/ 22 October 2010

Calmer chameleon

Calmer Chameleon

In a 20 02 BBC poll Boy George was voted the United Kingdom’s 46th favourite Briton of all time, finishing a respectable six places above Florence Nightingale, and just five places below Charles Dickens.

Sixteen years after conquering the heroin addiction that derailed his stratospheric early success with Culture Club, everyone’s favourite sharp-tongued pop star was well on his way to becoming a national treasure.

But the cracks began to appear in the summer of 20 06, when he was convicted of falsely reporting a burglary after cocaine was found in his New York apartment and ordered to do five days’ community service with the Manhattan sanitation department.

Then, on April 28 20 07, came the aberration that would ultimately lead to the release next week of his new single, Pentonville Blues — a candidly euphoric reggae anthem recorded with the dance-music duo Glide & Swerve and inspired by his time inside.

In January last year the man born George Alan O’Dowd in June 19 61 was sentenced to 15 months in jail for falsely imprisoning male escort Auden Carlsen by handcuffing him to the wall of his east London flat, then assaulting him with a metal chain. George’s barrister blamed his client’s offence on a “descent into self-destructive behaviour at the hands of drugs”. George himself offered no defence.

Now, 18 months after his release from jail, I’m sitting with George in his gothic north London mansion. Books are stacked on the floor, the rooms are filled with mannequins, and George himself, in a rhinestone-studded T-shirt, appears to have lost little of his characteristic style.

So what really happened that April night, I ask him. And, more importantly, why? “If you want to find out, Google it,” he says with uncharacteristic restraint.

“I’m through with confessionals.”

The incident occurred towards the end of a period of protracted hedonism, during which he had been taking drugs pretty much every day. His epiphany came when a fellow addict dragged him along to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. “I got sober on March 2 20 08,” he says, “and if I hadn’t been sober for most of the year before I went inside, I think [prison] would have been a very different experience.”

George’s life inside began with a rousing rendition of Karma Chameleon from fellow inmates. “I get that everywhere,” he says, unmoved. “At carpet markets in Morocco, by the pyramids in Egypt. I was expecting it, much like the environment, which is like the classic Victorian prisons you see in the movies — safety nets, balconies and everything painted drab green and yellow.”

Buoyed by “thousands” of supportive letters, George acclimatised remarkably quickly. “I spent a lot of time reading, everything from Wuthering Heights to Catch-22 and A Confederacy of Dunces, and listening to Bowie records. And I also took a job in the kitchens.”

Far from being petrified, he embraced the prison community — he’s planning to return to perform Pentonville Blues shortly. “You just get on with it,” he says. “You make friends. You go for coffee. You swap CDs. It’s like being at school. Except you can’t leave.”

George’s new-found sobriety and prevailing spirituality — he is devoted to Eckhart Tolle’s self-help bible, The Power of Now — appear to have curbed his notoriously toxic diatribes about fellow celebrities. (“All that money,” he said of Elton John in 20 05, “and he’s still got hair like a dinner lady.”)

“I used to slag people off left, right and centre,” he says, “but if I’m going to say something about someone else now, I try to think, ‘Is it useful? Will it help them?’ It’s been liberating to stop the viper-in-the-basket act.”

A vase of lilies on the coffee table seems to reinforce this shift. “Elton John sent them yesterday. We made up a long time ago.” He also wrote to George Michael — his 19 80s peer and former sparring partner – when the former Wham! star was sent to Pentonville Prison.

George’s return to music is heralded not just by his own new single, but also by his collaboration with pop’s nom du jour, Mark Ronson. The crowd-pleasing Somebody to Love Me, for which George provides a heartbreaking, rasping vocal, has rightly been trumpeted as the stand-out track on Ronson’s new album, Record Collection.

“I’ve been performing with him whenever I can,” says George, “and it’s great. I get to come on at the end for one song and take all the glory with none of the stress.”

Next up for George is a tour of the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany with none other than Cliff Richard and his old friend, Grace Jones. Then there’s his solo album, Ordinary Alien, due out in the next few months.

But his primary ambition, post-Pentonville, is simple — to enjoy the moment.

“I’ve spent a lot of my life not really being present,” he says. “I don’t want to be a figure of disappointment. I don’t want people to think, ‘Oh, poor fucking tragic George’, because I’m not.” —