Well, look. Gary Glitter has done many extremely bad things, of that there is little doubt. You wouldn’t ask him to babysit. You wouldn’t hire him as an after-school tutor. You wouldn’t ask him to dress up as Santa at your local shopping centre and have kiddies on his lap. On that we are all, I imagine, agreed.
However, if he earns royalties from a song that silly advertising creatives didn’t realise is a leeeetle bit insensitive to use in a TV commercial, that’s not his fault - it’s theirs.
Some of those lyrics go:
Do you wanna touch? - Yeah! Do you wanna touch? - Yeah! Do you wanna touch me there? Yeah!
Hands up who can’t help thinking of Brass Eye at this point?

The song from which the lyrics came, “Do You Wanna Touch Me”, was a hit in 1973 and the Joan Jett version of the track has recently been used in the States to soundtrack a commercial for Hewlett Packard’s TouchSmart TV. As the songwriter, Glitter collects any royalties on the song.
It’s pretty unbelievable that, in the time from the idea being brainstormed, through production, to eventually being screened, there wasn’t someone who flagged this up as a bit of a boo-boo.
But it makes for good headlines.
Anyway, if you want an icky little pre-Halloween chill, here’s some footage of the original being performed…

[video: HisWestiness]
[source]

Possibly related:

1. Introducing Gary Go and his amusingly-written MySpace page

2. Is your Video Life more interesting than Idiot Toys’ Gary Cutlack? Then you could win £500 worth of vouchers

3. My Chemical Toilet chats to Gary Numan at The Mighty Boosh Festival

4. Gary Numan, The Charlatans added to The Mighty Boosh festival bill

5. Lethal Bizzle’s treatment at Download, the Jay-Z Glastonbury furore: are British festival audiences guilty of racism?

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Posted by Stuart Waterman on Wednesday October 29th, 2008 at 10:55 am