CULTURE CLUBBING with George and The Boys

After years in the biz, very few things surprise me anymore. What the heck, I’ve railed at Rush. I fought it out with Fear. I battled the Bus Boys. I was double-dribbled by Dave Davies’ bodyguard. I’ve done it all; I’ve done it my way. Doubtless I’m dauntless.

Granted that I’m a veritable rock, let me confess I’m a bit taken aback by this Culture Club thang and—in particular— Boy George. I haven’t lost any sleep over the way the guy looks, but I don’t think anyone would disagree that he does look passably odd, Boy-wise. Hell, the guy’s a goof, and his face doesn’t match the voice on “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me.” Come to think of it, his face doesn’t match fingernails on the blackboard. But I don’t really want to make him cry—I like the Boy. He’s not my favorite Boy, of course, since I let two live in my house and they’ve got six years between ’em. Then there’s bill-paying Boys like Howdy!; I’m naturally partial to them. As far as Georges go, he’s a good George, but not a great George; e.g., Curious (the monkey) and Of The Jungle, the TV star.

He is, however, an easy George to talk to, and he hangs out with an interesting bunch of musicians. Take Steve Granger, for example. Steve plays the tenor sax as a C.C. sideman; we spent an absorbing 10 minutes discussing fishing in the U.S. and U.K. Very few musicians realize that the manners and mores of the bluegill are more exciting than they are—take a bow, Steve. Another side-player is Helen, a bulky songstress and the only woman in the Club entourage. “I’m a communist,” she told me when I met her, only to tell me later she was “just kidding.” Hey, I was just kidding about putting it in the story, too, Helen. Then there’s.Jon Moss, their most credentialed musician, who used to play With people like the Damned and the Clash and Adam Ant. Wait a minute, he didn’t play with people like the Damned and the Clash and Adam Ant, he played with the real Damned and the real Clash and the real Adam Ant. .“Adam has no sense of humor,” says Jon. OK by me, does he have, a sense of history?

The real prize in this crowd, of course, is Boy George himself. He hadn’t been told he was supposed to talk to anybody, so when I introduced rhyself he didn’t know me from Adam, or even Adam’s aunt. No sweat, though: George said, “Great, let’s do it now.” Now there’s a trusting person...I should’ve told him he had to pay me 500 bucks, too.

Well, how weird is Boy? Not so far gone, culture fans. I mean, whht can you say about a guy who noted: “In a country where they spawned Liberace, I’m hardly a revolutionary.”( Absolutely right. In a country that spawned Liberace, hardly anybody’s .anything. No one here gets out awake.

Touching on Boy’s looks—figuratively speaking here—there were a few points, that interested me. Like, why is he called “Boy,” anyway? This guy is 21 years old already.

“When I’m about 25, I’ll change it,” he laughed. “But when we did our first professional photo session, the pictures (of himself) were really, really feminine. It just looked like a woman; it didn’t look like me. So I thought it would be funny to use that name.”

4 if Vou can’t at yourself, you nothing.

“But you do look kind of feminine. Right?” I added, just on the off-chance I was wrong.

“Yeah, I suppose so.” Good supposing there.

“Do you want to talk about it?” (This is what’s known as loading the pistol.)

“Yeah, we can talk about it. We can talk about whatever you want.” (Bullseye!)

“OK, are you a homosexual?”

“No.”

“Are you a transvestite?”

“No.”

Hmm, what does that leave...“Are you nice to your parents?”

Seriously, though, Boy has a pretty good sense of humor about this whole thing, which he better have when I’m talking to him. “Atransvestite is someone who dresses like a woman,” he said. “I do not dress as a woman. I mean, I may look feminine, but I don’t think I actually am that feminine.” Yeah, I guess I’ve met more feminine people in my time, too.

Besides, all you intolerant sunnuvabitches who think Boy’s a geek have got another thing coming: “You can have all the morals and you can have all the things that help you survive, but if you can’t laugh at yourself, you’ve got nothing,” B.G. said. “If some big, fat guy laughs at me, I think: well, the guy’s overweight—he’s probably really uptight about being fat. He probably hasn’t seen his cock for about a week.” So there.

Where did Boy and his club of culture come from? Besides England, I mean. George O’Dowd hails from suburban London and he describes his parents as “absolutely brilliant.” But: “On my seventeenth birthday, I left my parents,got as far away as possible, so I moved away (to Birmingham,) and I stayed there a year.” This launched a series of remarkable adventures: first he became a fairly successful model (“It’s good money,” George nonchalantly noted) and then a protegeof-sorts to the ubiquitous Malcolm McLaren, who got him his first shot at fronting a band (Bow Wow Wow). “I did two gigs with them and it went well, but Bow Wow Wow just didn’t like me. They were scared of me, for a start. The guys were scared stiff of me, because I’m quite an overpowering person.”

