When it comes to pop stars on spiritual journeys, George Harrison, Cat Stevens and Sinéad O’Connor come to mind. But Boy George? This is the singer who turned bitchiness into high art. “The Artist Formerly Known as Get a Personality” is a putdown of Prince from which there is no coming back.

George’s tongue has been lacerating unsuspecting victims ever since he was the coat-check boy at the Blitz club in London in 1979. Yet here we are in his publicist’s office, George in his signature look of oversized hat and colour-saturated make-up, praising the wisdom of the Buddhist-inspired philosopher Alan Watts, extolling the virtues of a spiritual path called Three Principles and generally exuding enlightenment. Albeit interspersed with the odd cackle of wickedness.

“There have been a lot of times in my life when I ask myself, ‘Why do I do this?’” says George, who at 64 does have a surprising air of calm. Whether that is down to the mellowing effects of age, his discovery of the higher path or something else entirely is hard to tell.

“People say I was always desperate to be famous. In reality I was like a headless chicken with no real ambition at all, so it must have been a compulsion. At 17 I believed in the myth of rock’n’roll. Now I’ve discovered it is much more simple. Being creative is simply an instinct and one I cannot ignore.”

Nevertheless the former George O’Dowd did build an armour with which to face the world. He was 18 when he left his large dysfunctional Irish Catholic family in Eltham, southeast London, and moved from shared flats in Birmingham to squats in central London. He formed Culture Club after meeting the bassist Mikey Craig, who had recently had a child with Cleo Pizzey, the 15-year-old daughter of the domestic abuse campaigner Erin Pizzey.

“My mother was a victim of domestic abuse so I recognised this woman from the telly instantly,” George says. “I went to Erin Pizzey’s big bohemian house in Shepherds Bush and she had a teenage son called Amos, a white kid with dreadlocks who spoke in perfect patois and I thought: this is amazing. It was the birth of Culture Club. Back then, someone’s look was far more important than if they could play music. Tracey Emin was even in the band for a while. She couldn’t play a thing, but she looked incredible.”

In the early Eighties milieu from which Culture Club emerged, fashion came first. The Blitz, which was frequented by future members of Spandau Ballet and Visage and designers like Bodymap and Stephen Jones, was all about creating a persona, if only for the night.

“My original inspiration was Siouxsie Sioux,” George says. “From there it was Theda Bara, Betty Boop, Liz Taylor. When you’re a gay kid other kids make you aware that you’re different. You get picked on and you don’t know why. Then one summer holiday it just clicked: I would go with it. I went to school with drainpipe trousers and my tie ripped in half and everyone said I looked like a tramp, but it was a turning point. There comes a time where you either just shrink away or you embrace being different.”

George’s embrace yielded spectacular results. Culture Club’s Do You Really Want to Hurt Me? went to No 1 in 1982, beginning a string of hits that dried up around the second half of the decade. There followed the classic dilemma of the famous: wanting to be recognised yet wanting to be left alone at the same time.

“Exhibitionism is a double-edged sword — it’s look at me but don’t look at me,” George says of the paradox of fame. “You see a photo of Madonna walking out of a restaurant with a face like a smacked arse while secretly wanting all those people to be there. It doesn’t bother me any more, but in the old days I would get incredibly anxious about being recognised, people staring at me, taking my photograph without asking and for many years I made being who I am into a nightmare. Why? Because someone doesn’t think you’re pretty enough? Once you learn to get over yourself it’s a revelation.”

George says he never gets angry any more. It might come as a surprise to anyone who has been on the wrong side of him over the years, not least Culture Club’s former drummer, Jon Moss, a middle-class north Londoner. The two are not on the best terms. After being thrown out of the reunited Culture Club in 2018, Moss sued the three other members for loss of earnings. George has written a song about Moss on his new album. It’s called Dirty Little Limited Company.

“I say in the song, ‘How come you don’t fight for your rock’n’roll?’ Jon wants to fight for his royalties, but not the thing that gave him those royalties,” George says. Why isn’t he in the band? “Because Jon only wants to do it on his own terms. I’m a Gemini. I trust everyone and think everyone understands me. When I started the band I split everything four ways, but I don’t believe I was treated with the respect I gave to everyone else, especially Jon.”

Has George held out the olive branch? “I have, but then Jon’s controlling instincts came back. I’m 64. I don’t want to be controlled. I want to be out of control.”

Surely George was the leader of Culture Club, not Moss? “Jon was running the band,” he retorts. “He was the sole director, in charge of the finances, and when we did meet a couple of years ago he basically said he was doing me a favour. I felt quite insulted by that.”

To complicate matters, at the height of Culture Club’s success George and Moss were in a relationship. “So long ago! It’s like talking about two dinosaurs who once were in love. But just like I don’t feel anything bad about my dad, I don’t feel anything bad about Jon.” He thinks about this for a while. “That might annoy him even more, actually.”

