The singer says he is embracing spirituality and forgiveness. But he can still be rather rude, discovers Decca Aitkenhead.
“People,” says Boy George, “think I’m going to be a f***ing nightmare.” The younger George often was. At the height of his fame and addictions, he was forever huffing off stage and feuding with celebrities. After getting clean 15 years ago he went full Buddhist, big on chanting, meditation and mantras. But early in the pandemic he had an epiphany.
“I suddenly realised that I’d been spouting spiritual wisdom for a long time and I wasn’t actually doing any of it myself. It dawned on me, you actually ain’t doing any of this. You’re talking about it — but you’re full of shit.”
To remedy this he spent a lot of lockdown, in London, gazing at trees and marvelling at the beauty of birdsong. A friend introduced him to a spiritual philosophy called the Three Principles, the gist of which is that what feels like reality is really just our thoughts. It has, he says, “transformed the way I live”.
In a café only that morning, wearing no make-up, the singer had thought a woman was staring and talking about him and had felt uncomfortable. “And then I suddenly realised, what the f*** do I know? This is what’s brilliant about the Three Principles. The wisdom of your own stupidity falls on your hand, like a butterfly landing, and you pause and go, actually, how ridiculous to think that somebody that I’ve never met, who probably doesn’t even f***ing know who I am, even cares.”
He rolls his eyes and laughs at his own ego. “Talk about self-obsessed.”
So I’m a little surprised when he says he snapped at his bass player the other day. “Listen,” he told him, “you’re working with Muhammad Ali right now, so you don’t need to criticise what I do, because I don’t actually care what you think.” Whenever his manager starts talking to him about music, “I want to kill him. It just makes me rage, because actually I know that no one knows what they’re talking about.” That would include our photographer, apparently, with whom he tells me he had a bust-up before I arrived.
“I had to stop her and say, ‘If you control this to the extent you’re controlling me, you’re not going to get a good photo. I know you’re a Libra and you’ve got your own way of doing things, but you’re bossing me around and you need to stop it.’ " He assures me he has learnt to assert himself “lovingly” and that “I love Librans” — which comes as a surprise to a rather shaken shoot assistant when I check in with him later. The photographer had only asked him to turn his head, he says.
The thing about me is I am a total contradiction.
George is a Gemini. He says so more than a dozen times in his new memoir, Karma, and again within minutes of our meeting. “I’m Gemini with a Cancer moon, so I’m a control freak, but I am getting better.” He has already googled my sign (“I want to know everyone’s star signs and I judge them accordingly”) and by a stroke of luck gets on well with Aquarian women. My own doubt that the day we were born has anything to do with anything feels best kept to myself, but I can very definitely agree when he reflects on his Gemini self: “The thing about me is I am a total contradiction.”
It is 40 years since Culture Club’s hit single Karma Chameleon made the singer a household name. Born George O’Dowd, one of three sons and a daughter to Irish Catholic working-class parents in south London, he grew up amid violence and poverty, homophobia and racism, and ran wild. His father was a builder and a boxer, but George’s inspiration was David Bowie. An avant-garde face on the punk and New Romantic club scene by 15, George drifted from squat to squat on the dole, scrapping and stealing and living for the night, when he would go out dressed up in bin bags and safety pins and scandalise commuters on the morning train home.
After singing briefly for the new-wave band Bow Wow Wow, at 19 he and three friends from the club scene — Roy Hay (guitar), Mikey Craig (bass) and Jon Moss (drums) — formed Culture Club. He renamed himself Boy George because people, confused by his long hair and make-up, kept asking if he was a girl, and by 21 was singing their first No 1, Do You Really Want to Hurt Me, on Top of the Pops. When Karma Chameleon then went to No 1 in 16 countries the following year, George was a global superstar.
Seven straight top 10 singles in the UK, six in the US and more than 50 million worldwide record sales made Culture Club one of the biggest pop bands of the 1980s. George sang on Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas?, dazzled primetime chat-show hosts across America, charmed Princess Diana, slagged off Madonna and was arrested for cannabis possession.
