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and the only attention he’s had recently was for sweeping the streets in New York.
Can Boy George ever live up to his early fame?
Boy George has always desperately wanted to be understood, but not necessarily accepted.
It’s impossible to pin him down. He won’t be boxed.
So he wants love, but hates the idea of gay marriage.
He claims intimacy matters to him, but he’s happiest living alone.
“They’d have to be really good in bed to get me to live with them.”
It’s this very contrariness that has made him an icon.
With his band Culture Club in the early 1980s, he shocked and
delighted in equal parts, attacking stereotypes and rejigging boundaries.
With his pigtailed hair and come-to-me eyes, he looked like a girl but took it like a man.
Big hands, a genetic inheritance from his father, Jerry O’Dowd, the boxer and builder
whose volatility, machismo and sweetness he also inherited.
George looks like his mother, Dinah. They have the same penetrating eyes,
which speak of sadness and courage. Both suffered physically at the hands of his father,
who punched Dinah in the stomach when she was pregnant.
George left school in his early teens (at 13 or 15, depending on who you ask) to work in a clothes shop in Soho.
He lived in a squat, worked as a cloakroom attendant at Blitz club
(where he stole cash from the till and met Malcolm McLaren), was a model and briefly joined the band Bow Wow Wow
before forming his own.
His glory period was 1982-6, when Culture Club sold 35m records.
Do You Really Want to Hurt Me and the jaunty Karma Chameleon were the hits, but it was songs like Victims
that showcased his lyrical talent and his gift to articulate pain.
As a butch man who could appear as a beautiful girl, he made his fans believe that they too could transform themselves.
But by the time the album From Luxury to Heartache appeared in 1986, the luxury had gone and the heartache was gaining pace.
Recently he hit the headlines again, this time for sweeping the streets of New York on community service.
He calls it “media service”.
No quiet park and leaves to bag for him, but a full-on paparazzo frenzy in Chinatown.
It was meant to be a humiliation, a public example: even the feted fall.
But George remains defiant.
The details of the arrest at his New York flat are traumatic and purposely vague.
In October 2005 he called the NYPD, saying his apartment in Little Italy was being broken into.
When the cops arrived they found no evidence of a break-in, only a bleary, out-of-it George.
They found drugs – some reports say 15 small bags of cocaine – but their over-eagerness to search
the place without a warrant rendered any drugs charges null and void.
He was, however, found guilty of wasting police time.
“It was a crime against myself,” says George, who has always defined himself by nearly destroying himself.
Ultimately, he’s a survivor.
He just can’t enjoy an easy life.
He’s outside my front door smoking a cigarette.
“It’ll be a very short interview if I can’t smoke inside,” he quips.
I never told him he couldn’t. I’ve known George for many years.
He’s been close to people I’ve been close to.
He’s always had turbulent relationships.
I’ve seen him be passionately hot and cold, particularly with women.
He has often put them on a pedestal, only to knock them into the ground.
The singer and songwriter Amanda Ghost has been his most enduring friend.
She’s been the only one strong enough to stand up to him.
He comes in, sits down. His face is free of make-up, save beautifully pencilled eyebrows.
He’s in a hoodie and sweatpants from his own range, B-Rude. He’s more aggravated by a recent TV documentary,
than he was by sweeping the streets.
“They showed nothing about what I’m doing creatively.
” They played Time Machine, his new single with Ghost, a haunting, soulful ballad.
They showed his photography – or rather, a photo of a man’s penis.
“Of course there’s a lot of homoeroticism in my work, but I have photographs of lots of women too.
“It annoyed me, because when I did my service they were telling me, ‘You’re a genius, a genius.’
” But it’s not George’s genius that makes him fascinating, it’s the fact that he couples it with being-
self-destructive, out of control, scorchingly funny, self-deprecating, bitter, sweet, clever, stupid,
wounded and outraged.
You can’t really humiliate George: he’s done too good a job of that himself.
His lips curl: “How many shots do you need of someone sweeping the streets?
I found it very unfascinating. It was surreal, but not boring.
There was one girl we kept calling Princess – she’d stolen a bottle of perfume.
