Culture Club Young Guns Go for It

*

This programme contains strong language

# Young guns having some fun

-# Young guns!

-Heads up!

-Go for it! Young guns!

-Heads up!

-# Young guns!

-Heads up!

-Go for it! Young guns!

-Heads up!

-#

Culture Club were one of the biggest-selling pop bands of the '80s,

with a seemingly endless supply of catchy hit singles on both sides of the Atlantic.

# Desolate loving in your eyes You made my life so sweet... #

Their singer, Boy George, may have emerged from clubland as a freaky gender-bender,

but he was quickly adopted by everyone as the Queen Mum of pop.

The creative drive of Culture Club lay in the love affair between Boy George and drummer Jon Moss.

That was the very life of the band, the very heart of the band.

Much as I hated it at the time,

it was actually...the band.

NEW SPEAKER: I fell in love with George.

I was a bit cautious - "Oh, God, I'm queer!"

# ..I had to fight to make it mine

# That religion You could sink it neat

# Just move your feet And you'll feel fine... #

We were living the great lie. Every time we did a press conference,

someone could ask, "Are you sleeping with Jon?"

If they had, George would've said yes.

# In the church of the poison mind... #

I wanted people to know we were going out, but it was obvious that Jon didn't.

Jon didn't know what he wanted to be, where he was.

It's a side of my life and a part of my life that I'd like to resolve.

# In the church of the poison mind

# In the church of the poison mind

# In the church of the poison mind... #

George O'Dowd was born into a working-class Irish family in Eltham, Southeast London.

From an early age, he sought to escape its narrow, suburban horizons.

I used to get on the bus from about the age of 13, maybe younger, and take the bus to the West End.

And you'd be in this kind of, you know, other world,

where you could do what you wanted, without any parental control.

We're just coming up to Charing Cross station.

It was, you know, the link.

When you got to Charing Cross, you knew you were out of reach.

There was this tribe of people that didn't fit in.

Most of us had similar upbringings.

We had subservient mothers, volatile fathers.

The London club scene is like a surrogate mother to me. It's where I spent most of my teenage years,

flitting from one club to another.

I decided that I wanted to be one of those people that people pointed at when you went into a club.

You could become famous just for looking good.

You didn't necessarily have to do anything.

In the early '80s,

you merely had to BE.

If you could be, it was sufficient.

So here was this New Romantic tribe that...

..was born out of a desire to dress up in a kind of dandy fashion.

It became a sort of way of just experimenting with your sexuality.

A boy who could look like a girl who looked like a boy,

or a girl who looked like a boy who was looking like a girl.

NEW SPEAKER: It must've been five in the morning.

I looked out the window and there's the weirdest collection you've seen.

Green hair, pink hair, yellow hair, standing up, like that. I thought, "What the hell is that?!"

-She made us toast, though.

-He went, "These are my friends, Mum."

I thought, "Oh, my God!"

But, you know, once you talked to them and got to know them, they were a great bunch of kids.

MALCOLM McCLAREN: How could they turn the look into a product?

So, the notion of making music was a notion of creating product.

# Go wild! Go wild in the country

# Where snakes in the grass are absolutely free... #

George made his singing debut when Malcolm McLaren drafted him into his latest project, Bow Wow Wow,

to share vocals with the 15-year-old Annabella.

George went on stage and sang this song to a rather partisan crowd who all booed him.

After he came off, Vivienne said, "He looks like some queer version of Archbishop Makarios."

I, er, felt that was a somewhat, er, cruel criticism.

However, I had to get rid of him.

Malcolm put a picture of me in the NME saying I'd been fired.

That was my first notice of the fact that I'd been fired.

Which was good. Then I met Mikey.

DUB REGGAE MUSIC PLAYS

I was born in this house. We were a basic, working-class family.

Mum and Dad did everything they could to provide for us.

There were seven children.

It wasn't easy.

I remember, as a ten-year-old,

Mum and Dad would throw these kind of blues parties here, right here in this house,

in order to get some extra money.

And, er, my dad's cousin would bring in this enormous sound system

that could fill a hall, much less a tiny living room downstairs.

I'd be sitting on top of a giant speaker box,

thundering out bass until the early hours of the morning.

I just brought the whole Jamaican musical vibe, introduced that to George.

George was delighted with all that. He loved it,

embraced it immediately.

I said, "Look, can we get a band together?" And he said, "Yeah. Why not?"

Mikey said, "We need a drummer."