Like every pop star George had to face the moment when the glory days were over. For Culture Club it came with the appropriately titled 1986 album From Luxury to Heartache, which coincided with the singer’s developing drug addiction. How did he deal with it? “By not getting played on the radio,” George says, which wasn’t the answer I was expecting. “Pop music is simply hypnosis: if you hear a song enough you believe it is the greatest thing you’ve ever heard. I’ve written things in the past two years that piss over Karma Chameleon, but that’s life.”

These days George has been more preoccupied on reviving Taboo, his 2002 musical about the hedonistic Eighties nightclub of the same name. Taboo was founded by Leigh Bowery, who was the subject of an exhibition at Tate Modern this year.

“What I want to explore in the show is the odd relationship between Leigh and his wife, Nicola Bowery,” he says of the musical. “Long before non-binary, here’s a gay guy who married a straight woman and there was real tenderness and love between them. Yes, part of the reason he married Nicola was to piss everyone off, but I do think he really loved her.”

Characters like Bowery and arguably George came from a time when the goal was to be wholly yourself, not to represent a wider community who identify as queer, non-binary or any other label. “Oh totally. Someone said the other day, ‘Leigh Bowery was the blueprint for gay identity. He would have hated that. Hated it!”

Since then the trans debate has become far bigger than the number of people actually affected by it. He says, “Trans people are the new people to hate, but I always say: how many trans people have you met today?

“There’s the world on the internet, which is hideous and full of anger. Then there’s the real world, which is entirely different so in reality people have nothing to be nervous about. If I’m really lucky my own sexuality takes up about three hours a month. We’ve all got cats to feed, families to visit, jobs to do. I said in an interview when I was 17, ‘Being gay is like eating a bag of crisps. It’s so not important.’ I still think that now. What do you care about someone’s sexuality unless you’re going to have sex with them?”

This goes all the way to George feeling that the identity politics of the LGBTQ movement can be dangerous. “I don’t think it’s helped anyone. We’re not a thing. It’s like, ‘This is what black people are, this is what Jewish people are, this is what trans people are.’ No! Everybody is diverse because nobody is like anybody else, so you’re starting from the wrong perspective. Nobody gets to choose what colour eyes they have, how big their penis is, how fat their arse is.”

All this on the essence of humanity has not stopped George from judging a book by its cover, even when he’s gone spiritual in the past. In the early Nineties, enamoured of acid house and India, he released a tribute to the Hare Krishna movement called Bow Down Mister. It might have seemed as if George had dedicated himself to the power of devotional love, but the reality was more prosaic.

“It started in the Seventies when I bumped into some Hare Krishnas in Soho Square and said, ‘Oh, love what you’re wearing,’” he says. “I thought it was a fashion look. I didn’t realise it had spiritual significance. But from there I liked devotees. I liked the idea that they were putting their heads on the spiritual chopping block.”

Fast-forward to the late Eighties and George was living in a hotel in New York with his friend and fellow pop star Marilyn when two Hare Krishnas turned up in the lobby. “They had some samosas and I was hungry,” he says, on how his Damascene moment came to pass. “So I invited them up to the room and we became friends. I flew to India with one of them, loved it, and saw life getting on with itself: the beauty, the brutality. I felt at home in India.”

These days George lives as normal a life as possible. He still has his gothic mansion in Hampstead, north London, which he has been letting for the past few years because he’s been on the road so much with Culture Club. And he says if he doesn’t want to be recognised all he has to do is take off his hat. “When you stop trying to hide and also stop trying to be noticed you move through life so much faster,” he reveals. “If I get in a taxi and the driver asks about me, I’ll tell them I’m Boy George. Then I’m nice to them, which is good because people think I’m going to be an asshole.”

Especially after his 2022 appearance on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! Taken on for a reputed £500,000 fee at the height of his legal troubles with Moss, George was accused by viewers of bullying the MP Matt Hancock, although he claims he just said what he felt. “And you think you’re in the middle of nowhere, but it is of course a TV set. It was only when I left that I realised there was a café round the corner. Having said that, a scorpion did bite Matt Hancock. We nicknamed that scorpion Keir Starmer.”

George has hit some serious lows like his 2008 arrest and later conviction for falsely imprisoning a male escort. What did he learn from that experience? “That it didn’t need to happen, but I can’t change it and I’m not defined by my mistakes. I’ve transcended my own ideas of who I am. Now I’m on a mission to transcend the ideas people have of me. I think it will happen … eventually.”

Having met him on two previous occasions, I think he does seem at peace, I tell him. “My friend Fat Tony got married on Saturday,” he says as he gets up to leave. “I did the ceremony and he called the next day to say, ‘You were so calm. What’s going on?’ I just look at things differently. I wish I knew it years ago. I wish I knew it when Culture Club were on Top of the Pops.”

Source: THE TIMES