If you’ve attended a baseball, football, hockey, or basketball game in the last three decades, you’ve undoubtedly heard what is known simply as “the ‘Hey’ song.” That song and its throbbing, driving melody (“Da-da-da-da-da, HEY!”) is as much a part of the American sports scene as JumboTrons and mascots. But I recently learned something that has me having second thoughts about jamming to this song. It turns out that this sports anthem was written by a British singer who is a convicted child pornographer and child molester. The fact it’s still being played today is a severe indictment of the inadequate coverage of international news on this side of the pond.
The anthem we know as “the ‘Hey’ song” is actually “Rock and Roll, Part 2,” written in 1972 by British glam rocker Gary Glitter. It went as high as #7 on the Billboard Hot 100 that year. However, it really came into prominence in 1974. That year, the Kalamazoo Wings of the high-minor International Hockey League started playing the song when the team took the ice before games. When the Wings’ marketing director, Kevin O’Brien, moved to Denver to take the same post with the NHL’s Colorado Rockies, he took “Part 2” with him. The Rockies moved to New Jersey as the Devils in 1982, and Denver’s other pro teams, the Broncos and Nuggets, picked up the tune, and within a few years it had become an anthem across North America’s sporting world.
What most people in this country don’t know, however, is that Glitter has been exposed as a monster. It started in 1997, when a technician at a British computer repair shop found some 4,000 images of child porn on Glitter’s computer. Some of the images depicted kids as young as two years old. Glitter–whose real name is Paul Gadd–pleaded guilty in 1999 and was sentenced to four months in prison. He was released in 2000 after serving two months, but his reputation was ruined, and he hightailed it out of the country on his yacht.
After spending time in Spain and Cuba, he eventually settled in Cambodia. However, he was kicked out of that country in late 2002 amid allegations that he molested several young boys. He then traveled to Vietnam, but in 2005 he was arrested for molesting two girls aged 10 and 11, respectively. He was convicted in 2006 and sentenced to three years in prison. He was released in 2008 and immediately deported; he only agreed to go back to the UK after 19 countries refused to let him enter.
Four years later, Glitter was one of the targets of a wide-ranging investigation into sexual misconduct that originally centered around late BBC personality Jimmy Savile. In 2014, he was arrested on charges that he molested two girls between 1975 and 1980. He was convicted in 2015 and sentenced to 16 years in prison; he will not be released until he is 84 years old. Glitter is so despised in the UK now that when The Guardian profiled a Glitter fan club on Facebook last year, a number of its members only agreed to be interviewed under pseudonyms.
This story generated as much coverage overseas as the Jerry Sandusky scandal did here in the States. But apart from sporadic coverage in 2006, it generated barely a ripple in this country. To its credit, the NFL asked (read: told) its teams not to play Glitter’s version of the song in 2006, and reinforced this in 2012. It does allow a cover version played by Tube Tops, though. But aside from that, no other major sporting organization has taken action. That’s why I was somewhat unnerved to hear that song when I went to see my Charlotte Hornets earlier this week.
Considering what we know about the extent of Sandusky’s 40-year rampage of child molestation, I find it particularly incomprehensible that the NCAA hasn’t acted to ban this as an anthem at the collegiate level. I first learned about the extent of Glitter’s debauchery a few weeks before heading to my alma mater, the University of North Carolina, for a basketball game. I used to love joining in when the band played “Part 2,” especially when the “Hey” was replaced with a spell-out of “U-N-C!” Not anymore.
I would like to think that if more people knew about Glitter’s debauchery, this song would have long since been banned from the sporting world. After all, there is something fundamentally wrong with a convicted child molester earning $250,000 in royalties from this song being played at NHL games alone. It’s past time for the powers that be in sports to show some leadership and ban “Part 2”–permanently.
