Boy George: still pouting. Photograph by Magnus Hastings for The Observer
❚ SIX THINGS WE HAVE LEARNED from today’s 2,000-word interview in The Observer Magazine:
1 — George O’Dowd opens his mind the way others open their front door. Not that he answers everything – but he has an unusual emotional honesty.
2 — He recognises the strange dichotomy of drag. “You are wearing a mask, but on the other hand trying to draw attention, so it’s a kind of Look at me, don’t look at me.”
3 — In 2009 he was jailed in Britain after a bizarre case involving the false imprisonment of a 29-year-old Norwegian male escort… Does he have an instinctive emotional response to the episode – perhaps regret or guilt or shame? “No, I don’t think about any of those specifics.”
4 — “When it was time to [leave jail] I was thinking: Oh my God, I’ve got to go out of here and deal with my life. I am not sure I want to leave!”
5 — George loves and admires his mum hugely but steered clear when he was messed up. She saw through him and he couldn’t take the scrutiny.
6 — Only after his father’s death did [his family] achieve a real unity. “I think his death got everyone back together… I think we are a better family than we have ever been. In the past, everyone would turn up for a crisis. Now, we all turn up for dinner.”
❚ GET AN EYEFUL OF THOSE long-lost cheekbones! Hello! We haven’t seen you since the late 90s. Well, Boy George has been Twittering away for months about his fad diets, his gym routine and doing 100 squats at a time, and this week he unveiled the result — at least from the neck up. And yes, this studio video for Turn 2 Dust does suggest that a few pounds seem to have been shed.
Turn 2 Dust: two dancers among many turns in Boy George’s video
OK the camera is angled from above looking down throughout the three-and-a-half slickly edited minutes. OK he’s shot wearing black and artfully lit in a black void. OK somebody has been paid a fortune to get the maquillage just so. But hey. It’s a start. Welcome to the muscle marys club, George.
This reggaefied version of the highly danceable Turn 2 Dust derives from the track on his MP3 album Ordinary Alien released in March. It’s one of those heartfelt, political George numbers about the outsider “with only truth as my defence” and it pleads for tolerance: “All hatred must turn to dust.” And there’s a break, just for a moment, where you could swear the voice is Bowie’s, oh yes. This very cool video is shot in a no less cool London nightspot, the Lightbox, where George threw his 50th birthday party last June.
The vid is promoting an MP3 package of 11 remixes released this month. To underscore the song’s message, the video features a provocatively camp cast of comic clubbing characters, so it is no surprise that George can scarcely keep a straight face. Cheekbones and all.
MENTION OF LADY GAGA’S NAME
SETS GEORGE OFF, KERPOW!
+++ ❏ Yesterday Boy George was in Macau, the administrative region of China famed for its casinos, to present a deejay session at Club Lotus, preceded by this live videoed press conference. When a journalist asked whether his current musical collaborations might include Lady Gaga, the question seemed to trigger a good-humoured but impassioned rant [scroll forward to the 4-minute mark]. Here’s just a part of it…
“ I’m more interested in working with people in the dance field. I’m talking about house music, not pop. I’m not really involved in pop music — I haven’t been for a long long time. I don’t have anything to do with the modern pop scene. It’s not for me. It’s an alien thing to me. I just don’t get it, don’t feel part of it, don’t understand it. The dance world is more fun — you have more freedom… Pop music is very restricted. Everybody is making the same record, everybody is using same vocal sound, nobody’s singing about anything any more, it’s all crap…
“ That’s a very extreme statement but that’s how I feel. There’s nobody speaking to me in pop music. Everybody just wants to wear the fur coat and drink champagne and talk rubbish. Where’s the David Bowies? Where’s the Boy Georges? Where’s the passion? There isn’t really any. ”
QUIZZED ON THE PRICE OF HIS £499 PHOTOBOOK
❏ Boy George has a chunky 18×12-inch coffee-table picture book titled King of Queens coming out on Dec 12 in a limited edition of 999 signed copies, which includes a 10-inch vinyl anthology of unreleased music, all in a clamshell clothbound case, from Kitchen Sink Publishing, price £499. At the Macau press conference a journalist thought this was very expensive. George replied:
“ It’s 90 pages of photographs, very personal things from my collection, things people have never seen, a beautifully bound collectors’ book. It’s very expensive. But you don’t have to have it. It’s like saying you should put down the price of a Porsche because I want to have it. You know, some things in life, you can’t have. ”
MORE INTERESTING THAN MOST PEOPLE’S FANTASIES — THE SWINGING EIGHTIES 1978-1984
They didn’t call themselves New Romantics, or the Blitz Kids – but other people did.
“I’d find people at the Blitz who were possible only in my imagination. But they were real” — Stephen Jones, hatmaker, 1983. (Illustration courtesy Iain R Webb, 1983)
“The truth about those Blitz club people was more interesting than most people’s fantasies” — Steve Dagger, pop group manager, 1983
PRAISE INDEED!
“See David Johnson’s fabulously detailed website Shapersofthe80s to which I am hugely indebted” – Political historian Dominic Sandbrook, in his book Who Dares Wins, 2019
A UNIQUE HISTORY
➢ WELCOME to the Swinging 80s ➢ THE BLOG POSTS on this front page report topical updates ➢ ROLL OVER THE MENU AT TOP to go deeper into the past ➢ FOR NEWS & MONTH BY MONTH SEARCH, see the sidebar below
❏ Header artwork by Kat Starchild shows Blitz Kids Darla Jane Gilroy, Elise Brazier, Judi Frankland and Steve Strange, with David Bowie at centre in his 1980 video for Ashes to Ashes
TOLD FOR THE FIRST TIME
◆ Who was who in Spandau’s break-out year of 1980? The Invisible Hand of Shapersofthe80s draws a selective timeline for The unprecedented rise and rise of Spandau Ballet –– Turn to our inside page
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VINCENT BACK AT JAZZFM
✱ Catch up on legendary deejay Robbie Vincent’s Spring Bank Holiday session at JazzFM with four hours of “nothing but essential rhythms of soul, jazz and funk”… If you missed RV’s previous special on VE Day, hear it on Planetradio
UNTOLD BLITZ STORIES
✱ If you thought there was no more to know about the birth of Blitz culture in 1980 then get your hands on a sensational new book by an obsessive music fan called David Barrat. It is gripping, original and epic – a spooky tale of coincidence and parallel lives as mind-tingling as a Sherlock Holmes yarn. Titled both New Romantics Who Never Were and The Untold Story of Spandau Ballet! Sample this initial taster here at Shapers of the 80s
CHEWING THE FAT
✱ Jawing at Soho Radio on the 80s clubland revolution (from 32 mins) and on art (@55 mins) is probably the most influential shaper of the 80s, former Wag-club director Chris Sullivan (pictured) with editor of this website David Johnson
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