Boy George at home: 50-up but when will he stop pouting?
❚ ON TUESDAY JUNE 14 George O’Dowd celebrates his 50th birthday with a few select friends at the Vauxhall nightspot, The Lightbox. Yesterday an interview in the Daily Mail reunited him with Spencer Bright, the co-writer of his 1995 autobiography Take It Like A Man, which proved more cringingly honest and fuller of nasty settlings of scores than any popstar in their right mind should attempt. For that reason it was — and remains — a compulsively readable milestone in the endurance course that is Boy George’s life.
In recent years, interviews have been marred by self-serving psychobabble and improbable mysticism, but yesterday’s talk with Spencer Bright finds George momentarily on a more even keel. Finally, finally, Spencer elicits an astonishing confession from him: “Now, I can actually say that I do have lots of regrets.”
“Junkie George”: Gabor Scott’s © 1987 photograph
George had always been among the more highly visible of London’s style-setting Blitz Kids. By the mid-80s he had become one of the biggest popstars of the decade and his “blue-eyed reggae” band Culture Club was among Britain’s half-dozen New Romantic supergroups dominating world pop charts during the second British invasion of the US. Culture Club’s first two singles Do You Really Want to Hurt Me? and Karma Chameleon reached No 1 in several countries during 1982–83, and the band won a Grammy Award in 1984.
After four albums, songwriting had made George a millionaire several times over but he had also fallen prey to heavy drugs and at the age of 25 his band dumped him. He began squandering his life away, as outlined in Ex-jailbird George here at Shapersofthe80s, and fully documented at Wikipedia. A much sanitised account of his teen years was broadcast last year as the TV drama Worried About The Boy, after which ex-Blitz Kids gave their verdicts at Shapersofthe80s.
➢ IN YESTERDAY’S DAILY MAIL, SPENCER BRIGHT WRITES:
“ At one point it didn’t seem as if Boy George would make it much past his 25th birthday. Yet here he is, about to celebrate his 50th next Tuesday, and the transformation from the boy popstar to man seems astonishing. No one could be more pleased than me. George and I have a long history, from the days when, as a newspaper reporter, I used to follow him on the club and music scenes. In the early 1990s I helped him write his autobiography Take It Like A Man. We’ve been through a lot together. The book took four-and-a-half years, with much shouting and screaming, mostly from him at me, and moments where he’d crack me up so much I could hardly stand up. ”
GEORGE IS DESCRIBED AS A SOUGHT-AFTER DJ, PRODUCER, SONGWRITER AND PERFORMER:
“ People know me recently for lots of drama. For being arrested and going to prison. I’ve got my work cut out to remind them what I actually do. ”
The Mail interview airs various optimistic hopes which, for somebody with George’s track record, are a hostage to fortune. After claiming to have kicked many of his vices, we’re told he gave up smoking cigarettes six weeks ago — but ask any smoker how many times that gets said in a lifetime! “There are hopes of soon working with top producer Mark Ronson on a record with a reunited Culture Club, and an arena world tour next year.” But no mention of how his criminal records will bar entry into a significant number of countries.
GEORGE CONCLUDES:
“ I’ve never been a bad person and always had quite good morals. I cherish the moderate life now: I don’t want drama or complication. ”
➢ Read the full Daily Mail interview with Boy George dated June 9
➢ George performs with other 80s stars in the 2011 Here And Now summer tour from June 17. The single Sunshine Into My Life by Funkysober featuring Sharlene Hector, written and produced by Boy George, is out now on his own label, VG Records
It began with their first single The Sound of the Crowd [see video below] which peaked at No 12. Rushent was a pioneer of the remix, who decided to improve on the League’s original version of Dare by creating 1982’s 
Many also regard Rushent as the best new-wave producer of the late 70s through his work with The Stranglers, Britain’s longest-surviving rock band from that post-punk era (he produced their first three albums which would become both commercial and classic, Rattus Norvegicus, No More Heroes and Black and White), as well as Gen X, Buzzcocks, XTC, 999 and Hazel O’Connor. Other acts he engineered earlier in the 70s were T.Rex, David Essex, Fleetwood Mac, Yes and Shirley Bassey.
Hugh Cornwell (left), vocalist and guitarist with The Stranglers: “ It is with great sadness that I hear of Martin Rushent’s passing. He was a vibrant and gifted individual who was able to extract the essence of what The Stranglers began with, and translate it into something that could be played on radios across the UK. It was obviously no one-off success, as he was later to show with The Human League. I remember him fondly. ”
“Suede was about the intense passion of being loved as a band and constructing a universe for people to dive into and that was all part of the iconography of the sleeves and the worlds I sang about and possibly the over-use of lots of the imagery was all part of it. Maybe it was all part of my need to belong somewhere. We established a Suede landscape, and I always loved those bands that did that. Maybe it’s a very much over-used reference point but I did grow up loving The Smiths records and loving what they did and the kind of tribalism they created.
➢➢ Shapers of the 80s ➣➣ 