We gave Seventies rock stars a licence to behave badly

Gary Glitter was a novelty pop star who was able to carry out his abuse amongst a Seventies rock culture of hedonism and groupies that no band rose above, says Neil McCormick

Gary Glitter
Gary Glitter Credit: Photo: PA

​I wonder if Gary Glitter’s conviction is making other pop stars nervous? Will it shift the focus in the current historical sex abuse investigations to the rock business, where standards of hedonistic misbehaviour have notoriously dwelt on the very borderline of what is socially, morally and legally acceptable? It has been possible to detect nervous rumblings behind the scenes in the music world this past couple of years, an entertainment genre where the bawdy rallying cry “sex, drugs and rock and roll” has practically been a job description for some. Would anyone dare open that can of worms?

I am not sure that Glitter counts as a proper rock star. He was always a pantomime figure of fun, who seems more closely allied to the creepy DJs he was friends with than to the rock counterculture. He was clearly a predatory paedophile using his fame and his access to young fans to satisfy depraved and illegal sexual appetites and it is right that he should be belatedly brought to justice. But there is no real mystery about how he was he able to get away with it for it for so long. His abhorrent behaviour took place against a backdrop where ritualised sexual hysteria – a kind of public display of desirability, where the sight of female fans being led backstage by roadies to meet the band after a show​ –​ was considered perfectly normal​ , ​and where girls were not only being smuggled into hotel rooms but were smuggling themselves in.

Glitter was able to commit his crimes because he was hiding in plain sight behind the behaviour that was seen at every level of rock and roll, from the small fry to the biggest bands in the world. The Rolling Stones courted a bad-boy reputation but even the supposedly clean-cut Beatles were making hay behind the scenes. In a revelatory, myth-busting 1970 interview, John Lennon likened the Beatles tours to Fellini’s orgiastic movie of imperial Rome, Satyricon, in which “I was an emperor. I had millions of chicks, drinks, drugs, power and everybody saying how great I was.” With considerable regret, he described it as “such a heavy scene … If we couldn’t have groupies we’d have whores and everything, whatever. Whatever was going … When we hit town, we hit it.” Yoko Ono, who was with him during the interview, broke in to say, “How did you manage to keep that clean image? It’s amazing.” “Because everybody wants the image to carry on,” said Lennon, describing collusion between press, police, artists and the women themselves.

Gary Glitter

Gary Glitter has been convicted convicted of series of historic child abuse allegations dating back to 1970s

A key word Lennon used is “groupie”, a term for the kind of young women who actively and vigorously pursued encounters with their idols. Rock biographies and autobiographies of the era are full of allusions to and direct accounts of licentious sexual debauchery, with a general acknowledgement that rock stardom offered abundant access to women. Robbie Robertson of The Band claims he was recruited into rock with the promise “you won’t make much money but you’ll get more pussy than Frank Sinatra.” Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman recorded sexual encounters in his diary during their early tours, and claimed to have slept with 265 women in one particularly active year touring period “'cause you used to have three or four a night sometimes.” Gene Simmons of Kiss has been among the most boastful about his proclivity, asserting that he has had sex with 4,800 women. Asked how he could be so specific, he explained that he took Polaroid photos of each conquest. “It just proves you can be an ugly bastard and if you’ve got the right job you’ll have access.”

Unlike Glitter's crimes, there is no suggestion of illegality in this behaviour. For it to be abuse, there has to be a victim, and there can be little doubt that most of the sexual activity was consensual, although I doubt many backstage encounters went through ID checks or signed waivers or consent forms. The Sixties and Seventies were an era where entrenched chauvinistic attitudes to women still persisted despite the rise of feminism. Rock stars had a mystic, near mythic status that seemed to put them beyond the rules that bound ordinary mortals. Following the notorious Rolling Stones drug bust and prison sentences in 1967, William Rees Mogg wrote a famous editorial for the Times in defence of rock behaviour, quoting Alexander Pope’s “Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?” The convictions of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were subsequently quashed. As the Sixties came to an end, the forces of law seemed to back off the rock elite. Debauchery was spoken of openly in interviews, reported in rock journalism, and gossiped about by fans. It was as if we, as a culture, gave license to rock stars to act out our most rebellious, Bacchanalian fantasies.

