' victims", the Telegraph doesn't find space for that explanation; nor does Elliot explain if she believes that all existing copies of Glitter's work should be destroyed, nor if anyone convicted of any sexual offence should be prevented from working in any field at all in future. But I'm sure she would have thought these issues through and isn't just throwing her charity's good name behind a silly kneejerk moral panic.

Angry, angry Daily Mail: Computer error message

The Daily Mail takes a break from calling from Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross to be burned as some kind of witches to get angry at Hewlett Packard for encouraging child abuse. Or, rather:

Computer giant Hewlett Packard has caused outrage after paying convicted paedophile Gary Glitter £100,000 in royalties to use one of his songs in their latest ad campaign.

In the promos for the new HP TouchSmart monitor, Eighties rocker Joan Jett's cover of Glitter's 1972 hit Do You Wanna Touch Me is heard over the visuals.

It's not even Glitter's version of the song they're using. Is anyone really outraged by this, Mail? They have found an American organisation - AbuseWatch.net - to froth at the mouth a little, but given that even convicted paedophiles are still allowed to earn a living, it's not quite clear what the problem is. (Nor, indeed, why the Mail didn't get quite so exercised about George Bush using Glitter's music in the 2004 election campaign.)

The paper tries to make the song sound like it could be a hymn to sex wrongs:

The song include the lyrics: 'Every girl an boy. Needs a little joy. All you do is sit an stare.

'Beggin on my knees. Baby, wont you please. Run your fingers through my hair.'

- surely not even the Mail thinks that Glitter was using baby in the "newborn child" sense of the word, rather than the pop music usage of "person who I love", is it?

Still, the paper is clear: Nobody should be delivering cash to Gary Glitter. That is its line.

But hold on: what's this?

Scroll down to see the ad

Yes, having slammed HP for running Glitter's music and delivering him royalties, the Mail is, erm, running the ad featuring Glitter's music and, thus, delivering him royalties.

Someone you've never heard of is friends with Gary Glitter

The News of the World wants us to be angry and outraged at Gary Glitter's famous friend:

Look who's in Gary Glitter's gang
Pervert's hairdresser pal, vice madam and aunt who sold her niece for sex

Blimey - it's not Vidal, is it? Or Lee Stafford? Or even that bloke off the Salon?

Millionaire hairdresser Gordon Buchanan, wearing a red and white bandana and baring comedy false teeth, sits on the back of Glitter’s scooter before a trip to the seaside.

Millionaire who? Gordon Buchanan? Does the News of the World really think we know who he is?

Even Google doesn't know who he is - most of the search results for his name return the wildlife photographer; the first result for the hairdresser is #18 - for the Screws own story. He's even trumped by a Gordon Buchanan who runs a garden centre in Trovit. Then, at #25, there's another appearance - in pretty much the same story which appeared in, erm, Yesterday's Mirror. Indeed, aside from the current stories about Glitter, there's no reference to Buchanan in the first 100 search results. So why is the NOTW writing about him like he's a public figure?

Gary Glitter no longer his own worse enemy

Simon Heffer, earlier this week, writing in the Daily Telegraph:

Most rational people would find it quite acceptable if he were to be taken out and shot in the back of the head, and will be regretting that he came through his three years in a Vietnamese jail in quite such good shape.

Really? Heffer believes that "most rational people" would applaud vigilante justice and summary executions?

You can almost hear the memo flying through the air from the Telegraph lawyers, worrying about a possible charge of incitement, in the next paragraph:

I am not for a moment suggesting that anyone outraged by the existence of Gadd, or who fears for their own children when this man is loose on British soil, should take the law into his own hands.

Because that would be unacceptable. Oh, but hang on, though: Heffer has said that "rational people" wouldn't think it unacceptable. So is Heffer saying that he doesn't consider himself to be rational? That would make sense, as a lack of rational thought would explain two such contradictory paragraphs.

[via Greenslade]

Perhaps answering their own question

The Times website conjoins two stories, with a question that might look upwards for the answer "because you see what happens when they dont..."

For those who are keeping up, Glitter has now been turned away from Hong Kong.

Glitter shines on public policy

Just now, on Today, James Naughtie challenged Jacqui Smith over the timing of the Home Office announcement of plans for tighter restrictions on international travel for people convicted of sexual offences against children. Isn't this, he wondered, merely a knee-jerk style reaction to the release of Gary Glitter.

"Cases like this" replied the Home Secretary "highlight the questions we should be asking."

That would be a "yes", then.

Hello, hello, I'm back again

So, it's official, then: Gary Glitter is coming home:

"Police booked his ticket from Ho Chi Minh City to London and I have already paid for the ticket on his behalf," his lawyer Le Thanh Kinh told The Associated Press by telephone Thursday.