I said I'd met a drummer, as if Jon was the only drummer in the world, but he was quite cute.

When I was 15, I went out with the editor of My Guy.

I went to his office and there was a pin-up of Jon Moss.

Jon Moss was pin-up of the week in My Guy. That's when I first saw Jon.

I saw Jon on the King's Road and Kirk said, "He was in The Damned."

I found his number and rang him up.

I was brought up in Hampstead by a fairly wealthy, middle-class family.

Thanks, Mum and Dad.

I went to Highgate School.

My parents didn't want me to go to university or to do A levels.

When I was 14, I had to go and work at one of his shops in the West End,

clean the windows, whatever.

There was always that work ethic which bore me in good stead. I've got a lot to thank him for, for that.

After leaving school at 16, Jon spent brief but unsuccessful stints in a succession of punk bands,

including The Clash, The Damned and Adam And The Ants.

He then checked onto a course of exegesis, a cultish American form of motivational therapy.

Exegesis was originally done as a training seminar for salesmen.

He said, "Why are you here?" I said, "I want to be a famous musician."

I thought, "Blimey! Where'd that come from?"

That was really what I wanted. I wanted to move on.

He said, "How are you gonna achieve that?" I said, "I wanna concentrate more, be less self-indulgent."

And it worked. I came out going, "Yes! I'm gonna do it!"

It worked, really. I promise you.

I saw this guy wearing Vivienne Westwood boots, purple pantaloons and a Vivienne Westwood top,

dyed red hair and the make-up. I just thought, "Bloody hell! What is that?!

"Fuck, I've got a crush on this guy."

The minute Jon met me, he knew he was onto something. I don't think he ever thought about NOT joining.

He was in!

Like a rabbit on a greyhound track.

'Jon just wanted success, really.'

George and I had tons of ideas but didn't know how to put them together,

how to fit the pieces together, but Jon did.

He had that kind of energy that was needed to make the whole thing work.

Jon wanted to go in an out-and-out pop direction and that's what we did.

And, er...I'm glad for it.

JON MOSS: Roy turned up. He had aubergine hair.

He'd been in a band called Russian Bouquet. I thought, "Fuckin' hell, man, no!"

But he was great.

He had a good haircut. That was the important thing.

The cultural differences were amazing. He made the square.

MUSIC: "White Boy" by Culture Club

This is Canvey Island, the place for sun, sea and piracy for the Essex youth.

There was a club called the Goldmine

and it was the centre of jazz-funk, baggy jeans, coloured sweaters and, er...

..Mark II Cortinas and Essex girls!

And about 100 yards down the road is where Roy lost his virginity

in the back of a Ford Anglia.

I don't even remember her name. Isn't that sad?

Music was damn good. I got into jazz-funk music and that whole thing,

so our first single, White Boy, is very much a jazz-funk record.

It's white-boy soul.

In terms of musical contribution to Culture Club,

I think myself and Mikey had quite a deep knowledge of that stuff,

along with Mikey's, obviously, reggae and sort of Motown influences.

We brought a lot of that to it.

George was the pop guy. Jon had...

Jon basically knew how a band should work.

There's no point going into business without a commercial eye.

The difference was that I met three other people who really wanted to get on with it and do something.

They had a pop sensibility.

The name Culture Club trumpeted the band's varied cultural and musical backgrounds.

But for George and Jon, it was more than the music.

I fancied Jon, but didn't realise that he fancied me.

He went to America to visit relatives and he sent me a couple of postcards.

I went into his girlfriend's shop in Covent Garden and said, "I got a postcard from Jon."

She was like, "Well, he hasn't written to me." She was fuming!

When he arrived back, they had a fight. 10 o'clock that evening,

he arrived at my flat with scratch marks on his face.

Caroline said, "You're in love with George. Go and fucking see him!"

I said, "What did you say?" He said, "I told her I love you."

That's where it started - a downward spiral!

Without that, George wouldn't have written the lyrics he did, cos they were really in love.

It was exciting. I'd go out with him, kiss him in clubs. I wasn't bothered, because to me it wasn't a problem,

because George was so different.

We were like a show-biz couple!

We helped each other. George showed me something I'd never seen in my life -

a way of being, his brazenness and how confident he was. It was the happiest time of my life.

# ..I need the distractions Fire desire

# Love and reaction He must be someone... #

Jon was always going on about,

"Don't worry, boys. We'll get on Top Of The Pops and have a number one."

It seemed like he was fucking with destiny and knew it would happen.

For the first time on Top Of The Pops, it's Culture Club.

