the times | Saturday November 14 2020 1GR saturday review 5voice, but I had never really thought about
it before I met Jon and Mikey and Roy.”
As it turned out, George had a really
good voice, one that sounds more like a
black American female soul singer than
that of an Irish Catholic male from south-
east London. And it was his secret
relationship with Moss, who is suing the
remainder of the band after he alleged that
he was asked to take a rest on a 2018 tour,
which gave that voice its emotional heft.
George describes Moss as, on first
impression, coming across as posh, sarcas-
tic and straight, turning up to rehearsals in
a Golf convertible with brightly colouredjeans and an earring in one ear. “I certainly
didn’t realise he fancied me,” he says. “He
had a girlfriend at the time. But then he
went off to LA and sent me a postcard, and
I remember going into the shop where his
girlfriend worked and telling her, and she
said, ‘That’s funny, he didn’t send me one.’
I was such a bitch. Not long after that I
would go to clubs with Jon in full drag,
holding hands, and he was much wilder
than I was. I was the boring one who
wanted the picket-fence relationship
because I was so used to dealing with the
violence of my parents’ relationship and
wanted stability. He was happy to keep medifficult, but not like I used to be’
fame world. But life is about growing into
who you really are.”
What, then, has he learnt about
himself? “I’m a terrible cynic, but I’m
ridiculously optimistic. I’m a really bad
judge of character and I’m forever
surprised by my ability to pick a wrong’un.
I’m quite forgiving, and I’ve been forgiven
for a lot of things. I can be difficult, but not
like I used to be.” He adds, with that signa-
ture cackle: “And I’ve never been able to
pull off a day look. I’m either Boy George
or I’m like a tramp.”
George is single. He has spent much of
the past few months on his own, making
new music, getting therapy, arguing with
people on Twitter and generally despair-
ing at the literal nature of modern life.
“Today, young people are fighting to have
labels when we fought to not have them,”
he says. “It’s the pressure of the brand.
Someone goes on Instagram as a make-up
artist, but that’s not enough because the
next person is a transgender make-upartist with mental health issues. You would
think having access to everything would
make people more experimental, when in
fact it has narrowed things down and
simplified them. Kids are no longer walk-
ing down the road with Bowie albums
under their arms. They’re walking down
the road with surgical lips.”
Forty years on, Culture Club seem
remarkably non-literal by comparison.
A pop-soul-reggae band made up of a gay
male singer who we kids thought was
a woman, a black British man on bass, a
blond guitarist from Essex and a straight
drummer from a wealthy Jewish family
who was actually in a relationship with
the singer, they were the last word in
cultural cross-fertilisation. Hence the
name. And perhaps a lack of communica-
tion — of nothing ever really being talked
about and therefore infusing the whole
thing with an element of ambiguity — was
key to their success.
“We have never dealt with the integral
stuff: the personality issues, the old argu-
ments, the grudges,” George says. “Jon has
been suing us for the last few months, so
I facetimed him during the lockdown
and said, ‘Do you know what, mate?
I’m almost 60. Why am I fighting
with you?’ But we never discussed
anything and now we’re not talk-
ing at all. We never had anyone
to sit us down and explain things
to us when we were kids. But
even if we had, would we have
listened? Sometimes friends ask
me to talk to their kids about
fame and so on, and I always tell
them that their kids won’t listen to
me. They’d just think I’m a silly old
c***.”
Nothing, I suggest, can prepare you for
fame.
“Nothing,” he corrects, “can prepare you
for life.”
Culture Club: Rainbow in the Dark
streams from the Royal Albert Hall,
London SW7, on November 22,
royalalberthall.com, returns onlyriding the new wave
Clockwise from top left,
Boy George, Roy Hay,
Mikey Craig and Jon
Moss of Culture Club in
New York in 1983. Below:
Paul Weller and Boy
George in 1984KOH HASEBE/SHINKO MUSIC/GETTY IMAGES; DEAN STOCKINGS; MICHAEL PUTLAND/GETTY IMAGES; DENIZE ALAIN/CORBIS KIPA/SYGMA VIA GETTY IMAGES‘I’m a bad judge of
character. I’m always
surprised by how I
can pick a wrong’un’
as his bit on the side.” When fame hit,
management suggested that it wouldn’t be
good business for the relationship to be
made public. “Jon became more and more
cagey and it all became a horrible, horrible
secret,” George says. “If I grabbed his hand
he would pull away, and the more famous
we got the more arguments there were.
Roy Hay once said, ‘I didn’t sign up to be in
a gay soap opera.’ That was actually quite
a good one for Roy.”
As to what fame did to his own persona-
lity, George says: “The evidence is there to
see.” It all fell apart for the usual reasons —
sliding sales, relationship troubles, drugs.
Culture Club disbanded in 1986, after
which George, formerly so clean-cut
he didn’t even drink and famously claimed
to have preferred a cup of tea to sex,
sought treatment for heroin
addiction. His substance issues
reached a nadir in 2008 with
a court case followed by a spell
in jail in 2009 for false
imprisonment of a male escort.
How do you come back from
something like that?
“Time is the only way to get
through it,” he says. “Life throws
these things at you, but no matter
what situation you are in, you can
find something to laugh about. You
look back and think, ‘I can’t believe that
happened to me.’ But I came out the other
end of it and was dramatically altered as a
person. My whole perspective changed. I
realised that I wanted to pursue happiness
because happiness is a choice. A lot of
people cling to an idea they had about
themselves, or an idea someone else had
about them, which is especially true in the