Boy George

0:00BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts.

0:13Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which leading artistic figures choose the most important influences and experiences, the people, places and works that inspired their own creative lives. I'm John Wilson and my guest in this episode is Boy George. He shot to pop stardom in 1982 as frontman with the band Culture Club and later as a solo artist. With his soulful vocals and flamboyant androgynous looks, George became a massive star around the world.

1:00Let somebody love you His personal struggles with drug addiction and a prison sentence in 2009 meant he was rarely far from the tabloid headlines, but in recent years he's been a judge on The Voice, survived the jungle in I'm a Celebrity, and has just published a new memoir. Boy George continues to record and perform as a prolific solo singer-songwriter.

1:27I'm going to be talking about this level to George O'Dowd, who is here in front of me. What do you think? No. Leo. Leo. I shouldn't have told you that. No, I would have found out. I would have Googled you. Is that a good thing? Are we going to get off? It's not a good or bad thing. It's just about Niamh Gemini. And some people just absolutely don't believe in it, but I'll tell you what, it's very...

1:51Boy George, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you. You were born George O'Dowd in 1961 and you grew up in South London in a working class Irish family. Tell me about family life. What was it like growing up? Well, I used to think that my family were the most insane family on the planet because we had like chickens. We had like dogs. You know, we were we stood out and we're like the hillbillies of the road. Did you feel different as a kid? I definitely felt like aware of my difference from really about the age of six or seven. You know, all my friends were girls. I was interested in clothes and broken jewellery.

2:28I wasn't interested in climbing trees or being a soldier or playing with cars. So, yeah, I knew from very early on that I was, like, different, but not necessarily why. That took a while to work out. When did you realise you were gay? When would you have put that label on it? Well, it's a funny one. I started to notice that I fancied boys when I was at secondary school, and I thought, ooh, this is weird. Is this allowed? and then worked it out really from sort of hearing comments and reading things. And I was a very nosy kid. So I would read my parents' newspapers. I knew about things like April Ashley, who was the first, you know, transgender woman in the UK.

3:08I knew about that. I'd read it. So I was fascinated with, you know, culture, life, exotica, anything that was like naughty. I was there reading it. And what were your interests at school? In fact, what was your education like? My education was probably sport by my behaviour. I wasn't a particularly compliant kid because at home, my dad ruled the roost. You know, what my dad said went. So the minute I left the house, no one was going to tell me what to do. So I had a bad attitude towards authority and I wore it proudly. And I was always getting in trouble at school because I guess, you know, a lot of teachers in the 70s didn't really like kids.

3:47You know, when your parents sent you to school to learn, they didn't really get involved in your education. They didn't have time. Cooking for six kids, washing clothes. There wasn't time to. It only really came to a head when you got your school report, which you tried to hide. You would always try to hide it, you know. But I did well in English, I did well in R, and I did well in RE of all the weirdest subjects. And you say your dad ruled the roost at home. He was a tough dad. He wasn't like... He was a builder, wasn't he? He was a builder. I mean, he wasn't one thing, but he was definitely prone to, you know, explosions.

4:21He was a gambler. So if he gambled and won, it was heaven. If he gambled and lost, it wasn't so heavenly. And my dad was also a brilliant man. He was handsome. He had beautiful handwriting. He could sing. He was super intelligent. I think he felt frustrated creatively as a man. And he didn't really know how to be a dad. He wasn't good at being a dad. You've talked about your mum a lot in the past and how you get a lot of your creativity from her. I know you lost your mum this year, didn't you? Yeah, March, yeah. My mum and dad were both Aquarians. They were both creative, very, very creative. And my mum was a great seamstress.

5:00She was just someone that could cook anything, make anything, tiling, wallpapering. My mum was just one of those people that nothing got in her way except my dad. My dad got in her way. you know if my mum put on a tight cardigan she was having an affair my mum was very stylish beautiful clothes I mean she made clothes for everyone but there were only very few occasions when my mum was really allowed to express who she was and as a kid I used to love seeing my mum in full makeup you know with her clothes you know these she used to make these dresses with daisies and have matching shoes and later on when I started to be a bit of an exhibitionist I think to start with my mum was against it and then she thought no he's doing what I can't do so she kind of fully supported me and became a sort of collaborator in a way.

5:47Were you an outgoing kid at what point in your childhood did you think you might want to perform for a living? Started really when I was a kid singing at the local people old people's home I used to go and do like roll out the barrel and old man's a dustman and things like that with my girlfriends and I was precocious but not like stage school precocious. I mean, I wanted to go to stage school, absolutely. And I used to rush home from school to watch, you know, Bonnie Langford and, you know, variety shows. I loved Opportunity Knocks. I wrote to Opportunity Knocks to try and get on it, you know.