# Give me ti-ime

# To realise my crime

# Let me love and steal... #

'I didn't think everyone was gonna go mad over me.'

I thought we'd have a full-on freak following -

boys in make-up, girls, ex-punks.

You know, freaky girls and boys.

That was our audience, and overnight, after being on TV, we became pop pin-ups.

That's certainly not what I planned.

# Do you really want to hurt me?

# Do you really want to make me cry...? #

I knew that they just had to see the band...George in particular.

I told Mum I was in a band with him. She said, "Don't tell your father."

George brought himself down from being an out-and-out THING, queen of the night,

into some sort of image, really quite beautiful.

He even had that sort of shape.

He was like a sort of living logo.

# Do you really want to hurt me?

# Do you really want to make me cry...? #

But in America, we did exactly the opposite,

marketing the single in a plain bag.

The idea was, we don't know about America, we don't know if they'll go for it.

The black radio stations thought it was a reggae band

and all the white stations thought it was a girl,

sort of flirting with black music.

So this huge audience bought it

and just before it hit number one, we released it with the sleeve.

They found out it was a guy, but it was too late, cos the kids are going, "Oh, great!"

With the money beginning to roll in,

Jon was entrusted to set up the finances of Culture Club along sound business practices.

I've seen so many bands, they're all friends and everything's great,

they get a deal and they start arguing, especially about the publishing. Who gets what?

I said, "Right. We split everything equally." I set up a holding company.

Money would come in, a certain amount would be held for expenses,

and the rest would be distributed four times a year equally.

You'd get £25,000, £1 million... My suggestion was you put half in a tax account and keep half.

MUSIC: "It's A Miracle" by Culture Club

MALCOLM McLAREN: In the '80s, it was SUCCESS, and it ruled out failure.

That whole notion of pragmatism over romanticism really kicked in.

Having a career was something they had to think about

and Boy George became this mammoth phenomenon around the world

because he...he built an image that sold to all generations.

The notion of cross-dressing

actually didn't create a threat.

It did the exact opposite. It turned him into a teddy bear of soul music,

something that the mums and dads, who NEVER go out,

joined with the younger generation, who COULDN'T go out,

and together they formed, probably, a pop phenomenon.

NEW SPEAKER: It was a big landmark when they got to number one.

The tabloids were pretty homophobic at that time. I remember them doing, "Is it a boy? Is it a girl?"

They wanted to attack him for what he was doing to the nation's youth, but, at the same time...

Yes, he was a gender-bender, but he was like a pantomime dame.

That was the beauty of George.

I think a lot of people went out to hate him, but he won them over,

simply by his charm and by putting himself down.

I think part of it was my ordinariness,

the fact that I was from Southeast London. My background played a big part in it because,

in the same way as the Spice Girls have a council-estate glamour, it makes it much more accessible.

So on the one hand, I looked odd,

but my personality was ordinary. I could just chat about anything.

He loved seeing himself in the paper, even if it was shoving a hot dog down his throat.

"Boy George ISN'T a vegetarian!" Whatever.

He developed... It was like they gave him the drug for press

and he just wanted more.

And there were times when we had band decisions -

we've gotta stop the press, it's crazy, it becomes too much.

George would phone up Rick Sky and go, "I wanna do an interview cos the band said I can't."

Yeah, I did love it. I enjoyed it. It was fun.

I think that, looking back, I made people's jobs very easy.

You know, I mean, most pop stars have nothing to say, they act like it's all a drag.

It wasn't for me. I loved it.

Boy George and Culture Club were a gift to the tabloids.

It was when pop music became very important to those papers to capture a young market.

Instead of royalty or politicians, they went big on pop stars.

George was never drab. Headlines just poured out of him.

And he knew what he was doing. It was almost as if he was seeing the headline himself in the Sun.

MIKEY: He was in the papers every day.

He went to everything. As he puts it, even the opening of a toilet seat.

He, of course, he embraced it

and he was there, you know, lapping it all up,

but, eventually, it overwhelmed him.

# Desert loving in your eyes all the way... #

With the release of the second album, Colour By Numbers, in 1983,

Culture Club established themselves as the biggest-selling band in the world.

# I'm a man who doesn't know How to sell a contradiction... #

The album spawned five massive, global hits

and George had become one of the world's most recognisable stars.

CHEERING AND SCREAMING

# You come and go

# You come and go... #

Boy George became bigger than Culture Club.

The hats took over from the music.