Glitter is said to be unkeen on returning home - presumably as he was reported to have left the country without signing the sex offenders' register as part of his earlier conviction and can probably expect a fairly swift re-arrest.

Bobby Gillespie: Gary Glitter touched me when I was a kid

Not like that, though. Musically:

"Listen to [Glitter's] songs again and see what you think. 'Do You Wanna Touch Me', 'Rock And Roll (Part 2)', 'I Didn't Know I Loved You (’Til I Saw You Rock ’N’ Roll)' are ecstatic and fantastic.

"Those records are better than The Beatles."

"When I was a little kid, I heard those songs on the radio and I loved them. I still love them.

"What The Beatles were for people in the '60s is what glam rock was for us. We love Glitter, we love Bolan, we love Roxy, we love Suzi Quatro."

And yet, when Gillespie started making music, it sounded more like the Velvets than glam rock. Funny, that.

Glitter sickens as ticker flickers

Sky News is reporting that Gary Glitter is currently in hospital after suffering a heart attack. The channel claims that "it is believed" he could be returned to Britain early, in order to receive treatment, although it doesn't offer any explanation as to what might lead to this belief so soon after Glitter fell ill.

Did you miss me while I was away?

There's a strange report in the Sunday People which claims that not only is Gary Glitter going to return to the UK soon, but taxpayers are going to have to protect him:

[U]nder European laws, the ageing baldie will be given round-the-clock police protection against revenge attacks, a free home and up to 12 minders to guarantee his safety.

Shockingly, UK taxpayers will have to foot the bill for Glitter's freeloading lifestyle, which experts reckon could run to more than £250,000.

Oh, really? So the figure comes from "experts"; they're working on an extrapolation from the European legislation which - rather than insisting on round-the-clock protection and a dozen minders - merely says, like all UK citizens, the government has a duty to protect him. That just means that the cops can't turn a blind eye if he's getting beaten up, not that he has to be treated like he's a Monet.

What's more, the paper even acknowledges that Glitter's return to the UK is going to be less 'free houses and minders', more a black maria and handcuffs:

He had served four-months of a seven-month stretch for downloading 4,000 appalling child pornography pictures from the internet.

But despite being ordered to live at his West Country home after his release in 2000, he did a runner to Cuba.

Oh, and there's the little manner of not signing the sex offender's register. The People concedes:

[H]e is almost certain to be automatically banged up for breaching his licence when he returns to Britain.

Of course, if the papers continue to suggest he's running up massive bills for taxpayers, and tacitly encourage vigilantism, then Glitter's safety will start to be threatened and there will be a need to protect him from the public purse. The People is effectively starting to bring about the situation it is supposedly raging against.

Glitter banged; remains so

Gary Glitter's hopes of getting out of his Vietnam jail have been frustrated by child protection groups, nine of whom wrote to the nation's authorities calling for him to be denied a holiday amnesty:

Ecpat Uk, which led the call to keep Glitter, 63, locked up, said: "We do not believe he has served enough time in prison to change his behaviour."

ECPAT doesn't explain what sort of help Glitter is currently getting in his Vietnamese jail to address his criminality; nor if it really believes that locking someone in a rat-infested jail is really a way to address "behaviour" rather than merely dumping a problem out-of-sight.

Glitter wants out

Apparently, Gary Glitter is planning to ask the Vietnamese president to let him out early to mark Vietnam's Victory Day.

Yes, how could victory over Western forces trying to control your nation be better marked than by giving a treat to a Briton who came to shag your children?

Glitter cut - but not by much

Gary Glitter's hopes that his child molestation sentence would be ended as part of the Vietnamese Tet festival amnesty have ended in disappointment.

He is going to get a reduction in his sentence - but only by three months. He'll still be in prison until August 2008 under the redefined sentence.

Will Vietnamese authorities make Tet offensive to British tabloids?

Apparently, as part of the Lunar new year celebrations - Tet - it's something of a tradition to grant amnesties to Vietnamese prisoners. (There's an idea John Reid could use to get prison spaces freed up - its got to be more proactive than merely leaving the front gate of Ford Open Prison open and trying to shoo the inmates out.) This year, child molester Gary Glitter could be up for an early release:

"My client is on the list for Tet amnesty consideration and I expect to hear the final decision in a few days," Glitter's lawyer Le Thanh Kinh said.

"If he is amnestied he will be released very soon, probably next week."

Would this be a good thing for Glitter, though? It's unclear where he'd go if he was released - and its unlikely a man with his record would be left unhounded by the British tabloids. He might find that he's better off staying inside.

Government want 'Gary's Here' panic buttons in chatrooms

Is the wording of this BBC report into Gary Glitter's recent spell in a Cambodian jail implying that British Officials spent their time talking him out a charge of assault on young boys?