Scandal shines a light on pop's dark corners

AT A RECORDING STUDIO in London a few years ago to interview a band, the studio engineer regaled us with tales of its previous client, a household name. “He’d turn up at 2pm, faff around and then disappear for an hour before coming back to start work,” said the engineer. The star took the break, we later learned, because a local school would be finishing, and he enjoyed “driving past and looking at the young girls in their uniforms”.

Before the simmering Jimmy Savile scandal become a crisis last month, the music industry had for years been largely hiding from the world the sordid secret that it was a perfect cover for paedophiles. All that has changed, and ever more allegations are being made. The former pop star Gary Glitter, a convicted child sex offender, was arrested last weekend on suspicion of other sexual offences, as part of the investigation into Savile and others, and on Thursday police questioned the comedian Freddie Starr about an allegation that he molested a schoolgirl in Savile’s dressing room in 1974. British newspapers have reported that at least two more celebrities will be questioned by police.

In an unrelated case, the BBC is reconsidering naming part of its new London HQ after the late DJ John Peel after allegations that he impregnated a 15-year-old in 1969, when he was 30. Jane Nevin alleges she became pregnant and had a “traumatic abortion” after unprotected sex with him. (Several year earlier, when he lived in the US, Peel had married a 15-year-old who had lied about her age.) In 1989 he told one newspaper: “Girls used to queue up outside; oral sex they were particularly keen on. I remember one of my regular customers, as it were, turned out to be 13, but she looked older.”

Here, press reports claim an Irish show- business personality has been accused of raping a 16-year-old in the 1970s; allegedly, she later gave birth to his child. The woman is said to have reported this to the Garda a few weeks ago, before the Savile story broke.

The extent of entertainers’ alleged sexual abuse of underage girls and boys in the UK in the 1970s (and presumably before and after) was underlined this week by the publicist Max Clifford, who said he has been contacted by dozens of stars from the time who are “frightened to death” of being implicated in the investigation. “All kinds of things went on, and I do mean young girls throwing themselves at stars in their dressing rooms, at concert halls, at gigs, whatever,” said Clifford. “They never asked for anybody’s birth certificate. We are talking about a lot of people that were huge names in the 60s and 70s and a lot of them barely remember what they did last week . . . For them to try and recount what happened in a dressing room in 1965 or 1968 or 1972, genuinely, they are frightened to death. No one had heard the word ‘paedophile’ in the 60s and 70s.”

Clifford draws a distinction between “randy young pop stars” and “the real predators, such as Savile and Glitter”; leaving aside the fact that the overwhelming majority of people in the entertainment industry are repulsed by the information emerging about Savile’s activities, the pop world is made possible in part by teenage girls who idolise their heroes. Fame, power, money, alcohol and drugs – magnets to impressionable youngsters – swill around an industry that often lacks the normal strictures about appropriate behaviour.

This is a world where a song about a man distressed to find out that his lover is under age – Gary Puckett’s Young Girl – was a number-one hit; where The Rolling Stones could sing, “I don’t care that you’re 15 years old, I don’t want to see no ID,” in Stray Cat Blues; where The Beatles opened their account with the line “She was just 17, you know what I mean”; where Jerry Lee Lewis married a 14-year-old girl; where Chuck Berry was sentenced to two years in prison for transporting a 14-year-old girl across US state lines; where Bill Wyman, the Stones’ former bass player, began seeing his future (and now divorced) wife when she was 14 and he was nearly 50.

At any pop show young teenagers, most of them unsupervised, wait at the stage door. When a limousine ride and a penthouse hotel suite are on offer, you can see the attraction, particularly, as the Savile story shows, if the young fan is from a vulnerable background.

What’s instructive about the coverage of these stories is how often people say “things were different then”, in the 1960s and 1970s. But for a middle-aged man to have sexual designs on a 12-, 13- or 14-year-old girl is as wrong in 2012 as it was in 1982, 1972 or 1962.

In a chilling echo of what happened to young Irish people who reported clerical abuse, the British teenagers who reported Savile’s sex crimes simply weren’t believed.

Celebrity culture has even more of a hold today. This year the Los Angeles Times reported the number of child-sexual-abuse cases in recent years that have involved people in the US entertainment industry. “Hollywood provides predators potent bait to attract young victims,” it said, also quoting a paediatrician: “Wanting fame is huge and it is a huge inducement. The people that are in Hollywood who want to do this to kids are armed with one of the very best instruments to get kids in.”

But the story that perhaps says it all is from the late 1980s. Channel 4, unbelievably now, broadcast Mini-Pops, in which prepubescent kids dressed as pop stars to sing the day’s hits. The girls wore make-up and dressed like Madonna as they gyrated to the music. Unsurprisingly, the Channel 4 switchboard lit up afterwards. But for every call questioning Mini-Pops’ morality there were three from parents anxious to get their children on the show.

Savile: His own words

Jimmy Savile’s autobiography, Love Is an Uphill Thing, from 1976, contains some graphic admissions about his behaviour. At one point he writes about running a disco in Leeds. “A high-ranking lady police officer came in one night and showed me a picture of an attractive girl who had run away from a remand home. ‘Ah,’ says I all serious, ‘if she comes in I’ll bring her back tomorrow but I’ll keep her all night first as my reward’.” The runaway girl did arrive, he writes – and stayed the night with him before he handed her over to the police the next morning. “The officeress was dissuaded from bringing charges against me by her colleagues – for it was well known that were I to go, I would probably take half the station with me.”

The book, a bestseller, contains another story about Savile’s being caught in a caravan with a group of naked girls. “The heat of the albeit innocent night had caused the girls to shed the majority of their day clothes. In some cases all. We all resembled some great human octopus. Again the knock. One of the girls rose from the human pile like Venus. Peering out of the curtain she became rigid with fright. ‘It’s my mother and father,’ she hissed. There was a silent-movie pandemonium. Escape was uppermost in my mind but that was impossible.”