It was the band, then the band plus the singer,

then it was the singer and his hat, then it was just his hat(!)

With someone like Boy George, what do you expect? It became just Boy George.

You can't have everything. If it works a certain way, it does.

If you fight the natural way things are going, things will go wrong.

I've been talking to Elton John and George would walk in the room

and he's gone. "Hi, George!"

And when we're getting the award for best BAND, not best hat, not best pretty make-up,

but the BPI award for best British band in 1983,

we're walking into the place

and me, Jon and Mikey get pushed out of the way by the photographers.

I kicked a few, the fuckers. Bastards. You know, that got really frustrating,

because I knew how many hours I put in in the studio when George was off doing photo shoots.

Jon got 50% of the attention because he was my boyfriend.

If we did an interview with the NME, it would always be me and Jon.

Everything was me and Jon.

What angered both myself and I'm not sure, but probably Roy as well,

was that if you had something to broach with George, Jon would back him up and vice versa.

So you were fighting the two of them, always.

I felt excluded from decision making. It was done in the bedroom.

But all was not well in George and Jon's bedroom.

The blurred sexual identity which worked so well for Culture Club undermined their relationship.

# Victims we know so well

# They shine in your eyes When we kiss and tell

# Strange places we never see

# But you're always there Like a ghost in my dream... #

I'd never been out with a guy before, but with George it wasn't a guy, it was like this thing,

and it was his whole different area of life that I couldn't cope with.

I wasn't prepared for his world.

-George wasn't exactly a transvestite, but he was on the borders.

-Sure.

Not like these two(!)

People that go out with trannies are more screwed up than the trannies.

Blokes that go out with them kid themselves they're going out with a real woman and they're not queer.

But they're normally more screwed up than the trannies themselves.

Jon cheated on me with this girl called Sam,

who used to work in Maxwell's in Hampstead. I hated her.

I never trusted him after that.

He wasn't mature enough at the time.

He couldn't believe that when we argued, I'd walk off then phone him up saying I was sorry.

He was so used to the hard knocks, I don't think he could understand that someone could feel that way.

Maybe it's that weird thing where you wouldn't want anybody who was a friend of yours to be your friend.

You know? I think there was a touch of that.

One of the big problems was that I didn't think Jon really knew how to be intimate...at all.

At the end, it was only sex.

I couldn't just turn up at Jon's house. I had to make an appointment.

There was always this sense that he was hiding things from me.

George's asexual image was so central to the band's popularity

that any disclosure of the reality of George and Jon's relationship

ran counter to Jon's commercial instincts.

In this business, people don't really care what you do in bed.

It's show business, you're entertaining,

and there's no reason why people should know that.

You don't have to be totally open in that way, otherwise you'd be saying, "I fucked so-and-so in the toilet."

My image was so far from the reality.

I can remember playing at the Dominion Theatre and Jon and I having sex before I went on stage.

Here I was bouncing out on stage to all these little girls with dolls.

There was all these contradictions going on.

He didn't claim to be out. When he was questioned about his sexuality,

he said he preferred a cup of tea to sex,

so he was treading this strange line, this almost ambiguous line, and maybe he did that for Jon.

-This is a present.

-It's a teapot for me!

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

I read that you'd rather go to bed with a pot of tea than anything else.

-Not WITH a pot of tea.

-Have a pot of tea.

-Instead of going to bed.

RICK SKY: I was aware of the relationship George was having with Jon Moss.

You've got a creation here, of both George's and the media,

of a sexless, Widow Twankey, pantomime, eccentric star,

and talking about a gay love affair would've destroyed that.

You don't wanna take a shotgun to the golden goose.

I was never big on secrets,

which is why the whole experience of not really saying what I was

was quite tortuous for me...

because I'm not a secretive person, really.

MUSIC: "The War Song" by Culture Club

ROY: If they weren't getting on, it'd be like having a day in divorce court.

It could be hideous.

I remember George attacking Jon with a six-inch long hatpin, which could've been very nasty!

# War, war is stupid And people are stupid... #

I did hit George twice and broke my finger cos I didn't hit him properly.

I hit him properly the third time and then he was all nice to me.

We had some terrible fights.

They were beginning to sort of, er,

have more and more fights and more and more arguments

and I could tell that, you know, they weren't going to be together that much longer.

The pace at which things were happening was just frightening.

I felt that we could've slowed down.

We could've written a song with Stevie Wonder, we were so hot.

They probably knew that the whole thing could end at any minute, so we've gotta do as much as we can.