Much of the worst behaviour has become the stuff of rock folklore. Led Zeppelin were the biggest band in the world in the Seventies, but their backstage debauchery figures almost as strongly as music in biographies like Hammer of The Gods by Steven Davis and Trampled Underfoot by Barney Hoskyns. There are tales of bystanders getting beaten up, women bound and humiliated, a groupie defiled with a dead fish for the amusement of onlookers. The late rock journalist Mick Farren described his revolt at a scene “running in semen and beer and unpleasantness” recalling band members in the backroom of a discotheque ‘getting their d---- sucked by 13-year-olds under the table.” It is a matter of historical record that guitarist Jimmy Page, then in his late twenties, had an under age American girlfriend during the early Seventies. Lori Maddox (sometimes known as Mattix) has given interviews describing her role in an organised group of LA school girls who went hunting for rock stars. She was 14 when she took up with Page, and still views the whole affair as a great romance, even though she spent much of the time hidden away from prying eyes in hotel rooms. Kate Hudson’s character in the film Almost Famous was partly based on Maddox, who writer and director Cameron Crowe met as a teenage Rolling Stone journalist profiling Zeppelin in 1973. “What I was trying to capture was the elaborate denial that the girls buy into,” said Crowe. “They talk about themselves as muses … but when you get the rock stars, you realise (the girls) of course are the trinkets.”

I don’t want to single out Zeppelin though, because the belief, among fans at least, was that everyone was at it. Clean-cut teen pop idol David Cassidy spoke in 1977 about how his road crew would “corral a hand-picked dozen of the most beautiful” girls at his concerts. “After the show, I’d go up to this room, pick the one I wanted, and let the band divvy up the rest. I was an animal.” As he grew older, the appeal of such behaviour palled. “I was tired of strangers in my room, my bed; tired of girls climbing up the fire escape and hiding in my closets, in my shower.”

Why and when did this behaviour stop? There were some legendarily debauched bands in the Eighties and Nineties, including American rockers Motley Crue, Guns N Roses and Marilyn Manson. But my own impression is that, over time, with the growth of equality for women and, for that matter, a greater sense of the self-damage inflicted by drugs and alcohol, such rampantly excessive behaviour has certainly become less routine. Punk rock challenged attitudes at the end of the Seventies, openly expressing disgust at the indulgences of rock stardom, and nailing its flag to the notion that sexism was uncool. I think the increasing professionalism of road crews and management has found better and safer ways to supervise encounters with fans. In my own travels backstage, I don’t see hordes of young girls hanging around. But it is also true that journalists are no longer granted the sort of unfettered access that was once routine. The writer Nick Kent, who travelled extensively with the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin in the Seventies has observed that his own attitude to women was corrupted by his proximity to life backstage. “Seeing those conniving, loveless little girls really affected my concept of femininity for a while,” he has admitted.

Excess all areas: Motley Crue in the Eighties

Motley Crew

Many rock stars own feelings about what they did in the past appears to have changed. In 1975, Steven Tyler of American rock group Aerosmith persuaded the mother of 16-year-old groupie Julia Holcomb to sign over guardianship of her daughter, so that they could travel interstate without fear of arrest. Now a committed Christian, Holcomb has publicly forgiven Tyler and acknowledges her role in instigating it, but is still upset about the way he refers to their affair. In Aerosmith’s 1997 autobiography, he described her (under a false name) as “a skinny young mall-chick who had more legs than a bucket of chicken". They were together for three years, during which the then drug-addled singer says, “(She) lost her childhood. I lost my mind.”

Zeppelin are very tight-lipped about their behaviour in the Seventies. I have interviewed all of the surviving band members at different times, and find them erudite, civilised and agreeable, but all are circumspect and, I think it’s fair to say, uncomfortable with aspects of the rock culture they once lorded over. Bassist John Paul Jones claims he always removed himself from the action to hang out with gentle hippies on the road. Singer Robert Plant tends to be quite rueful: “There was excess, there were adventures, there was all that stuff … So it was something to behold. But it went very quickly, now I think. And there was a lot of sobering stuff as well.” Jimmy Page has offered the defence that he spent most of those tours in his hotel room drinking tea. “There’s a lot of water under the bridge for everyone who survived that era. End of story.”

The truth is, as a rock fan, I hope that is the end of the story. I hope today’s rock and rollers behave better towards women than their predecessors. It can sometimes be hard to remember now but they were different times, with different attitudes. I think society gave a lot of dubious moral latitude to groups of young men playing loud music, some young women behaved with scant respect for their own dignity, and things got crazy for a while, as if there could be no consequences to their actions. But Glitter’s conviction reminds us that there can be very serious consequences, especially if people are treated in ways that leave lingering damage in their lives. No one is shedding any tears for Gary Glitter and his callous abuse of young girls​.

But is ​it easier ​to purge him from our cultural memories because his records were just novelty hits of no lasting value? ​How would we feel if we were presented with every detail of rock star life ​of a Beatle, or a Stone, or a Zeppelin ​in their heyday, someone whose records transformed lives and remain much loved parts of popular culture? Would we ​have more complicated feelings? I suspect a lot of old rockers will be quietly hoping these question are never put to the test.