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Boy George- Fighting, Fashion & Fun- Punk Is Just A Word
“I never believed I was defined by my clothes, it was just a look and an attitude which felt comfortable to me, with my background, growing up in suburbia as a homosexual. That spiky punk attitude felt right.”
Like his great hero Davie Bowie and erstwhile contemporary Madonna, Boy George remains both iconic and a genuine global superstar, famed as much for his gender-bending seminal pop star persona as he is for his music. Unlike Bowie and Madonna, he’s increasingly returned to his underground, club scene origins, establishing himself as a top mainstream house DJ in recent years, and more interestingly, becoming a key player on London’s new electro scene. A fixture at Nag, Nag, Nag (hisTaboo costume designer Mike Nichols is Jonny Slut’s long term best mate) he’s virtually come full circle, following the DIY punk ethics of the 70s that first made him rich.
“You either have that punk attitude or you don’t,” says George, chatting across a table in his ultra-comfortable Hampstead mansion.
“It’s about the idea being more important than thinking ‘what am I going to get out of it?’ Lots of people say to me ‘You’re only like that because you’ve got money’ but I was always like that in the past and have never been any different. The fact that I’ve got money makes no difference, whatsoever.”
Putting his words into practise he’s currently pouring time, energy (and considerable amounts of his own money) into a myriad of DIY projects, including starring in a new Broadway production of his stage show Taboo, a series of 7” own label electro singles by his new band The Twin, plus launching his own fashion collection Y. The samples for Y are scattered around his house, as are his regular team of make-up artists, designers and support staff, beavering away on photo shoots, garments and the like, as he chats to Jonty Skrufff. The samples themselves are also distinctly DIY in style, cut and pasted handprints decorating mini skirts, shirts and 70s style ties. Not that they’re intended as particularly serious statements of intent.
“What I always found was that the people who really, really believed in their clothes, who went round really acting the part, were the ones who ended up in suburbia with six kids,” George laughs.
“Because punk is just a word. What happens with those types is that they end up becoming defined by their clothes, so ten years later they’re following a different style and they’ve become something else, with another label.”
Skrufff: What does punk mean to you these days?
Boy George: “In the beginning, punk was just another form of showing off- the people that used to be into Bowie moved into punk, simply because it was another wardrobe and another form of exhibitionism. People like me were quite young back then and the only real political aspect to it was the idea of being anti-social and a bit nonchalant about everything- it was all about being bored and hating the world. But it was also exciting and such fun. But like most things it soon became everything it set out not to be, and started adopting all these student concerns and all got a bit political; there was too much theory chucked at it which pushed out the fun. People started going round stamping on flowers and kicking over fences, which wasn’t what it was about at all- all that ‘let’s spit at each other and punch people’ attitude came in.”
I remember when punk started getting really mainstream being at ULU (London University’s concert hall) for a Gang Of Four gig. The Goth thing was just starting and I was dressing with more makeup and frilly stuff and I remember somebody tipping a pint of blackcurrant and lager on my head. It wasn’t good; my hair was ruined! You started to get that hostility, with the serious punks looking at you with your make-up and liner, giving out all that ‘what are you doing here?’ attitude. That’s where the New Romantic thing came from, because we moved on and found our own clubs.”
Skrufff: You famously referred to yourself as a drag queen in the mid 80s, at the Grammys in the States, did you see yourself as a drag queen during the New Romantic era?
Boy George: “I’ve never really thought of dressing up as being ‘in drag’, I do use that term but it could mean anything, it could refer to me wearing a suit. When I made that comment at the Grammys, saying ‘Thank you America, you know a good drag queen when you see one’, I didn’t mean it in the way they took it. It was more like ‘drag- whatever’. We’d been waiting hours to do a satellite link up, I was bored and came out with that comment just to be camp; I wasn’t being political or anything. It ended my career in America, though every drag queen in America loves me so I’m quite happy I said it.”
Skrufff: Does punk mean anything to you today?
Boy George: “The sound of punk, that immediate unprocessed sound, is very exciting, though a lot of the bands today trying to do that seem a bit too thought out, a bit too considered, to me. Punk was the reason I became a musician, I’d be seeing all these bands with great vibes about them who didn’t have great singers. Prior to that, being in a band was about paying your dues, touring and building up a fan base, then punk came along and it was like ‘fuck that, all you have to do is look great, have a bit of attitude and know a few chords’. It suddenly became a real possibility to be in a band. Before, as a teenager, I’d be going to careers advice talks at school and I’d be telling them ‘I want to be a singer or maybe I could get involved in theatrical costumes’ and they’d be like ‘Mr O’Dowd, you must be more practical, those sorts of jobs are unobtainable.’ Then suddenly I found myself putting a band together and it was very exciting. To me the punk thing still symbolizes that DIY culture thing, that ‘yes, you can do it, anything is possible’ vibe and that’s why I loved it.”
Skrufff: You used to walk around dressed extremely provocatively, did you get attacked much?
Boy George: “I didn’t really get attacked until there was a front page article in The Sun about punks fighting teds (Teddy boys). That’s when it started to get violent, prior to that people thought I was dressing up for rag week (Brit culture ed- student charity fund raising event characterised by students doing pranks). When something doesn’t have a label, people don’t tend to be so aggressive, once you say I’m a punk, or this or that, people then have something to attack. That’s when people started punching and kicking you. I blame Malcolm (McClaren), for all that- a troublemaker (chuckling). After that article, getting from my Mother’s house to the train station became like running the gauntlet, it was always terrifying- but I always did it. I thought ‘Fuck it, I’m not letting anyone dictate what I wear’. My Dad always used to say ‘If he wants to go out dressed like that, let him get beat up, see if I care’.”