It was chaos. His affair with Jon Moss, the band’s drummer, was volatile and violent, and when it ended no amount of awards and hits and Concorde flights could stop George unravelling into cocaine and heroin addiction. Too drug-addled to perform at Live Aid in 1985, the following summer he was booed and bottled off stage at a concert in Clapham, south London, stumbling and slurring. “Junkie George Has 8 Weeks To Live” screamed one tabloid headline.
Following the band’s ill-tempered split in 1986 he entered treatment, and after modest success as a solo artist became a popular club DJ in the 1990s. Culture Club reunited briefly in 1998 before unravelling again into bitter animosity. George wrote and starred in a musical, Taboo, which was a huge West End hit in 2002 and won an Olivier — but when its transfer to Broadway bombed he relapsed back into drugs and was arrested in Manhattan in 2006 for cocaine possession. That charge was later dropped, but he was sentenced to community service after pleading guilty to falsely reporting a burglary. The following year he was arrested in London for false imprisonment and assault, and sentenced to 15 months in 2009. His victim, Audun Carlsen, was a 28-year-old model and escort he says he’d hired for a photoshoot, not sex.
Released on electronic tag after four months, he resumed his solo career, and in 2016 replaced Sir Tom Jones as a mentor on BBC1′s The Voice before joining the panel of the Australian version, winning him a new generation of fans. His appearance on I’m a Celebrity won him more last year, when he called fellow jungle contestant Matt Hancock “slippery” and “slimy” — although his feelings about the former health secretary turned into something more nuanced than that.
Along the way he launched a fashion line and a record label, and in the past two years alone has released 57 tracks, “maybe more”. He calls them “some of my best work”, and his voice has got only better with age.
The latest autobiography is his third, and he is back touring with the original Culture Club line-up (minus Moss) all over the world. For a boy whose headmaster once told him he would “never make of anything of yourself”, it has been a remarkable life.
Effortlessly charismatic, he is quick-witted, energetic and great fun, in his full baroque stage regalia and make-up. He talks in looping digressive swirls, occasionally breaking into song, and is quick to laugh at himself. At 62 he has finally, as he puts it, “learnt how to enjoy being Boy George”.
He doesn’t, however, appear to like answering questions. When I ask when he was last in love, for example, he retorts, “Mind your own business,” and I have to remind him that questions about his life are literally my business.
George is a world expert at gnomic deflection, deploying humour or ambiguity or contradictory opinions as camouflage. For someone who has always craved attention, to seem so reluctant to be really seen is, I suggest, quite the paradox. He laughs and concedes, “Well, I don’t like fuss; it’s unnecessary. But if you don’t fuss over me I’m, like, ‘Everyone’s ignoring me,’ and I get annoyed.” He adds: “And currently, no, I’m not in a relationship.”
He is still dealing with the toxic fallout from his relationship with Moss, which he once called “the great unresolved romance of the century”. Their affair provided the lyrical inspiration for many of Culture Club’s hits, but the couple’s fights were ugly and, after decades of feuding and making friends again, Moss left the band during a reunion tour in 2018 following a shouting match with George. Moss sued for loss of income, alleging he had been “expelled” from the group, and settled in March for £1.75 million (about NZ$3.6m) from his three former bandmates, leaving George reportedly facing bankruptcy.
“That’s not true,” George says quickly. “But I think Jon wanted to bankrupt me. I think he wanted to hurt me.”
How much money does George have? “Absolutely f*** all.” The financial implications of the settlement are “bad”. How bad can be inferred perhaps from the fact he is playing Captain Hook in panto across the country this Christmas.
He put his enormous gothic mansion on Hampstead Heath up for sale in September 2022 for £17m. The property listing electrified the press, agog at its triple-height ceilings, mezzanine cinema room and sculpted silver torso propped up on a chair with two erect penises for armrests. George is now living in a rental about six miles away in Hackney and leasing his Hampstead house to tenants.
