His silence ever welcome.

I’m stuck between two pieces on television and so, through sheer weight of logic, I’d like to write about Glenn Medeiros instead. Who could forget Glenn Medeiros? Certainly if you listened to popular music in the late 80’s there was a brief spell when you couldn’t possibly escape him. His calling card of course was the smash hit (in some non Communist countries) ‘Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love For You’, a soaring, soft focus, bucket filling piece of power-rom-pop which was adored by the kind of female that perhaps saw Glenn as the musical successor to the lazy, post prog version of Demis Roussos: someone capable of using hairspray, walking along a beach and removing knickers by remote control all at the same time. I don’t recall it being a big hit with the boys but if it was I was oblivious; in 1987 when it came out I was 11 years old but even by then I knew I wasn’t going to, sorry, gonna, waste my time listening to this kind of blurry toss. Still, I would have had to have lanced my ear drums with hot needles to allow myself a chance away from it because everywhere you turned it would follow you like a stray, lice riddled Portuguese dog, panting in the sun while you just want to enjoy the holiday that is the rest of your life without Glenn Medeiros in it.

After that Glenn went on to top the charts in the US with ‘She Ain’t Worth It’ and, as if it were possible to go any lower given that it was a duet with Bobby Brown, his career slid away to even more of a rien de rien – crooning out what must have been an exhausting Christmas album and then vanishing off to polish his teeth in another job: my research tells me he is now the head of a Catholic school in Hawaii. Go him. Anyway, why should I be bothering to tell you all about Glenn Medeiros? Well, partly because I needed to write something before my head exploded and partly because it seems Glenn has found time in his hectic Catholic school timetable to speak out about sexual favours in the music business. Quite what has inspired him to choose now is a mystery but it is clear that Glenn wants to make it very transparent that while almost everyone else in pop in the late 80’s was giving someone else a blowjob he was having none of it. Sir.

Glenn’s ‘revelation’ is that he and other artists were often asked for sex by music figures in exchange for a career, but while some of his peers saw this as a path to glory he managed to create a short, sickly name for himself without any such compromise. We have to take his word for it when he says “you saw it everywhere” and that “I had friends who specifically said, ‘I am going to be moving in with this person because this person is going to be helping me with my recording career.'”. And that’s the bit that piqued my interest, kind of. You see I thought all this favours for head starts in the entertainment business was just part of a long line of grotty hand jobs and three minute wonders, but all of a sudden we’re talking about people moving in with people and sharing a life together. And if that seems extreme you would at least expect a pretty big pay off on the other side – if a pervy, grim grope got someone a slot on Top Of The Pops then the act of co-habitation should have got them membership of U2.

Of course Glenn Medeiros is just the next name to come out and talk about the #MeToo movement and for that he should not be scorned. I’m pleased for him that he is proud he made his way without getting involved in all the awful shit some performers had to endure; many more of them female than male. According to him the music industry is heavily indebted to the Mafia and a few of his famous colleagues would have had all their perks paid for provided they sold drugs or essentially prostituted themselves out to the highest bidder. But Glenn didn’t do any of that – he flew straight and pure and since he’s not mentioned a single name in all of this he may as well have made the whole fucking thing up. After all what’s the point in revealing all about the industry if you reveal nothing whatsoever? If he can’t name the artists (which is a far more understandable kind of discretion) he could at least have named the male songwriter who claimed he was better than most just before he sidled up to Medeiros wearing nothing but an open robe.

Medeiros committed several crimes in his career and all of them related to his songs and the dreadful footage that came with him singing them. ‘Nothing Gonna Change My Love For You’ is one of those seismic events in music that rock you to your core and made you decide whether you are going to follow the path of good taste or just crouch down and listen to some more shit just like that. But at least Glenn’s crimes and criminal records didn’t hurt anyone back then, though he may have tortured men’s hair styling for a while, but it seems to me that by lifting the veil to reveal no-one behind it is a pretty unhelpful thing to do. It may be that he feels that as a head teacher he needs to exercise caution or it may be that as a Catholic he’s probably got something to hide or something else to feel guilty about. Whatever the reasons, after all these years of blissful silence Glenn Medeiros has seen fit to open his mouth once more, and just like back then it seems it would have been better for everyone all round if he’d just kept it shut and let silence prevail.

G B Hewitt. 18.02.2021