Culture Club: Return Of The Rag Bags

Culture Club: Return Of The Rag Bags

Sylvie Simmons

While Boy George has been off waxing his hair or posing for waxwork dummies or appearing in Japanese gin commercials or whatever it is he’s up to these days, Jon Moss has been busy helping promote the album that’s put Culture Club back in the limelight again: From Luxury To Heartache. ROCK-SHOTS pinned Jon to the spot (the exact spot, a rather comfy black leather couch that could be cut up to make the well-dressed drummer some very nice new designer jackets, seeing as he’s getting bored with the ones he’s got!) to find out exactly what his luxuries—not to mention his heartaches—are these days.

Do you spend a lot on clothes and fast cars and glamorous things?

“I don’t think material things are that important, but having said that, I’ve got racks of designer clothes at home! Actually they’re pretty useless, aren’t they, designer clothes? Very impractical. You can only wear them once, like Princess Diana, and then you just put them away where they gather dust! I like the security and peace of mind that money brings, but relationships are more important.” What’s your relationship with Boy George like? The newspapers in Britain have reported that you two aren’t talking to each other, that you had a row over George’s girlfriend and threw a brick through his window!

‘‘No, I didn’t! George phoned me up and he hadn’t put the phone back on the hook, so I couldn’t make any phone calls, and he’d gone to sleep. Two hours later I go ’round there and bang on the door, and he wouldn’t wake up, so I kept banging, and in the end he came down, put the phone back on the hook and that was it. They made out I’d gone ’round there and smashed the door down. They were trying to make out we were warring. We’re not. We don’t. That girl, Alice Temple—I know her; she’s in the video. George and I are very close. I don’t think it’s anybody’s business how close we are. I’ve had a couple of near fights with the press saying personal things about us. It’s like, ‘You shouldn’t know about that side of my life.’ Or, ‘You shouldn’t say things you don’t know about.’”

Who was your first love—do you still remember?

‘‘I’ve still got the poem she wrote me!

I was 13 at the time, her name was Lisa. We went to a Roxy Music concert together.”

What upsets you most?

‘‘At the moment, some of the things that are written about us. Everyone can make mistakes, but to have everything you do written about! If I was to go to a night club and I was seen being flogged by women with fish in their hands, at least I’d done it, so I couldn’t mind if they wrote it! But the worst thing is when they write things that you haven’t done!”

So you don’t go out any more?

‘‘You’ve got to go out, you’ve got to be in public. Being famous is like a pact with the devil. Because you want to be famous, you want everybody to know and love you, and then when you go out and everyone wants to know you and love you, you don’t want it—which is ridiculous! The trouble is, some people can go from loving you to hating you very quickly.”

How’s George these days?

‘‘He’s gone strange, George, at the moment. He’s going through a period of change in his life—I’m not sure what to or where from. He’s got a lot of thinking to do, a lot of growing up, I think, which he’s doing at the moment. He is a mad artist, basically, a very creative person but a bit uncontrollable, very selfish and impulsive in a funny sort of way. I think he overstretched himself over the past two years. It’s like he was running with the wave and the wave went over him and obviously he got washed up in it and pulled under. When your personal philosophy runs out, you have to tread water for a little while, because you get saturated with all your own being. You get fed up with being you after a while. You have to stop and direct yourself every now and then.” What was your impression on first meeting George?

‘‘It was amazing. He was a real radical in his own way, a positive radical, when everything at the time was all that Angry Young Man punk thing.”

Weren ’t you ever an Angry Young Man? You were in the Clash for a while?

“I was in the Clash for two months, and I left because I didn’t like it at all. I didn’t believe in it. They were a good band, but I didn’t like their politics. I said, ‘I don’t believe you, you just want to be rich pop stars, why don’t you admit it?’ See, I come from Hampstead (an expensive part of London) from a Bohemian middleclass set; there was a whole load of us and we didn’t want to align ourselves with anybody. For example, I never liked David Bowie...never, never, never. And the reason was because if everybody else liked something I didn’t like it on principle. I’m perverse!”

Can you play any instrument other than the drums?

‘‘Not really—a few piano chords. I’d like to, but I’m too lazy. I bought myself a new Fairlight, which is great!”

Do you like any music other than pop?

‘‘Yes! My first loves were Motown, Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin. It s funny that, because I always thought I should be in a heavy metal band really!”

What are your favorite new records?

‘‘Jermaine Jackson’s ‘This Is Love’— it’s brilliant. The Janet Jackson albumworth buying. And Scarecrow, John Cougar Mellencamp. Brilliant.”

And your favorite song on the new Culture Club album?

‘‘It changes all the time. I like ‘God Thank You Woman’ and ‘Reasons’ a lot.”

Do you remember those old Battle Of The Bands they used to have with you, Wham! and Duran Duran? Did they bother you?

‘‘No, because we used to win them most of the time! It’s a shame about Wham!, isn't it?

What’s happening to all the good bands? George Michael is brilliant, he really is. Duran Duran? They had that look, didn’t they—that Anthony Price look. But Culture Club was a bunch of real oddities. If you picked four people off the street they couldn’t look more different than the individual members of Culture Club. There was Duran Duran and there was us: they represented the good life and the things you couldn’t have, the things that you fantasized about—fast cars and yachts and women and the glamorous life—and Culture Club were like sort of a rag-bag, the things that you can have with just a bit of imagination. The real side of things.”