“I can get more money renting it than living in it. But it’s been really fun being out of there. I love it.” I’m not sure if this enthusiasm is for my benefit or for Moss’s; I think he certainly wouldn’t want the drummer to imagine he was hurting.
“A couple of years ago I burnt all the letters he wrote me,” he volunteers. “It wasn’t like they were like Lady Chatterley’s Lover’s letters. They were just filth. They were about sex. They weren’t romantic, they weren’t loving. It wasn’t anything I’m going to read when I’m 70 and go, ‘Oh, so sweet.’ And I also wanted to get rid of the temptation to print them just to be bitchy. I thought, actually, I don’t want to be bitchy. I don’t need to be bitchy.”
Then again, he wanted to call his new book Bitchy But Soulful, which is both the name of a song he wrote about Moss and how he describes himself. “But for some reason [the publishers] wanted to call it Karma. It’s so obvious. Yawn.”
I thought, actually, I don’t want to be bitchy. I don’t need to be bitchy.
His choice would have made a good title, for George’s battle against his own impulse to bitch is a running theme throughout the book. “I can’t say enough times that I don’t hate Jon,” he writes, adding, “Perhaps it’s a case of, ‘Say it enough times and convince yourself,’ " which strikes me as insightful.
A quick temper and an acid tongue were survival mechanisms for George as a child. Beaten up and taunted for being a “poof”, he had to be fearlessly combative, so the struggle to be less so seems practically heroic — if not yet entirely won. When I quote Sun Tzu’s advice to anyone in conflict to “build your enemy a golden bridge to retreat across”, he looks puzzled. “But what if you can’t be bothered to build them a golden bridge? It’s a bit time-wasting. I mean, are they that insecure they need a bridge?”
He puts his younger “spiky, unfriendly” public image down to his own insecurity. “Wanting to manage the whole moment. Wanting to look a certain way.” He was so insecure he used to hide in hotel bathrooms when room service knocked on the door — but when I mention this he exclaims, “Oh, I still do that now!” I ask why. “Back in the day it was driven by something totally different. ‘People can’t see me looking like this, blah, blah, blah.’ Now it’s sort of similar, but it’s not coming from such a place of self-loathing. It’s, like, ‘I don’t look good in a white towel.’ "
This makes his decision to submit to the indignities of I’m a Celebrity last year all the more surprising. “Well, I didn’t surrender control entirely,” he says, grinning mischievously. Contestants have to hand in their phones on arrival in Australia before going into pre-camp isolation. George handed in a decoy handset and kept his, so he could google his camp-mates’ star signs.
He still can’t quite believe he signed up for the show — though the reported fee of £500,000 helps explain it. “With Jon Moss and his money-sucking lawsuit breathing down my neck,” he writes in Karma, “I felt like it was a gig I couldn’t turn down.” He thinks the producers tried to cast him as “the diva”, but he endured disgusting bush-tucker trials with startling grit. (“I wasn’t just doing it for the gays,” he writes, “but I was doing it for the gays.”)
In what role does he think they cast Hancock? “Oh, they wanted him to win so badly. It would have been TV gold. And it felt towards the end like he was going to win. But I didn’t really care about that.”
On the show he talked about his anger at ministers breaking lockdown rules while he was unable to visit his mother in hospital during the pandemic, so I ask if Hancock’s excuse — “I fell in love” — washed with him. “Yeah, as a romantic, it does. Don’t you think? If you fall in love with someone, the rules just go out the window.” I put his forgiveness down to a contrarian instinct, but he says that isn’t it. “As someone who has been forgiven for a lot of things myself, I just didn’t necessarily want to be dragging this poor guy over the coals for the rest of humanity. There’s got to be a point where you go, enough.”
What did he like about Hancock? “Well, he’s a Libra. And unfortunately Geminis and Libras get on. Even,” he chuckles, “me and the photographer, in the end.” He and Hancock have been planning to go for dinner together, though they haven’t got around to it yet. “But he texted me when my mum passed away, and I appreciated that very much.”
