In a sleazy resort town in southern Vietnam, a portly, bald westerner with a white goatee beard is riding a 100cc Honda along the seafront. Behind him sits a pencil-thin, pony-tailed Vietnamese teenager young enough to be his granddaughter. The westerner is wearing a woolly hat and a pair of cut-off denim shorts that his stomach hangs over. He could be any one of the washed-out, middle-aged expatriates who head to Vung Tau in search of young girls and cheap, anonymous living - but look closer and you may recognise a profile that was once world famous.
With its strips of girlie bars and massage parlours offering the services of dark-skinned teenagers from poor villages in the Mekong Delta, Vung Tau is a town where oil workers heading for rigs far out in the South China Sea have their last drunken night before leaving shore and their first drunken night back on dry land. To others, it is an adopted home and a refuge - a desolate and last resort for expatriates with broken marriages, disappointing careers and damaged lives to leave behind; a place where men come to forget and to be forgotten.
As he wheels his motorbike onto the pavement outside a rented villa, the 61-year-old is barely recognisable as one of the biggest pop stars of the 1970s, a man whose records sold millions and whose bouffant hair, outrageous silver suits and theatrically raised eyebrows stared out from the bedroom walls of countless teenagers.
Gary Glitter was a giant of my childhood. As an eight-year-old, I would watch in awe as he strutted the stage on British chart show Top Of The Pops in platform heels and wing-collared Lurex suits, belting out such hits as Do You Wanna Touch Me and Hello! Hello! I'm Back Again. He was a star whose camp fame survived the decades. More than 30 years after his heyday, his anthem Rock And Roll (Part Two) is played at American football matches and was used as a soundtrack for George W. Bush's election rallies. His nostalgia concert tours were sell-outs deep into the 90s.
It all ended in 1999, when Glitter - real name Paul Francis Gadd - was arrested for possessing a huge stash of child pornography on his computer and jailed for four months. When he was freed, rather than seek redemption at home, he went into exile first in Cuba then in Cambodia. Royalties from his songs continued to roll in, funding the increasingly sinister lifestyle of a wealthy fugitive who openly paid for the company of young Asian girls.
When Cambodia kicked him out, refusing to let him return to the house he bought in Phnom Penh, Glitter began criss-crossing the porous border with Vietnam, slowly establishing the communist country as his new bolt-hole. For three years, he evaded the journalists trying to track him down - myself among them. He would cross the border, stay in US$10-a-night guesthouses for weeks at a time and, hungry for company, occasionally venture out for drinking sessions in Ho Chi Minh City or the border town of Chau Doc. By the time excited backpackers who found themselves sitting next to a 70s pop icon got around to telephoning newspapers with their story, the trail had always gone cold.