Culture Club "Live" at Wembley Stadium, 2016 (Rock Fuel Media, PBS, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, June 8) I got home from the Bears San Diego den party soon enough to watch the second KPBS screening of a live concert film from the band Culture Club at Wembley Stadium in London in 2016 – and my husband Charles got home from work in time to join me. He’d previously noted that the only reason he’d have to want to watch the Culture Club reunion was if the Black woman backup singer who’d duetted with Boy George on the original recording of “Church of the Poison Mind” was still there – which, fortunately, she was. I actually got to see Culture Club live in 1985 (or was it 1987?) when they were touring in support of their third album, Waking Up with the House on Fire, which was generally considered to be the weakest of the three after the explosively successful debut, Kissing to Be Clever (1983), and the even bigger Colour by Numbers (1984). I had a picture-disc version of Colour by Numbers which I bought at the old independent Tasha’s Music City record store downtown. I’d been warned that picture discs didn’t sound as good as conventional ones because they had to be pressed on clear instead of black vinyl (polyvinyl chloride is normally clear; the reason most records are black is they add graphite as a lubricant to reduce surface noise), but the picture disc sounded fine to me and I wanted it because I liked the cover art better than the one on the conventional black-vinyl album.

I hadn’t heard anything by Culture Club in years so I’d forgotten what a great pop-rock band they were, and despite Boy George having a crisis with polyps on his vocal cords in 2014 his voice had held up surprisingly well even though he had to transpose many of the songs to lower keys. (He certainly weathered this sort of vocal crisis much better than Elton John did!) The edition of Culture Club that played Wembley in 2016 included all four members of the original band – singer “Boy” George O’Dowd, guitarist and keyboard player Roy Hay, bassist Mikey Craig and drummer Jon Moss – two years before George definitively fired Moss from the band and had to pay him a settlement. (It’s unclear just how much money Moss got but he asked for nearly £200,000, about $250,000). The relationship between Boy George and Jon Moss had been fraught for years because the two were lovers during Culture Club’s mid-1980’s heyday even though Moss was otherwise totally straight. Boy George was then playing the sort of double game with his own sexuality, insisting publicly that he was Bisexual and all his truly important emotional relationships had been with women – until he got sued for paternity and he won by persuading the court that he couldn’t have fathered a child because he’d never had sex with a woman in his life.

Boy George has had a really up-and-down life, including not only the typical rock star’s bout with drug addiction (alcohol and heroin) but a weird bust in 2008 in which a hustler accused him of false imprisonment, kidnapping and assault. Boy George’s defense was that he’d hired the man for a consensual S/M scene, but he ended up with a 15-month sentence; he was allowed to serve just four months before he was paroled to house arrest. The Wembley concert as shown on PBS (as usual, the concert was divided into segments with those God-awful PBS “pledge breaks” in between, and five of the 15 songs Culture Club performed were deleted from the TV version and were only available on the special edition you could get for a hefty contribution to your local PBS station) consisted of 10 songs, plus repeat performances of two of them, one at the beginning and one at the end. The one at the beginning was Marc Bolan’s T. Rex hit “Bang a Gong (Get It On)” from the 1971 album Electric Warrior, which was shown at the beginning with Boy George doing voiceovers on top of it. Fortunately it was repeated during the concert as the last song Culture Club played. According to Boy George’s Wikipedia page, Bolan was one of the biggest influences on him, along with David Bowie and Siouxsie, and he used it as the song on which he introduced the band members, not only the main members but also the hired hands, including the three incredible Black women backup singers and the extra guys playing harmonica and horns.

One thing I’d forgotten about Culture Club is how much they were influenced by Jamaican music, not only reggae but also ska; though they had a three-piece horn section (trumpet, trombone and sax), the trombonist was featured much more than the other two were and played some ska-esque solos on a number of the songs. The show opened with “Church of the Poison Mind” from Colour by Numbers in a stunning performance that featured the original second vocalist, Helen Watts (though she wasn’t mixed as well at Wembley as she’d been on the record), and then the band performed “It’s a Miracle” and one of the big hits from Kissing to Be Clever, “I’ll Tumble 4 Ya.” (That’s the song’s official title; apparently Boy George and his bandmates were using Prince’s strategy of naming their songs with abbreviations and single letters or numbers that has led my husband Charles to call Prince “the first texter.”) The next song was really a surprise: “Everything I Own,” which I remembered from the day but not as Boy George’s first solo hit. Indeed, I didn’t associate it with him at all, and during the show’s closing credits I realized why. It was actually a song by David Gates, recorded in the 1970’s with his soft-rock band Bread, and I’d only heard it in Gates’s version; Boy George made it his first solo single in 1987 and it actually topped the British charts, but went nowhere in the U.S.

Then the band swung into more familiar Culture Club territory: “Time (Clock of the Heart),” “Miss Me Blind,” “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” (which Boy George said he actually tried to talk his record company out of releasing as a single; instead it became an international hit and the band’s breakthrough song both in Britain and the U.S.), “Victims” (a quite intense and moving slow ballad and not at all what we’d expect from Culture Club) and what was introduced as the band’s biggest hit of all time, “Karma Chameleon.” The Wembley telecast was produced by Barry Summers and directed by Mark Ritchie, and overall it captured the look and feel of a Culture Club concert even though their music, though pleasant and infectious enough, hardly rises to the quality level of the best rock of the 1980’s or the two decades before. It was a real shock to hear Marc Bolan’s “Bang a Gong (Get It On)” and realize how much better it is as a song than any of Culture Club’s originals, even though Boy George and company came only within hailing distance of Bolan’s taut energy and vivid intensity. Of course it was amusing in its own way to watch one of the world’s most famous Gay men try to sound convincing as he sang, “I want you to be my girl.”