Former Glam rock star Gary Glitter faces spending the remainder of his life in prison after being found guilty of a series of child sex offences on three young girls, aged between 8 and 13.

A jury of five men and seven women took two days to convict the flamboyant star, now 70, of six offences, committed in the 1970’s and 1980’s, including the attempted rape of an eight-year-old child and having unlawful sex with a 12-year-old girl, a charge which carries a life sentence.

Judge Alistair McCreath told him: “In light of verdicts, I am remanding him in custody.”

Glitter was cleared of two counts of indecent assault and one count of administering a drug or other thing in order to facilitate sexual intercourse. He will be sentenced on 27 February.

The father of three, whose real name is Paul Gadd, raised his eyebrows and looked shocked when the verdicts were read out. He blew kisses to the public gallery, full of reporters, as he was led down to the cells.

His predatory sexual offences against his child victims, including fans that helped propel him to stardom, went unpunished for 40 years because of the “immunity of fame”, the prosecution said during the trial.

However, that vanished after the singer’s fall from grace when he was found to have a “voracious” appetite for child abuse images. He was convicted in 1999 of building up a library of 4,000 such images, some involving children as young as two.

Later, in 2012, he was arrested as part of the Operation Yewtree investigation, set up in the wake of the Jimmy Savile child abuse scandal. It was during this period that his three victims, now grown women, found the courage to tell the police about the abuse, although they had previously confided in others.

Each broke down in tears as they described how the star they had idolised as children had abused them. One, a nurse in her 40s, told the jury how the singer, by then a household name who had sold 18m records, had picked her up in his Rolls-Royce and driven her to a mansion, with a special “sweets room”, a swimming pool and a pony, when she was eight.

She was excited, there was a party. But that night in 1975, as she lay sleeping with a friend, the star crept into their bed and attempted to rape her, an attack which left her broken and ashamed, she said. She summoned the courage to go to the police when she heard he had been arrested for child abuse images. She wanted them to know that it wasn’t just images, she said.

Gadd committed the six offences during the height of “Glittermania” – when thousands of his screaming fans would gather at airports and he could not walk down the street without being recognised.

He would shower his fans with red roses at his concerts, he told the court, and give them jackets, T-shirts and other gifts.

But his fame allowed him to target the vulnerable among them and subject them to sexual assaults which he told one was “our secret”.

Detective Chief Inspector Michael Orchard from the Sexual Offences, Exploitation and Child Abuse Command, said that Gadd was the first person arrested under Operation Yewtree. He said: “Paul Gadd has shown himself to be a habitual sexual predator, who took advantage of the star status afforded to him by targeting young girls who trusted him and were in awe of his fame. His lack of remorse and defence that the victims were lying make his crimes all the more indefensible.”

Peter Watt, the director of national services at NSPCC, said the singer was devious and manipulative throughout his trial, and he praised the bravery of his victims for coming forward. Watt said: “Thankfully the jury has seen through all the fake tears, and his attempts to paint his victims as liars, gold diggers or opportunistic fantasists.”

Chief crown prosecutor and head of CPS London, Baljit Ubhey, said: “Paul Gadd abused his access to young fans in order to give himself the opportunities to assault and abuse his victims. Crimes such as these have repercussions for victims that can last for a lifetime.”

She said she hoped the trial would encourage other victims of sexual abuse to come forward.

Mark Castle, of Victim Support, said: “It takes tremendous strength to report sexual abuse and to then go on and testify in court, especially in such a high-profile case as this one and others linked to Operation Yewtree. This guilty verdict is testament to his victims’ courage.”

Police said on Thursday that they had received information during the course of the trial about potential other attacks and were looking into them.

Glitter, who is hard of hearing and was aided throughout the trial by two lip speaking interpreters, arrived at court each day in his trademark dark glasses and a variety of different coloured tailored jackets, patterned silk scarf and a felt or cossack hat.

The jury at Southwark crown court also heard the accounts of two teenage fans who met Gadd backstage. One, who is now 50, was 12 when he sexually assaulted her in his Holiday Inn hotel room after a 1977 concert at a Leicester nightclub, Baileys. Another former fan, now 48, was sexually assaulted backstage after a concert in another club in Watford, Hertfordshire.

Gadd, who went bald at 18, said he did not remember them and could not have carried out the assaults they described because his elaborate post-performance wig-maintenance routine meant he never had fans backstage.

In relation to his first victim, he denied being at the mansion during the dates she said he crept into her bed, or that it had a “sweets room”.

But the jury of seven women and five men did not believe him, choosing instead to believe the vivid and detailed testimony of his victims.

“I felt like something was going to break and it was me,” said the nurse, before describing how as an eight-year-old, she scrubbed and scrubbed at herself after the attempted rape, drawing blood.

In legal argument before the trial, Gadd’s lawyers argued the case should be thrown out because it was impossible for jurors not to have missed years of coverage of an “extremely adverse nature” by the media, including a mockumentary which depicted his execution. They also argued his arrest under Operation Yewtree unfairly linked him to the late entertainer Savile and led to an “unconscious backdrop of vitriol” towards her client. The judge disagreed.

There were dramatic scenes during the trial as Gadd sobbed uncontrollably, claiming the thousands of child abuse images found on his computer were not representative of his sexual history, but were due to the pressures of a collapsing career, financial trouble, drug problems and missing his girlfriend.

He was remorseful, his defence said, and the offences did not make him guilty of offences 20 years earlier.

But the prosecution described his testimony as “Oscar-worthy” and said it amounted to a “melodramatic denial” of his sexual proclivities.

The jury did not hear about Gadd’s 2006 conviction and three-year prison sentence for molesting two girls aged 11 and 12, because it occurred in a Vietnam court, outside the jurisdiction of the UK.

Four years earlier, he had been expelled from neighbouring Cambodia, where he went after leaving the UK on completion of half of a four-month sentence for child abuse images. Also ruled inadmissible was the account of a former chambermaid from the Holiday Inn in Leicester, who came forward during his trial with evidence to say she had discovered him in the bath with a girl she believed, but couldn’t be sure, was about 12.

His first victim, who first went to police in 1998, has faced a long wait for justice. A court decided that it was not at that time possible to try him for on charges related to her allegations.

Gadd was also tried in 1999 over the alleged sexual assault of a fourth teenage fan, a former girlfriend who said they began a sexual relationship when she was 14. He was acquitted after a controversial summing up, which drew complaints from children’s groups, in which the judge told the jury: “Some 14-year-olds look like sophisticated young ladies, a nightmare for many publicans.”

The case prompted a landmark ruling censuring newspaper payments to witnesses by the then Press Complaints Commission after it emerged that the woman, Allison Brown, who waived her right to anonymity, had been paid £10,000 by the News of The World and stood to gain another £25,000 if the trial resulted in a conviction.

Another woman has since alleged, in an ITV documentary, that she saw Gadd having sex with a girl under the age of 14 in Jimmy Savile’s dressing room.

• This article was amended on 6 February 2015 because Watford is in Hertfordshire, not Herefordshire as an earlier version said.