Probably true. I haven’t met many people that can talk so fast for so long as George can. Despite this self-acknowledged status, Boy sees the Culture Club as one of them there band democracies we’ve all come to love over the years. “One thing about this band that we don’t do: we just don’t believe in that rock ’n’ roll shit.”

“What rock ’n’ roll shit?” The last several Seger albums, perhaps?

Nope. “I believe in complete democracy and I believe that you should act like a human being. I don’t think you should act like you’re something special.”

This democracy-thing kept cropping up in our conversation, to the point where I think it might be a bit of an obsession with our Boy. Regarding his parents: “They’re very democratic.” Regarding the Culture Club: “One thing we try to do in this band: we try to keep it really democratic. Regarding Adam Ant: “He acts like he’s something special. He sacked his band, didn’t he?”

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Mr. Ant proved to be another fine conversational foil that evening. I knew I was on solid ground when I suggested that he did his make-up better than Boy George and elicited a look of (hopefully) mock pain and horror from O’Dowd. Jesus, what kind of business am I in, going around judging how grown-up men do their goddamned make-up?

Oh well, back to Adam Ant. George is one fella who has no qualms about being a pop star, which is something that gave Ant the willies when I talked with him a while back. I repeated to George what Adam told me, i.e., “I’m not a pop star.” (What is this, anyway, a gossip column? “/ told George that Adam said blah blah”... Sheesh!)

“Well, he’s a damned liar, isn’t he?” said George. “Because he’s the biggest pop star that ever came in England. (No, I won’t touch that one.) He’s the most revolutionary thing that’s happened for years in England. But what he actually did was he took it so far that all he was was a pop star. He wasn’t a person.

“I’ll tell you something. What happened to Adam Ant, as well...the one thing with this band (C.C.) is that we started out with a sound that we wanted to keep. Adam Ant started out with a very alternative punk sound (what the hell’s that?) and then decided he wanted to become a pop star. And he became a pop star.

“The thing is: I do like Adam. ‘Goody Two Shoes’ is a good song. It’s the only good song on the album, though. There is something about Adam Ant which he’s got, which he can lose. He’s got something there which is more than music. He’s got something there that people like. But I think that, in a way, I could’ve done what Adam Ant has done. I could’ve taken my make-up off and come to America and put on a pair of tight trousers and stuffed hose down my leg and done quite well at it. But I have no desire to.”

Well, no doubt. I hate to depart from all this tremendously interesting Limey gossip and talk about music for a few minutes, but what the hell. Why not take a chance?

It’s pretty obvious to me that C.C.’s a great example of being in the right place at the right time with a winsome little whine like “Hurt Me,” but that’s only because I’m an expert. Their black/white message—so boldly stated on Kissing To Be Clever— is getting awfully tedious as far as politics/ sociology goes. I mean, I get the hint already, you upstanding British bands: we’re supposed to get along with each other or something like that, right? So leave me alone, I not only don’t feel guilty—I actually feel good—about being a white boy.

Of course, my aesthetic is well-honed. If you want to know where Boy George is coming from, why, heck; I’ll let him tell you. “I like Foreigner,” he said with a straight face. “There’s one Foreigner song that I think is the best they’ve ever done, which is ‘Waiting For A Girl Like You.’ ”

Me, I can’t really identify with it. You look like a Foreigner fan, though.

“That song’s great!”

Do you like “Africa” by Toto?

“I like that song (begins humming ‘Africa.’). Jon (Moss) had that song months ago and I really couldn’t stand it, but then I heard it on the radio and I really got to like it.

“When I was really young, though, it was Shirley Bassey and Dean Martin.”

Of course. Dino’s always been my favorite, too. Him and Burl Ives.

(Boy started breaking up a bit here, and I suggested to my erstwhile companion, a long-suffering Bob Alford: “I think Boy’s kidding me rather cruelly.”)

“I’m not kidding you!”

Oh yeah? Do you like “That’s Amore?”

“ ‘When you walk down the street with a cloud at your feet, that’s amore...that’s amore. ”1 wanna tell you, it sounded like a heavenly choir of angelic Smokey Robinsons.

Boy was giggling with delight. “Actually, it’s really strange that you mentioned that song. ‘Cause that song was, like, my parents’ favorite song.”

Y’know, Boy, I’d really like to meet your parents someday. '