She turned up with her Prada handbag. She was on really good money, but she’d done it to compensate for-
whatever she wasn’t getting emotionally.
She made me laugh because she kept moaning the whole time.”
Of course, George found camaraderie and softness in the hardest places.
It doesn’t sound like he found it in the least bit humiliating.
“It was about refusing to be humiliated.
I’m not Madonna, I don’t live that kind of life.
We were really working.
I didn’t mind doing something productive.
I wanted to get it over with.
I didn’t want to talk about my drug arrest either: it’s my drama, nobody’s business.”
Drugs nearly killed him the first time round.
His brother David outed him to Fleet Street, where The Sun ran the headline that he only had weeks to live.
That was in 1986, and he’s still here.
He’s survived various friends’ deaths by drugs. Got sober and wrote the partly autobiographical musical Taboo,
which was about suburban boys experimenting with drugs and sexuality.
The musical did well in London in 2001.
The next year it was picked up by Rosie O’Donnell to be put on Broadway.
Although George questioned whether the hugely successful multimillionaire talk-show host could really connect
to the spirit of the funny, sad, decadent musical, he went with it and took on the role of the outlandish club
eccentric Leigh Bowery.
After a three-month run it was deemed a flop and she pulled it.
George was deeply wounded by the experience. “Rosie said she wouldn’t change anything,
then went about changing everything.
She wasn’t used to people answering her back.
She’d say, ‘Come on, show me your balls.’
And if you did, she’d cut them off.”
He’s chuckling because there’s a happy ending to the Taboo story.
It’s just been bought by Endemol, which owns theatres all over the world, and is going to tour.
“I prayed every day she wouldn’t renew her option. Hallelujah.”
But the show’s demise left him vulnerable.
“I stayed in New York, isolating myself and left to my own devices, working on fashion,
selling clothes in Pat Fields [the designer made famous for styling Sex and the City].”
His New York sojourn mirrored the decadent adventure of 20 years earlier,
when he had his first swanky New York apartment, as Culture Club was falling apart and he began his drugs spiral.
Just like the last time, he didn’t want to return to London a famous failure.
He further isolated himself by firing his manager of 26 years, Tony Gordon,
who wanted him to do another Culture Club tour.
“I’m not interested in living in the past, but he’d sell his soul for a cheeseburger.
He wasn’t interested in my photography or my fashion.” This summer, Culture Club re-formed
with a new singer and Tony Gordon as manager.
“It was a hard thing. I’d been with him since I was 18, but it was a kind of meltdown – a lot of other people
went out of my life as well.”
While he can dismiss the street-sweeping as “surreal”, his state of mind around the time of the arrest
and the arrest itself bring back a wincing pain.
He recalls: “I was taken to the police station but my foot was bleeding. I’d cut it on something.
And you know what Americans are like… They said, ‘He’s bleeding, maybe he’s got Aids.’
So they took me to Bellevue,” he chuckles painfully, “where I belong.”
Bellevue is a mental institution for the criminally insane. “It was the most nightmarish thing that had ever happened.
I was handcuffed to a metal bed. I asked for a drink of water but they just ignored me.
I thought, I’ll just do a really dramatic scream.
That worked. A really nice Australian nurse came over and said, ‘Are you okay?’
I said, ‘I’m not okay. I’m having palpitations, I’m terrified.’
Before Bellevue, he was detained in a holding cell, where police officers called him a has-been.
“I said, ‘At least I’m a has-been, you’re a never-was.’
” He felt terrorised by the treatment of other prisoners and recalls scenes that seemed designed to threaten him.
Being George, he found someone to flirt with, even in bedlam.
“One of the paramedics was cute. I said, ‘I like your tattoos.
Actually, I like everything about you.’ ”
But he can’t laugh about all of it.
“I was taken into the catacombs of the jailhouse and put into a cell that had cameras facing it.
The whole nine hours I was there a voice on a Tannoy said, ‘You f***ing faggot.
You waste of space.’
The toilet in the cell overflowed constantly.
There was piss everywhere.
I kept saying, ‘Can I have water?’
In the end I drank my own piss because I thought I was going to die of dehydration.
I did think, ‘Maybe I’m never going to get out of here.’
