Culture Club stirs up shock waves with some smooth tunes
Hold on, take it easy. The sex stuff is coming up in a minute. First, listen to the music.
Culture Club is the hottest band of the moment from England or, very likely, from anywhere else. The group’s success is almost as wild as the opera poof masquerades of its lead singer, Boy George. Consider: three Top Ten singles from Culture Club’s first album, Kissing to Be Clever, which sold more than a million copies; a fourth, fresh single, Church of the Poison Mind, already snug at No. 11, with another, Karma Chameleon, ready to take off; and a new album, Colour by Numbers, storming the LP charts.
Culture Club whips up a smooth, seamless sound that proudly picks every pocket of pop for inspiration: reggae, soul, country and western, mainstream rock. The results are whimsical, joyous and occasionally mysterious detonations of apparently casual inspiration. Very cool, very catchy and, to borrow a favorite word of the lead singer’s, never naf. “Naf’ stands for out of it, rotten, done over and overdone—and not, clearly, for Culture Club, which seems, at this somewhat disjointed juncture on the hit parade, to define the very core of contemporary pop.
Part of the soul of this success, a good deal of the inspiration and most of the attention have been laid at the swinging door of Boy George. Says Percussionist Jon Moss, at 26 the band’s elder statesman: “Boy George is our anchor. You’re never going to be able to spot a Culture Club record by just the music. It will be George’s voice that identifies us.” The voice is an excellent instrument, gliding over notes like a Slinky toy that springs downstairs on its own power. As the saloon singers of an older generation might have put it, the kid’s got a great set of pipes.
He is, in fact, a regular Pan. A little like the guy with the hoofs, a lot like the flyboy who wouldn’t grow up and, yes, apparently pansexual too. This last aspect of Culture Club has caused many titters, generated a lot of speculation and produced countless photos of Boy George, resplendent and unrepentant, winking or moue-ing in four-color splendor. His wardrobe is a tip-to-toe tutorial in the applied art of sartorial shock: coats that Scaramouche might have worn had Scaramouche been a color-blind butcher, a rabbi’s black felt hat and unorthodox ties that seem to glow radioactively. His makeup is heavy: mascara (more under the eye than over), raspberry-colored lips, lots of foundation and cantilevered eyebrows. “I try to make my eyes look like Elizabeth Taylor’s,” he says. “And really, I have one picture of myself that looks so much like her.”
The paradox is intriguing: the soulful voice and the drop-dead campiness. It also invites a few questions, which Boy George, 22, can handle expertly. “I’m not gay,” he says. “I’m as gay as I am heterosexual. O.K., I’ve experimented with both sexes, but I’m not a limp-wristed floozy and I’m not a transvestite. Transvestites show tits, man. I’m 6 ft., I’m a man, and I have no delusions.” As for his appearance, Boy also says that he has “experimented” a good deal but “I’m just convinced that this is the way I look best.”
George Alan O’Dowd (the nickname is of recent vintage) has been conducting his researches into cultural outrage ever since he began appearing at Sunday school at age 13 wearing chapeaux and platform shoes. His family moved from one working-class area of London to another, but when George at 15 showed up for school with white plastic sandals, a tie cut in half and resewed by his mum and a virulent orange dye job, he was placed in a class for incorrigibles. The class was supervised by a psychologist, but the headmaster preferred a tough therapy (the birch rod) and so George dropped out of school. He roamed the London club scene, and by 1980 had done some singing with Bow Wow Wow, a wild and woolly pop act contrived by Malcolm McLaren, who also perpetrated the Sex Pistols. By then George had become what a current press release calls “one of the nation’s most prominent eccentrics,” and a photo of Boy in full regalia caught the eye of Mikey Craig, then 20, a bass player looking for a band of his own. Craig maneuvered a meeting and Boy signed on. So did Jon Moss and, eventually, Guitarist-Keyboardist Roy Hay. Then the band started playing and writing.
“I think the hardest thing in the world is to write a good pop song,” says Moss. “If you ask me, it’s much easier to write music that appeals to a small group of people. Yet we’re not a typical pop band. You can’t categorize us. We don’t follow any one musical line. Every single we’ve released has been different.” That, in part, is because everyone in the band has a hand in the songwriting and a different handle on music. Boy George, for example, reveres soul and what he calls “fat black” music (“I love Pearl Bailey”), while Roy likes Steely Dan.
This cultural confluence is worked out on tour, where the band members try out song fragments on one another, and in the studio. George supplies most of the lyrics, Roy many of the harmonies (he stashed some Beach Boys tributes into an odd corner of Church of the Poison Mind). “Mikey has a lot of the conceptual feelings about the songs,” says George, “and Jon gives them shape. All four of us work on every song together.” The four-man core of the band is often augmented by several other instrumentalists, and by Vocalist Helen Terry, who has been described by no less than Michael Jackson as “the best soul singer since Aretha.”
“It’s multicultural,” Moss says. “I’m Jewish, George is Catholic and dresses up, Mikey is black and Roy is like a typical English boy. All the creativity is spontaneous.” Combustible too. Culture Club is not only the band of the moment. It seems quite capable of making that moment linger a while, well past the breaking point when mascara can get in the way of the music.
—By Jay Cocks.
Reported by William Blaylock/Nice
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