Gary Glitter has told a jury that he could not have abused schoolgirls backstage because of an elaborate wig-cleaning ritual he always performed alone in his hotel room to hide his baldness.

The singer, real name Paul Gadd, is accused of a string of historical child sexual offences on three young girls, two of whom said they were sexually assaulted by him after concerts.

Giving evidence, Gadd, 70, told Southwark crown court how his energetic performances during the height of “Glittermania” would leave him “screaming with perspiration,” in need of a shower and some wig maintenance. The singer, who went bald at 18, would don a dressing gown, cover his wig with towels and go to his hotel room, he said.

“All I wanted to do was have a shower, get the wig off, clean it … and put it back on” ready for the evening ahead.

The procedure of removing his wig, cleaning it with carbon tetrachloride, drying it and securing it back on his head “never took less than an hour and a quarter” he said.

“I never had anybody after a performance because I had to deal with this,” he said. “It was a major chore in my life. You had to deal with it.”

“Nobody ever saw me without my hair”.

“In those days, rock and roll singers had hair.”

Two women claim they were abused by Gadd in the 1970s and 1980s after concerts. One alleges that when she was 12 the star plied her with champagne backstage in order to have sex with her. She said she went to his room at the Holiday Inn in Leicester in 1977.

Sallie Bennett-Jenkins, QC, for the defence, asked Gadd about her. He said he did not remember her.

Bennett-Jenkins asked: “Is there any truth in the allegations that this girl had sex with you in the night and her mother came in in the morning?”

“Absolutely not,” Gadd said.

He was asked about another fan, who alleged she visited him backstage after he performed at a club called Baileys in Watford and was asked to sit on his lap. The woman claims that she was just 13 when the star slid his hand up her skirt and forcefully kissed her.

“Did you ever do that to a young girl in Watford?” asked Bennett-Jenkins.

“No I did not,” he said.

Gadd was asked about his whereabouts during Easter 1975 and 1976, around the time his first alleged victim said he attempted to rape her as she lay sleeping after a party at a mansion, where there was a “sweet room”.

He said he spent Easter 1975 with a relative but could not be sure as he had been touring in 1976. Bennett-Jenkins asked: “Did you sexually assault (the alleged victim)?”

Her client replied: “No, I did not.”

Gadd, who had a series of chart-topping hits in the 1970s, told the court he was “married to Mistress Rock and Roll”, was always on tour and rarely saw his two children, after a short-lived marriage in the 1960s.

He told the court how, at the height of his fame, he could not walk down the street without being recognised, would be greeted by thousands of screaming fans at airports and besieged by hundreds outside his flat in Kensington, London.

The court heard how he shared an office with David Bowie and would copy his style of smoking French cigarettes. One of the women who alleges he sexually assaulted her told the court she and Gadd had smoked together when she spent the night at his hotel room in Leicester. But Glitter told the jury that he only briefly smoked but quit after having nodules removed from his larynx in 1974, before the alleged attack.

He said that despite going bankrupt, he stayed in Britain unlike his good friend Rod Stewart, who left to go to the United States.

Jurors heard how Gadd’s fortunes changed after disco and punk rock became popular and ticket sales dropped off. His manager dreamt up a promotional “Farewell Tour” in 1976, on the false premise that he had given up touring as he had fallen in love with the hairdresser for the band.

By 1977, Gadd was declared bankrupt, which he put down to Harold Wilson’s government, the mismanagement of his business affairs and paying tax at 87 pence in the pound.

Gadd said he had many relationships with “adult women”, including a Cuban, Yudenia Sosa Martinez, the mother of his second son, Gary Jnr.

The musician said that during the 1990s he was taking drugs heavily, due to tiredness on tour.

“I was working more concerts than I should have been because I was trying to pay the back off. It just ... it goes into a spiral, once you get into uppers and downers and all that stuff you get kind of addicted to it and I guess that is what happened to me, plus I was missing Yudenia terribly,” he said.

The trial continues