Unfortunately, the results were Waking Up With The House On Fire,

which I didn't think was a good album.

# Life will never be the same as it was again... #

I think a lot of it was to do with getting into drugs, for George.

I went round to Marilyn's place and he's smoking a joint.

I stopped smoking when I met George cos he didn't take anything.

I said, "What are you doing?" and he said, "So what."

He went from that to heroin in six months.

'I did my whole pop-star thing in reverse.'

When I should've been doing it, I was writing letters to fans,

but when the band fell apart, that's when I began to indulge in rock star excesses.

-BEEP

-off, darling!

When I realised he was on smack, I could not believe it.

I hated him for that, after all his anti-drug things.

I mean, dope, fair enough, but how can he get into heroin?

It was nothing to do with being unhappy... Well, that's up to him.

But to get into that and to allow people around you to... I don't know.

I was scared. I was dealing with a lunatic.

'The pop singer Boy George has been fined £250 for possessing heroin...'

Being an ordinary, working-class boy that became successful,

I think a lot of people were disappointed

that, you know, I'd thrown away this amazing opportunity.

It was terrible. I wasn't myself.

He drove his car into the back of my garage and I hit him with a hammer.

It was only a tiny one, a little staple hammer.

I was running down the street, 5am, with George with "Fuck me" written all over him,

chasing him down the street with this hammer, naked.

I got to the end of the street and went, "Hmm. Fuck."

I could see people looking out the window, "It's that pop group again."

It's funny now, but that period was just dreadful, a really bad vibe.

'An inquest opened today into the death of the American musician

'whose body was found at Boy George's London mansion...'

Just so many things had happened.

Three of my friends died, other people were getting sick,

another friend was rushed to hospital from an overdose.

It was like the end of the party.

Although the band limped on for a further 18 months, Culture Club were finished.

Boy George managed to kick his heroin habit and reinvented himself as a club DJ.

For the next 12 years, the band barely spoke.

The strange thing about those pop icons in the '80s was...

..they were part of a legion of disaffected youth that left home at the end of the '70s

and wanted to go back home by the middle of the '80s.

They wanted to tell mum and dad how they'd become successful.

Culture Club represents my ambition which I achieved, which was incredible, to be a pop star.

It sounds stupid. A successful musician, a teenybop idol - not bad.

Making money, buying my own house,

making my parents proud when they thought it was a waste of time,

being with someone like George, still being involved with him.

He's a totally... Whether he's good or bad, there's no-one like George.

I have met, worked with and loved a unique, original person.

And, er, that's enough, isn't it?

But strangely, that wasn't enough.

After 12 acrimonious years, out of the blue, the band decided to reform.

# Do you deal in black money?

# Do you deal in black money?

# Do you deal it? Do you deal in black money?

# Do you deal in black money...? #

MIKEY: I always thought that it would perhaps come back together again.

The was no announcement of the end of the band,

so it felt like it wasn't finished and there was unfinished business to attend to.

My first reaction to the reunion was, "I'm not doing it with Jon,"

cos the last time I saw Jon we had litigations and didn't speak.

The next time I saw him was when we were "reunited".

Sometimes it's hard, because things have been very spoiled.

Times that I thought were brilliant, I've now found out that he thought were terrible,

so how can I say that was a brilliant time? It doesn't work.

It's a shock to think that a whole period was a nightmare for someone and you thought it was wonderful.

So it's very hard to say what a wonderful time it was,

because that takes two people... in a relationship.

I think Jon really did love me and still loves me and I do love Jon.

He's SO funny. At times, Jon is the funniest man in the world.

Roy is... another complete psychopath,

but there's something really sweet about Roy.

I do really love Mikey as well. He's a bit of a rock, an important ingredient in Culture Club.

I do like them and sometimes there's no reason to like them.

I guess they feel the same about me.

Why-ay-ay-ay-yeah.

# Take a picture of tonight and keep it by your heart

# Love has left us memories There's no better way to part... #

JON: Culture Club are like a sort of English institution.

You know, George is Barbara Windsor. He'll say I'm Kenneth Williams.

Mikey... Who are you, Mikey? Dunno.

Roy's Jim Dale. It's Carry On Culture Club.

# ..I got me on my mind

# Oh-h, I...just wanna be loved

# Don't wanna fight you baby

# But I'm much too proud to say it loud

# I...just wanna be loved

# Don't wanna beg you baby

# But I'm much too proud to shout it out... #

Subtitles by Neil Gemmill BBC Scotland - 1998