After narrowly escaping death by disco when a glitter ball fell on him during rehearsal, Boy George tells Libby Brooks why Boyzone’s Stephen Gately isn’t his type of queer
But for those benign few inches, it would have been a pop demise to rival Mama Cass and her chicken sandwich. The fates, however, have clearly deemed a less obvious end for Boy George. When the 1,8m-high mirror ball crashes from the rafters during a soundcheck at Bournemouth International Centre, it glances off his shoulder before juddering to a halt stage left. There is a long moment of held breath as he bends double in wordless agony.
The mirror ball was heavy. It hurt. If there was ever a moment for starry self- indulgence, it is now. But expectation and George O’Dowd have never been on speaking terms. Not because he exists to confound, but because this is how he is today, at this moment, take him or leave him, love him or loathe him, remember him.
It is more than 15 years since Culture Club blazed and guttered across the pop stratosphere. If Margaret Thatcher was king of the 1980s, then Boy George was surely queen. The liminal boy-girl, with a tender heart face and the voice of a buggered angel, brought the urban transgression of clubland to the provincial playground. In the ascendant, the immediate, mainstream ubiquity of hits like Do You Really Want to Hurt Me? and Karma Chameleon brought a new language of sexual ambiguity to a generation of suburban youngsters.
But fame is not a gentle mistress. Consumed by his destructive love affair with drummer Jon Moss, George fretted away the height of his global success in self-imposed purdah, staying in to plait his wigs while the other band members were out partying. By the release of the band’s third album late in 1984, his descent into drug addiction had begun, and the band foundered. At the end of 1986, following a conviction for possession, he finally kicked heroin. But the lights had gone out in Culture Club.
More than a decade on, the band are touring again, offering a nostalgia-heavy Club Sandwich with special guests Belinda Carlisle, Bananarama and Heaven 17. At 38, George himself now enjoys a thriving second career as a club DJ, as well as penning a column for the Express newspaper.
And he continues to obviate definition. “I don’t think of it as reinvention,” he says. “I see it as getting on with your life. Reinvention is a press term. It’s more of a survival technique for me.”
His move into DJ-ing was as accidental, he insists, as the re-formation of Culture Club. He is similarly ill at ease with the selective accusation of nostalgia-driven appeal. “George Michael and Madonna were part of the 1980s too, but no one calls them nostalgic. I don’t know why it always applies to me.” Perhaps, he suggests, it is the legacy of a spectacular demise. “I’m seen as someone who fucked up,” he says lightly.
In person, Boy George is not accessibly likeable, in the way that some impress their charm upon you like a complimentary cocktail. But nor is his conversation an arm’s lengths performance, teasing at unknowable depths. When he tells you that he is a nice person, or that he can be a bitch, you believe him. Because he betrays no reason why he should be lying to you. His is the honesty of one very much in control.
MTV has ripped the heart and soul out of pop music, he says. “When I was growing up, David Bowie coming to Lewisham Odeon was an event for six months before and six months after. It consumed your every waking hour. When MTV came along it made it all generic, like any other product.”
Youth in general suffers from a loss of ambiguity, he says. He rails against the sterile demography of today’s manufactured teeny bands. “If you look at pop now, it’s like seeing your mates on TV. Kids want their pop stars to look like them.”
Boy George, by contrast, has never looked like anyone else. “Sometimes I know I look ridiculous, but the more ridiculous I feel the more confident I am; the more outrageous the outfit the less I care whether people laugh at me.”
>From the ribbons and ringlets of early Culture Club to the tungsten-lit diva of The Crying Game, George has always flouted the conventions of drag. His stage persona is a creature, not a category. “As a kid I didn’t want to be ordinary,” he says. “To a degree it’s about sexuality, but then lots of gay men do everything they can to appear normal.” The nexus between performer and person offers rich territory for amateur analysts. But with Boy George, there is no shock at seeing him clear-eyed and make-up free. He has no illusion about his illusion; thus, being with him in one state is as truthful as the other.
“Tony Parsons once wrote that George Michael is a dignified homosexual and Boy George is a disgusting caricature. I am a bit draggy and I am a bit blokey, which confuses people because I don’t fit any of the classic homosexual stereotypes.”
The comparison with Michael is illuminating, and one that he feels deeply, judging by the number of times he mentions his name in conversation. Boy George had been living as an out gay man for seven years by the time Culture Club rose to fame; George Michael was forced into a public declaration of his sexuality 20 months ago after his arrest for lewd conduct in a Los Angeles public toilet.
“I can understand why someone like George Michael would stay in the closet because it’s bad for business. It limits people’s view of you. But it’s difficult for me because I spent the last 15 years normalising my sexuality so that now it’s a part of who I am, it almost goes before me.”
The Los Angeles incident simply confirmed a received truth about gay sexuality, he argues, “that even if you’re in a relationship you’re out there looking for other partners. They don’t think of us as being intimate, they think of us as being sexual.
“You’re brought up in a culture that tells you that heterosexuals are better than you, that straight relationships are happier and more fruitful. Gay people are denied proper emotional development. Often the first time you discover who you are is through sex, which is why so many gay people have problems with intimacy and commitment.”
It is telling that he feels more confident in straight clubs than in gay ones. “I get to be special, to be an individual.” He finds the body fascism and uniformity of the gay scene as alienating as straight society’s refusal to acknowledge the complexity of homosexual interaction. “I feel like I’m in a sexual no man’s land,” he says. “I’m too poofy for the poofs and too scary for the straights.”
The 1980s was a time of sexual progression, he argues, despite the prevailing political wind. Now there is a price to be paid for assimilation, and it is the end of transgression. “I was reading an interview with [Boyzone’s] Stephen Gately, and he kept using the word `normal’.” When George met him recently, he felt no kinship. “He wasn’t my type of queer. I was like an alien to him.”
Tolerance is a chimera, he says. “People ask you an interesting question, but they don’t want an interesting answer. People tend to stick within safe parameters: be queer but don’t be too queer. I think that’s where dressing up becomes a hindrance: people can focus on that and it keeps it cute and unthreatening.”
Through ostracism or assimilation, society is practised in negotiating with its deviants. We filtered Boy George through a comforting lens of oddity and eccentricity in a way that we could not have done had George Michael whipped off his chunky knits and confessed who I’m Your Man was really written for.
But whatever diluted truth we took, and still choose to take, from Boy George, his words are spirit neat as they ever were. “People see me as a talking hat,” he says ruefully. He is so much more than that and, most importantly, he knows it.