6:20So you craved the limelight then? I wanted to be a singer. I wanted to sing. Music was the thing that saved me, really, from everything. Before you discovered your own music, what was being played in the house? Sinatra, Dean Martin all those sort of classic jazz singers Make it one for my babe And one more for the road And then my dad, because my dad was a builder he'd bring back records from houses that he cleared so he'd bring back piles of records I was really the only one that would plunder through those records and I found an album by Pearl Bailey called Applause I found some Dino Washington, I found some 1930s jazz, Cottonfield jazz, Bessie Smith, all those kind of characters.

7:07So I was listening to that stuff in my room. That's really where my love of jazz really started, listening to those records. Nobody knows you when you're down and out I mean when you're down and out If it had a good sleeve, oh, I'll play it. You know, Irish shows, tunes, rebel songs, they were played a lot in our house. And then the radio, you know, whatever was on the radio. In the 70s, radio was like, it was a madhouse, wasn't it? I mean, it was everything. You know, it was everything you could think of altogether. You mentioned rebel songs. Did you feel Irish growing up? Very. I mean, my name's O'Dowd.

7:46I grew up in the 70s with all the bombing and, you know, kids at school would be making comments and I used to get called O 'Loud. Georgiou Loud we grew up in a very Irish world you ever considered doing an album of Irish songs? I have a couple of songs that I've written about my mum actually that are very in that tradition I've got this song called Sweet Jesus which is about my mum about her passing I've got another song called If You Stay which I wrote for her 80th birthday which is about my mum leaving Ireland a lot of people left Ireland at that time and got married One for the dreamers, another for the road.

8:26All that held you back, all that made you go.

8:37On this programme, Boy George, I ask my guests to choose the most important influences and experiences that have inspired their own creativity. And your first choice is David Bowie. and seeing Ziggy Stardust in 1973, that landmark tour, when you were, well, you would have been 11 years old, I guess. I was just coming up to my 12th birthday. My birthday's in June, so... But that's incredibly young to have seen a Bowie show. Yeah, I was very lucky. My grandmother, Bridget, had had a row with my dad because we were watching Bowie on TV and my grandmother was like, why are you letting him watch? I won't say what she said.

9:13That big poof. and I think my dad just went up against her just to be, because they didn't get on, you know. He used to call her Mary Magdalene. And I just managed to get my dad to buy me a ticket. Louis Shemodian was the place we went to see every band and often we'd break in and get in for free. Someone would open the stage door or someone would let you run in. But I couldn't risk that with Bowie, not getting in. So I had a ticket. I had no bus fare to get there, no bus fare to get back. I bunked the bus to Lewisham and I walked back singing Bowie songs into an empty Coke can on the way home and I walked all the way home from Blackheath to my parents house top of Shooter's Hill which is about four miles.

9:54So you went to the gig totally by yourself? On my own. No friends were there? No, I met people there. Yeah. Older kids, like cooler fans, like totally Bowie'd out, anti-Bowie clones. It was amazing but yeah, I mean it's kind of mad but I was a bit of a loner when I was a kid. What do you remember? I still am a little bit now. I like my own company. Because my dad couldn't be on his own. You're a liar, I bet you can't be on your own either. I do. I'm quite happy with my own company sometimes. Well, that's good. That's the skill. No, because I think, you know, growing up in a house with so many kids and so tight for space, and then I think I always wanted a big house because, you know, I grew up in a two-up, two-down with an outside toilet.

10:34So take us back to that night at the Lewisham Odeon. What were your impressions of the gig itself? When you compare it to the gigs I saw after, there was nothing like it.

10:55The lighting, the clothing, subjects. As a kid it felt like he was just totally talking to me, it felt like he totally got me, you know. One of the big songs for me was the song called After All.

11:13Thoughts from the skies, from paradise. We're painting our faces and dressing in thoughts from the skies. I felt like he understood who I was and where I was and what I was going to be. That's on The Man Who Sold the World album, isn't it? That's on The Man Who Sold the World album, yeah. So was that your route into Bowie? Was that the first? The Man Who Sold the World was the album that my brother gave me when he moved on to Alice Keeper. He gave me Bowie. What got you into Bowie in the first place? What was it that appealed? That album particularly, but when Ziggy Starlots came out, you know, the lyrics on that, a cop knelt and kissed the feet of a priest and a queer threw up at the sight of that.

11:55Queer is saying that in a song, you know, something you got called in school. It wasn't something people sung about. So it was just everything about it. Smiling and waving and looking so fine Don't think you knew you were in the song And it was gone It's really interesting, though, that you say the initial appeal was the lyric, and you just quoted two lyrics there, and it was possibly a simplistic assumption on my part that I thought maybe it was the flamboyance, it was the image. I mean, how much did that play a part, and particularly when you saw him on that Ziggy tour? Well, I don't believe you can separate a man from what he does, what he wears, what he thinks, his politics, the way he eats, the way he walks into a room.