” In the event, his estate agent stumped up bail money.
Friends sneaked into his apartment and found his passport, and he returned to London immediately.
“I am not good in isolation.”
Yet he insists he prefers to live alone. He’s furious that in the documentary there was a line that said:
“Jon Moss [from Culture Club] got married and Boy George lives alone in the East End, where he makes art
about his ongoing longing for unattainable men.”
“I hate that because it implies the homosexual is lonely and Jon Moss is happy and married.
He ain’t getting any cock and I am.”
George once said: “All men are gay unless proven otherwise.”
In those heady Culture Club days, where George was told to keep his sexuality quiet by the suits
who wanted to sell records and by Moss, who wanted to sell records, while he was announcing
that he preferred a cup of tea to sex, he and Moss were at it all the time.
It was a tumultuous relationship where George, used to expressing emotion through violence
because he’d seen it in his upbringing, would throw bottles at Moss.
Once Moss’s fingers got broken. Not great if you’re a drummer. “I have a box in my house.
Every single note, letter, Jon wrote to me.
I kept them because I’m deeply romantic, and I tell you what,” he chuckles fiendishly, “if he pushes it too far
I’ll print them. They were about sex and they were graphic.
Why should I care if Culture Club have re-formed and they’re doing my songs?
What, on a tour of Butlins? I’m a terrible grudge-bearer, but I forgive eventually,” he says,
although his fall-outs have been epic.
He hadn’t spoken to his father for three years when he died, because of the way he left his mother
after 43 years of marriage. He had a heart attack while he was on holiday in Egypt with his new wife.
George wasn’t going to go to the funeral but a friend persuaded him.
“Don’t get me wrong. I loved my father. But I came back for my mother.
It was hard to see her at the funeral with my dad’s new wife there.
Two months later my mother did a private ceremony and laid a plaque for him.
I thought, ‘You are an amazing woman…’ I couldn’t have loved her more at this point
because she did this after everything he did to her.
My mother is a tank, a goddess.
My dad was a terrible father and a terrible husband, but he did have this really sweet side.”
Now the family think he may have been a schizophrenic.
George is the middle child of six children.
After him came Gerald, who had his father’s colouring, good looks and mental problems.
“He did everything my dad wanted. My dad broke his spirit.
The tragedy of my brother was that he is a lovely person and nobody realised he is a schizophrenic.
” Gerald stabbed his wife to death in 1995 while she was sleeping and was detained under the Mental Health Act.
George’s brother David sold the stories of George’s drug abuse to The Sun to shock him into giving up his heroin addiction.
“He tried to save my life. My brother loves me, but it’s safe to say that at that period in my history no one was really
behaving well.” George grew up – and in a way still is – surrounded by topsy-turvy emotions where love and control
are confused.
When George first came out it was his father who understood first, despite his obvious faults.
“Don’t tell me what to do, because I had a father who controlled my every move as a child.
I hate authority, yet at the same time it turns me on.”
Do you think your father created the blueprint for the ambiguous relationship, the unavailable man?
“Ha, that’s a myth. They’re not unavailable. For a start, I’ve slept with most of the men I’ve photographed.
My mother asked me recently, ‘Where’s this relationship going?’ I said, ‘Where did yours go?
My father left you after 43 years. Where’s anything going?’ Then she slapped me.”
Would you rather want something, have that yearning, than actually have it – be kept wanting?
“Everybody would. How many people are living out there without intimacy?
I’m not. But I’m always with the one that’s not going anywhere.”
For him, it seems, intimacy only happens with insecurity.
“The idea of gay marriage makes me retch. One of the luxuries about being homosexual is not having to worry about that.
I don’t want company. I don’t want a boyfriend who’s a Ming vase. I have friends who are couples who don’t have sex.
If you ain’t having sex, out the door. I don’t believe in this whole idea that it’s nice to have someone around.
It’s not.”
After Moss, his longest relationship was with Michael Dunne. That ended in 1994. At the time of their relationship,
Michael was a drug user, and in his meek little way,
maybe a George user. Now he’s clean and friends hope that one day they might get back together.
For the meantime, George is with a lawyer. “He doesn’t take any of my shit.