Skrufff: Muzik magazine in on of their last issues published telephone threats from you saying you’d come round and beat them up if they wrote about you again, did you really do that?
Boy George: “Yeah I did, I was just about to fly to Moscow, I think I’d taken a couple of Temazepans (tranquillisers) and I was tripping out. I bought a copy of the magazine at the airport and I was like ‘Why don’t they just leave me alone?’ Don’t write about me!’ I don’t court the media, I go out and do my own thing and I’m really happy the tabloids don’t usually write about me, I wish they’d all just fuck off and leave me alone. They’re always saying ‘washed up and sad and desperate’, so don’t write about me.”
Skrufff: Do you take media criticism personally?
Boy George: “Yeah, of course I do, I find it really insulting. But they’re always trying to perpetuate this idea that I don’t do anything, that I’m a sad washed up old pop star, who just does a bit of DJing at the weekend. Fuck off, leave me alone; I’ve never been so busy in my life! I’ve got three albums on the go and a clothing empire to run. It annoys me because the whole thing is about lazy observations and lazy assumptions and it’s very British. It’s so fucking British to kick people. The big problem for me is that I’m considered to be anti-industry by the music industry. If people don’t hear about you or see you on TV, they think you’re in a coma, or sitting at home watching old 80s videos.. I think there’s so much potential with the internet. There’s none of that panic you used to have with bands, where it’s all fitted into slots, of touring, promotion and record releases. With the net I can spend months on projects, that panic of ‘I’ve got to keep up with my career’ has gone. I don’t have that feeling of ‘I’ve got to get this record out now or it’ll be over’ feeling anymore.”
Skrufff: What inspired your electro track Here Come The Girls?
Boy George: “Here Come The Girls has been done for a while and came out of doing Taboo. The basic situation for me in this country is that I don’t get played on Radio 1 and haven’t been played by them for 15 years. You find yourself compromising and compromising again because you think ‘if I do this or that, maybe they’ll play the record’, Then when they still don’t, you start to think ‘Why don’t I just do what I want to do?’ I was getting really frustrated with that Radio 1 issue, and also with being signed to a major label and having to go through the normal channels and felt that I was wasting my energy and time. Because in that system, you know before the record’s even come out whether it’s going to be a hit or not, whether shops have stocked it, it’s so depressing. You’ve made an album then before it’s even been released you know it’s not going to do anything, so you’re like ‘Why am I doing this? It’s frustrating and it’s not fulfilling, in a creative way.
I decided a while ago that I wanted to change things and started doing stuff by myself and working with people with different attitudes. Throughout much of the 90s, everything was about money; you could sell a dance record for 20 grand (US$35,000). So everyone you worked with was really greedy and wanted to know what they were going to get paid before they’d even done anything. I hate that, I hate people that put money first so started finding people on the same level as me, that wanted to do things just because they wanted to do them, to be creative. There are people out there like that, once you start looking you do find people on your wave length, that was the beginning of The Twin. It’s about doing things in a low rent manner, not spending loads of money on videos and that kind of thing. So I started spending more time thinking about ideas rather than ‘will MTV broadcast it?’
Skrufff: Do you feel there’s a new club scene forming around this new electro music?
Boy George: “The fact that dance magazines are slagging off electro is always a good sign. They’re saying things like ‘it’s the emperor’s new clothes’ but what they’re forgetting is that without electro, there wouldn’t be any house. It all comes from bands like Cabaret Voltaire, Human League and Kraftwerk and that’s where house music’s roots are. Part of the reason electro has become so popular is because even R&B has become so ubiquitous right now. R&B has become part of mass culture, whereas before it was unobtainable. If I go back to Eltham (South East London) all my little nieces and nephews are into R&B and they all want to be black. So anybody who wants anything alternative has moved over to electronic music, stuff like Adult, music with that punk vibe which has a dance element too. It’s silly irrelevant music.
Having said that, there’s also a lot of crap out there too- almost anybody can stand up there behind a drumbeat and go ‘I am a robot’. You still need to be discerning. You can tell when something is honest. I like someone like Larry Tee’s attitude to it all, he’ll say ‘there’s this great band in New York and they’re so wrong’, he’s got that vibe of appreciating a certain fragile quality to a sound, which I love.”
Skrufff: How do you view today’s house culture?
Boy George: “It’s an old boy’s network now isn’t it? - It’s about whom you know- you’ve got to be friends with Pete Tong. It’s another world that I feel I’ve been part of for a long time but I’m not really part of it because I don’t play by the same rules as every one else in it. House culture there as a medium but I’m much more excited by the electroclash thing- it’s much more fun, it’s DIY and it doesn’t rely on huge advances for singles. Electroclash is great, it’s much better.”
The Twin’s first two singles Here Come The Girls and Electro Hetero are out now on More Protein Records. (Here Comes The Girls is by The Twin versus The Replicant and introducing C33X).
http://www.boy.george.net
by: Jonty Skrufff (Skrufff.com)
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