Gary Glitter - The Ultimate, 25 Years Of Hits

We Say...

Review by Ira Robbins

It's easy to conclude that Gary Glitter's Peter Pan fantasies, which have since rotted into an horror show of notorious allegations of international pederasty, played a subliminal role in his '70s glam-rock fame. Like Chuck Berry, who also earned an unsavory sexual reputation later in life, Glitter was a lot older than the audience his songs addressed. But while "I'm the Leader of the Gang" and "Doing Alright With the Boys" cast the Englishman as a populist peer to teens, such lascivious numbers as "Do You Want to Touch Me?" and "I Dare You to Lay [One] on Me" and "Rock Hard Men" touched different nerves: either playful acknowledgments of pubescent desires or creepy exhibitionist thrills for the man on the mic.

At the time, of course, it all seemed completely harmless, as Glitter presented himself as a campy vaudevillian, an entertainer who played an outsized cartoon in a hit parade of colorful characters, limned by lyrics of shallow but blunt perfection. Actually, Glitter's success wasn't really about words — the best singles he made with writer-producer Mike Leander barely have any, favoring instead the sound of stadium-sized soccer chants set to Spectorized strata of beat, relegating guitars to an incidental role. "Rock and Roll Part Two," a stripped-down remix of "Rock and Roll Part One," is their ultimate creation, a revolutionary inversion of rock's instrumental mix and the essential (undoubtedly inadvertent) prototype for disco and house: a nearly pure – but completely infectious — beat. "Rock On," "Do You Want to Touch Me" and "I Didn't Know I Loved You ('Til I Saw You Rock and Roll)" all do a little less with more, but stand as stirring crowd-rousers laden with atmosphere and raucous youth.

Perhaps the taint of who the man born Paul Gadd is claimed to be will forever spoil their pleasure, but as artifacts of a brilliant creation, the best of the 32 tracks on this two-disc compilation stand as peerless pop achievements.