His attitude is cool but he’s very passionate and intelligent.
” It’s this new desire of George’s to be with someone who doesn’t take his shit that gives me hope.
Amanda Ghost is also such a person. Feisty, strong-willed. It’s his longest-lasting relationship.
When I tell him that I’m impressed that he and Amanda haven’t had a fall-out, he says: “Oh yes, we have.
We didn’t speak for about two months because she tried to organise an interferon.”
By this he means an intervention, but he can’t bring himself to say the word. He says he’s “currently sober”.
Drug use is a dark place for him. Nightmarish memories.
He says: “My relationship with drugs is nonexistent at this point.
But I know why she did it. Everyone was like, what’s going to happen?
But if you tell me not to do something, I’ll do it more.”
The next day I meet Ghost for breakfast. She’s not the typical George acolyte.
“When I first started hanging around with him I wasn’t impressed by his celebrity
in the way so many people who’d gone before me had been.
He had so many of them. They were all moths to his flame.
They all vicariously succeeded through George, but never surpassed him.
I said I’d never work for him, would never be on his payroll.”
They met when she was studying fashion and journalism. Ghost was born in 1974,
so was only a child when he was first famous.
“I’ve always had a healthy disdain for anyone who thought they were better than me.
When I became a singer I never wanted to work with him, but he would read me excerpts from his autobiography,
Take It Like a Man.” Amanda believes in the theory that all famous people stop developing at the age they
become famous, which for George was 19.
“What it’s given him is this sense of, ‘I’ll do whatever I want and I don’t care about the repercussions because
I’m not a normal human being,’ and he isn’t.”
She disagrees with his theory that he unravelled after spending too much time on his own when Taboo finished.
She says he entered the dark period before that.
“I pinpoint the time he went to America as when he relapsed.
After being a massive icon in the 1980s he was becoming George O’Dowd again.
Taboo resurrected the monster. There he was on Broadway, billboards everywhere.
He’s Boy George again. He wouldn’t come back here because he felt a failure.
What a load of rubbish. England loves him. He is one of the great Britons of all time.
One of the most recognised people that this country has ever produced.”
Amanda is bringing out Time Machine – the record they wrote together and duet on – and George’s album
on her own record label, Plan A. At 32 you wonder how she has the business savvy to run her own label and
write songs for Beyoncé and Shakira and All Saints. Next week she and George will be writing with Kylie.
That’s easy,” she laughs. “I co-wrote You’re Beautiful with James Blunt.
He was this sweet boy who asked me to help him, so we wrote this song.
I took it to Warner Bros, my label at the time, and they said it’s too posh, it’ll never sell.
That proves nobody knows anything. It’s a good lesson.”
It’s a lesson that George takes comfort in. It lets him get on with what he loves doing,
though he says: “I haven’t made money out of the music business for years. It’s not why I do it.
” These days he earns most of his money from being a sought-after DJ.
He’s also doing well as a photographer, having just exclusively taken pictures for Jean Paul Gaultier’s new couture range.
Amanda confirms he is currently drug-free and she is cautiously optimistic for him, although she says:
“I wish he would find love.” She compares him to Michael Jackson, Prince, Elizabeth Taylor, Joni Mitchell:
“They know what it’s like. I think it’s incompatible to have love and fame.
Are all these people unlovable? They can they be loved by millions but can’t be loved by one.
I tell him he’s being Judy Garland. ‘Is that what you want to happen to you?’ I ask him,
‘because that’s what the public are expecting, that you’ll wake up one day and it’ll be on the news
that you’ve had a terrible end.’ But he just says he doesn’t care.”
That’s not true, though: he definitely cares.
“I’m very romantic,” he says. “Love is like God. It’s unprovable.
Its power is the not knowing. That’s the whole point of love.”
For George, romantic love is most real when it’s unreal.
He has admitted that he has paid for sex. Ghost thinks only love can save him.
It’s not that he is unlovable, it’s that he has tended to choose people who did or could not love him enough.
He needs someone who can give back the love he’s capable of giving.
To be loved by the one, and not the many.
-> Source: www.timesonline.co.uk<- . . . .
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