12:37I think it's all encompassing. So for me, it wouldn't be enough just to see somebody that was a great songwriter, but just look like they were bored or in track pants. I mean, I do like some understated artists. You know, I get that, but it's still a pose. Doing no outfit is still a statement. But I was always just drawn to, you know, exciting performers that I noticed. I went into the detail. I mean, in those days, you bought records and you read the sleeve and you read the lyrics and you wanted to know what they were about. What's he singing about? And were you aware of Bowie's sexuality or the stories about his sexuality at the time?

13:16Because it was never clear, was it, at the time? Well, I think all rock stars, Mick Jagger, you know, Bowie, Mark Bolan, they were all a bit blurring the sort of sexual boundaries. You know, because being rock and roll, you know, you didn't say what you were, did you? So did he give you more confidence about expressing your sexuality straight away then? and we're talking about early teens. Yeah, I mean, I definitely was much braver after that concert and, you know, got more brave as I met friends, you know, who lived near me. I'd bump into people at the train station. Charing Cross train station was this kind of, you know, mecca of like, oh, look, there's someone getting on the same train as me and they're wearing bondage trousers.

13:52They say never meet your heroes. You did end up knowing David Bowie, didn't you? Yeah, I met him, but he was definitely worth meeting. He didn't disappoint? No, not at all, not at all. He was charming. I mean, I was only ever in public scenes with him. I had dinner with him once in 2005 with Iman and my best friend Michael Cavadiers, who's an actor, and that was the first time I really sat with him, and it was just brilliant. David was really nice to Michael, that really involved him in the conversation. Did you tell Bowie what he meant to you? Oh, he knew, he knew.

14:25Your next choice for this programme is meeting the club promoter, Philip Salon, who was a real driving force behind the scene which was centred around the Blitz Club in Covent Garden in London in the late 1970s. When did you meet Philip? I and my girlfriend Laura, we met this flamboyant guy who was walking up the road, not Philip, someone else took us to Bangs, which was a notorious gay club on the Tottenham Court Road and in that club was Philip Salom, dancing on a podium in a black skirt with a sort of Egyptian colour lipstick and, you know, just looking absolutely fabulous. and we targeted him.

15:00I was like, that's my only best friend. And I made my girlfriend follow him into the toilets to borrow his black eyeliner. And that's how we became friends. And that was it. After that, he was a big part of my life. So this is what, 1976? About 76, yeah. Did you know what he did, what his reputation was? Or you just liked the look of him? No, I asked him if he was gay and he said, are you interested? And I was like, oh, no, I was terrified because I wasn't out then. I was still in the closet. I had a girlfriend. Oh, when you say girlfriend, I think you meant a friend. No, I had a girlfriend. My girlfriend was called Laura.

15:31Yeah, she was my girlfriend from school and she was gorgeous. So I'd gone out with her to this club and then, you know, sort of met Philip and then gradually sort of started to go to like gay clubs with Philip and Laura. She went out with a straight boy. It was better for her. What did Philip Salon offer you when you got to know him? Excitement. Philip was the most exciting, energetic person I'd ever come across. He was absolutely as gay as you could come. Lived with his parents, was just outrageous. He wasn't someone who pretended to be straight. He was out, you know, and it was kind of a new thing for me to meet somebody who was so bold.

16:11And Philip was like the Pied Piper, and he'd take us off to these parties or to clubs, and often they were parties we weren't invited to. They were things that he just heard about. He had a list of things that we had to go to. So he led you into this scene? He led us like gladiators around London. And, you know, there was one fantastic night with Philip I remember so vividly where we went to one club and we were going to another club and we got in a black taxi and he started changing in the back of the taxi. He was just 24-7 outrageous, Philip. You moved to London, I guess, around this time and you became part of the new romantic scene, you know, stalwart of the gay club scene in the late 1970s.

16:50And you were living after that in a succession of squats in central London. how important were these very creative communities to you to your own sense of creative development oh one thousand percent the most important thing I mean I remember meeting Grayson Perry you know when he was 19 or 20 and there's a funny conversation that he told me the story when I saw him recently he said that we were doing this performance in the front of a shop that we were doing this cabaret that we'd all written and he was putting on a pair of tights and Marilyn Marilyn looked at him and he goes, you've done that before.

17:22And he said he laughed his head off because obviously he hadn't even really started on his journey. But, you know, there were certain characters like Marilyn was the really good example of someone that was just so outrageous. You should just explain Marilyn. Marilyn was my best friend in the 70s. He used to go around dressed as Marilyn Monroe. And he made it into a lot of the sort of gossip columns and people write about him, you know, because he was, you know, there wasn't anyone like him, you know. And he loved being photographed. So he was a photographer. He was first in the queue to get photographed.