For many years he was estranged from his father, who died in 2004, but the death of his beloved mother, Dinah, in March was shattering. He had always thought, “I’m going to f***ing go insane when this happens. I’m going to f***ing want to smash the world to pieces. But actually, when it came to it, it was quite a beautiful, magical kind of moment.” She died with her family at her bedside, her hand in George’s. “I was grateful that I was there and I was grateful that I didn’t make it about myself. That was the thing.”
I had always assumed he has never talked publicly about the 2007 crime that sent him to prison in large part because he wanted to protect his mother. And indeed its mention in Karma, I suspect on advice of the publisher’s lawyers or his PR team, is cursory. “At this point,” the final draft reads, “what does it really matter what happened? [Carlsen’s] version of events and mine have never matched up. What he told police is now in the ether and it was printed in newspapers and is regarded as fact.”
Under arrest, George had spoken to the police without a lawyer present. “Which makes me a big moron,” he admits. He told them he had been high on cocaine, and in a state of paranoia believed Carlsen had stolen an image from his computer. He told them they had argued and he had handcuffed the man’s wrist to a metal wall fixture beside his bed, but denied hitting him. In court the victim accused George of beating him with a chain as he fled. George pleaded not guilty to false imprisonment and assault but declined to give evidence, and was convicted of both charges.
“It was stupid, aggressive and regrettable,” he writes, “but it was less than 30 seconds before he pulled himself free and ran out of the flat and down Ravey Street in his white vest and underwear.” He also corrects the popular misapprehension that he had handcuffed him to a radiator. “There were no radiators” in his flat.
I ask him about the incident. “It was over in 30 seconds,” he sighs, before breaking into a cryptic song he wrote about his victim, who still pops up in the media, most recently to call George a “monster”. “But you hung around for 17 years making me a criminal, when I’m just made of minerals,” he sings. “It was quick, it was fast, it was nowhere near what he said it was, but what I put in the book is a full stop on it.”
Of prison, he writes, “When people asked if it changed me, I got very defensive. I didn’t realise the changes until I was free.” I ask him to elaborate on what those changes were — and get another masterclass in garrulous deflection.
“What I would say about that experience is who you are outside is who you’ll be inside. So if people like you outside, they will like you inside. And it was quite mind-blowing, because they put on a documentary about me when I was in there and I thought, this is going to be the worst thing ever. And it was the opposite. Everybody was so nice, going, ‘Oh my God, I never knew you met this or that person. What were they like?’ It was so funny. So the whole conversation changed and suddenly people were, like, ‘You’re amazing.’ And it was hilarious because, yes, there is that sense of, like, ‘You’re an idiot. Why did you do what you did?’ And of course I understand that. I remember being very clear about it when I went in there — this is a turning point in my life.”
The life-defining change had been made nine months before he was sentenced, when a friend took him to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. He has been clean ever since and still goes to meetings sometimes, but does now drink occasionally, though not to the point of getting drunk. Is that a bit risky?
“I’m not an addict, right? I’m not in active addiction. The possibility is there; it’s in the ether. But I don’t walk around thinking of myself as someone who’s trying to avoid everything. One of the great things about the Three Principles is you don’t have to stay stuck in a narrative about yourself. And I’ve got so many people around me that are in recovery. They will quote the book at me if I start getting out of control.”
After decades of dramas and ding-dongs, only one wound is too raw to heal. For almost 40 years he was great friends with the flamboyant socialite Philip Sallon, who helped launch the teenage George onto the 1970s club scene. The pair fell out a decade ago, “but I’ll always love him”.
Sallon always wrote to anyone he knew when they lost a loved one, even if he didn’t like them. “He always said it was the right thing to do.” He did not write to George when his mother died.
“It was like a nail through my soul,” he says softly. “And therein lies the contradiction of Boy George. I can love and hate you at the same time.”
- Karma by Boy George (Bonnier)
Written by: Decca Aitkenhead
© The Times of London