Rehabilitation of Boy George

Once Boy George had it all – not just the music career, but national treasure status to boot. Heroin dependency followed by cocaine addiction sabotaged all of that, culminating last year in an ugly court case that seemed to defy credibility, which saw George convicted of false imprisonment and led to him spending four months in jail. Here, in his first major interview since his release, he talks to Alan Franks about prison, privacy, love and regret


can’t say I was looking forward to meeting Boy George. Those photos of him two years ago, bloated, brutish and sinister; the arrest for imprisoning a Norwegian man in his London flat, manacled to the wall and to the bed, and beating him; his own jailing for the crime. He had become so unrecognisable that it was hard to believe he had once been the pretty and effeminate singer with the massively popular Eighties band Culture Club. Stars lose their looks, from Elvis Presley to Adam Ant, but there never was such a dramatic morphing as this, all the way across the spectrum from beauty to beast, sweet little thing to nasty piece of work.
For days before our meeting, the negotiations were dogged by the tedious rock’n’roll foreplay that often happens on such occasions. Boy George, said his representatives, did not want to talk if the whole thing was going to be about “my prison hell” (their phrase). He served four months of a 15-month sentence, until May this year, in HMP Edmunds Hill, a category C prison in Suffolk, and then wore an electronic tag for a further three. He is, in a word, out, and back in the public eye, if he was ever truly away. He has product to shift, namely himself and his new moves in the entertainment business – the imminent opening of a no-booze, no-drugs club called Godspeed, the return of his West End show in December and a live performance at the fashionable Proud Camden in London.
When we do meet, it is in the old stables that form part of Proud, a gallery cum music venue, where the matter of his crime and punishment stands like an elephant in the stall. So it’s a surprise when he says: “The thing about Pentonville [where he spent the first six days of his sentence] is that when you go in there, you are going into Scum [the violent 1979 film about life in a borstal]. You’ve got the classic picture of the balconies and the banging cups. I knew what to expect. I was quite hostile.” Hostile to the other prisoners? “Yes. Very hostile. And very grumpy. Not because I felt that way particularly, but because I felt it required that. The situation required me to be a bit feisty, a bit don’t-f***-with-me. I’d heard it all before. I’ve grown up with all that name-calling. I can’t walk down the street without someone calling out, ‘Karma chameleon.’ [Culture Club’s 1983 hit single.] That’s sweet; that doesn’t bother me.”
The 48-year-old singer hasn’t spoken publicly before about his prison experiences, but he is so quick off the mark in doing so now that there’s barely been time to take in the present look of the man. Something’s changed. He was always a chameleon himself, a professional one like his idol David Bowie, but the alteration in him looks far more profound than a shift of image. He cuts a very different figure now to the one on display at his trial and conviction at Snaresbrook Crown Court in December last year. He’s lost weight: he looks firm, and astoundingly solid. It’s more the set of a builder, which his late father was, than of a New Romantic, however middle-aged. He carries himself like someone who reckons he’s useful. But it’s in the face that the big change has happened. That awful frame of raddled flesh has fallen away to unveil the old androgynous expression of the young Boy George: hard little imp. His eyes twinkle with a weird but rather benign mischief, and there are times when he can barely talk for overjoyed laughter.

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