17:53And, you know, he was, like Philip, Marilyn was just very outspoken. And the squats that I'm talking about, particularly on Warren Street, not far from where we're sitting here in the BBC at the moment. I mean, people forget these are kind of semi-derelict houses often without plumbing and heating. When I told my mum and dad that I wanted to move into a squat, they were horrified and they did everything they could to try and talk me out of there. like there's no water, there's no lights, but there was freedom. There was absolute freedom. You know, I could do what I wanted. I could stay out as late as I liked, eat what I wanted.

18:27I was a little bit of a cheating squatter because I went home for Sunday dinner and I got my washing done by my mum and I often went and got food. So I was a little bit of a sort of fake squatter really, but I loved the freedom. You know, I loved being there. Two other key names on the scene at this time, Steve Strange and Rusty Egan, who were founders of the Blitz Club. Why was that place so important? The Blitz was really, like, after punk, there was a bunch of us that, punk got quite mainstream. You know, there was a lot of violence, a lot of spitting, and, you know, it was aggression. So those of us that were really into the music and the fashion sort of moved more towards the sort of, towards more the goth thing, you know, the Batcave and the goth look, which was more make-up, more frills.

19:10and then that sort of morphed into what was called the new romantic scene because we were sort of channeling the whole berlin kind of cabaret type feel and um it was quite period costume but with a sort of punk twist and um you know it was hard to find a club where you could go and not get attacked you know because if you went into a soul club but you were a little bit too outrageous someone would start on you if you went to a punk club I often got beer thrown at me in punk clubs because people were like you ain't a punk you're wearing loads of make-up Steve and Rusty were trying to create a space where you wouldn't get laughed at you wouldn't have to have arguments with casuals you weren't going to get attacked and it was a small scene which kind of grew and grew but at the beginning it was 200 people

20:02It's called Blitz a former furniture warehouse in Covent Garden, which is fast becoming the office workers' equivalent of the exclusive Studio 54 Club in New York. Only the outrageous are allowed in on Tuesday nights. Anyone considered normal is politely turned away at the door by a Covent Garden dress designer and pop musician called Steve Strange. That's what the club's about. It's about fashion. It's about looks. The men dress outrageous, the women dress outrageous, and they like to feel when they're inside that door they can feel safe and if they're not safe it's not their club around this time you were spotted by malcolm mclaren the manager of the sex pistols famously the founder of the shop sex with vivian westward on the king's road and he invited you to join a band bow wow wow

20:59who actually had a couple of hits around this time and from what I've read you played a couple of gigs and were then sacked Malcolm brought me into bow-wow-wow because of the way I looked and he thought it would threaten Annabella who's the lead singer at the time yeah she was 15 yeah he was young girl they brought in this guy that like a girl you know to threaten her position and I I think once he sort of got what he wanted out of me, threw me out of the band. But were they the first gigs you ever played? Yeah. I got pushed on stage at the Rainbow Theatre. Big theatre? Yeah, they did this big concert by a while with the fairground.

21:33It was a big event. And Malcolm decided to send me on at the end of the show instead of Annabella. And I sang a song by Peanuts Wilson called Cast Dine Arm, which is an old 50s song. And the audience were booing. They were like, why are you on? We want Annabella. But I got the taste. I was terrified, but once I was on there, I was like, oh, this is great, I want to do this again. And then I did another gig at the Polyseptic in Manchester, and that was when I was fired. Then in 1980, you formed Culture Club with Roy Hay, the guitarist and bassist Micah Craig, and drummer John Moss. What did you sound like initially when you first got together?

22:09What was the sort of musical DNA? If you listen to Kiss It To Be Clever, that's really... Your first album. The first album is very eclectic. Anything goes, really. It was like mixing things that shouldn't necessarily be together. Very upbeat as well, though. Very upbeat, very happy, very celebratory, you know.

22:36John and Mikey had both auditioned for Random in the Ants and didn't get the gig. So they knew that something was going on with men in makeup. They knew there was this frilly thing coming. They were like, something's happening. And John was like, I went to audition with Adam and the Ants. He's beautiful. He wears all this makeup and he reminds me a bit of you. So there was a feeling that pop music was going to get a bit dandy. You know, go back to the 70s, like Mark Bolan and Bowie. Did you come up with the name Culture Club? Eventually, we were called Can't Wait Club. We were called the Caravan Club.

23:08We were called all sorts of mad things. And then eventually we worked out that we were so diverse, Jamaican, Irish, Jewish. and then, you know, Roy being sort of a real Essex boy. So we were a real mix of cultures and types of people, you know. You released your debut album in October 1982 and then you had an amazingly successful hit single, Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?, which went to number one. It was a big hit all around the world. But, I mean, there was a moment when you're on top of the pops, which, I mean, I remember very clearly, everybody the next day was talking about this appearance.