4 saturday review 1GR Saturday November 14 2020 | the times

freaks and there it began,” George says of

his life as a walking creation. “Somehow

all these iconic characters knew of each

other. You had Steve Strange [later of

Visage] in Wales; and Pete Burns [of Dead

or Alive] in Liverpool; and Martin, who

was Birmingham’s premier freak and a

huge influence on me. We’d go out to-

gether and people would say, ‘Ooh, Mar-

tin, you’ve got competition!’ But he adopt-

ed an alien persona, while I just looked like

a girl because I wanted a boyfriend and

boys like girls. Blokes would say, ‘Are you a

bird?’ I’d reply, ‘No I’m not, but I can be.’ ”

Hearing of a new club called the Blitz,

soon to become the beating heart of the

burgeoning New Romantic movement,

George returned to London and moved

into a squat in Warren Street alongside the

milliner Stephen Jones, the singer Marilyn

and the future transvestite potter Grayson

Perry. “And I was the last freak standing

because everyone was becoming a fashion

designer or going off to college. At the time

I had a brief love affair with Kirk Brandon

of the post-punk band Theatre of Hate,

and I would go to their rehearsals, where

there would be comments like, ‘You’ve got

a great look, you should be in a band.’ It’s

really strange. My dad told me I had a good

Y

ou would think, after the
best part of 40 years
together, that the four
members of Culture
Club would know every-
thing there is to know
about each other, but it
seems not. The band who took the freakier
aspects of club culture and put them on
Top of the Pops, who captured an emerging
open-mindedness at the beginning of the
1980s and made a household name of Boy
George as one of the original gender-fluid
pop stars, came together at Erin Pizzey’s
house in Hammersmith, west London.
Pizzey was famous for setting up the first
refuge for battered wives and was also a
friend of my parents. I remember being
fascinated by this unconventional, kaftan-
clad figure. Not least because Pizzey’s
daughter Cleo was only 15 when she had a
son by a 17-year-old called Mikey Craig,
later to become the bassist in Culture Club.
“I had no idea!” Boy George, 59, says of
the tender age of his bassist’s former girl-
friend. “But I do remember Erin Pizzey’s
house as the pivotal place for us in the early
days. Growing up in suburban southeast
London, I craved Erin’s bohemian world of
paper lanterns and candles everywhere,
with all these dreadlocked children
running about in bare feet. It was the world
I wanted to be in.”
George is talking from his rented flat in
central London, which he has been in for
the past two years while work is carried out
on his gothic mansion in Hampstead. He
bought the house next door to double the
living space. “I probably wouldn’t have
done that had I known what was around
the corner [the pandemic], but I’m not
a downsizing type of person. Bigger hats,
bigger houses,” he says.
Not that he needs to be. Culture Club
have sold more than 150 million records,

Boy George, who

turns 60 next year,

tells Will Hodgkinson

about his colourful

love life, enthusiastic

shopping sprees and

soured friendships

and since George, Craig, the guitarist Roy

Hay and, until 2018, the drummer Jon

Moss got back together in 2014 they have

filled arenas the world over. Such perfectly

upbeat yet lovelorn, reggae and soul-

tinged pop songs as Do You Really Want to

Hurt Me?, Karma Chameleon and Time

(Clock of the Heart) have become modern

staples. This month the band are sched-

uled to play at the Royal Albert Hall in

London and, although plans for a socially

distanced audience have been ruled out,

the live-stream will reach thousands.

The strange thing about all of this is that

Boy George, born George O’Dowd in 1961,

the second of six children in a working-

class Irish Catholic family, never wanted to

be famous. Just a star in his own universe.

“I was the pink sheep of the family,” he

says, with a trademark chuckle that

cannot help but lift the spirits. “I didn’t

know I was gay, but I knew I preferred the

company of girls, and collecting broken

jewellery and listening to pop music. My

dad was a builder and he would bring

back records from the houses he cleared

out — Irish show tunes, old jazz records

from the 1930s — so I always loved music,

but we weren’t encouraged to pursue

any particular thing. My brothers worked

for my father and it was assumed that I

would do the same, but I didn’t really

fancy that. I thought I could do something

in fashion, or perhaps be a make-up

artist... I certainly didn’t think I could

be a singer.”

Culture Club are a mainstream pop act,

but they were forged from an alternative

world. After being expelled from school for

fighting with the headmaster, George left

home at 16, in part because he had fallen in

love with his best friend and felt the need

to escape the area. He moved to Birming-

ham, where Martin Degville, a dress-

maker, later to be a member of the short-

lived Warholian pop experiment Sigue

Sigue Sputnik, was enjoying being the

city’s most outlandish figure.

“I moved into a disused dental studio in

Walsall with Martin and a bunch of other

‘I’ve never been able

to pull off a day look.

I’m either Boy George

or I look like a tramp’

cover story

‘I’m a cynic and an optimist. I can be

rad hatter Boy George

in the Eighties and, above

right, today. Above left:

with Culture Club