I collect stuff. Old report cards, concert ticket stubs, Playbills, gig flyers, maps, trip diaries, postcards, pieces I’ve published and songs I’ve made, letters (love and otherwise), photos from travels and of people I’ve known. I hang on to these scraps and wisps, the detritus of what I’ve seen and done. I have a vision of one day turning it all into a proper scrapbook.
Boy George collects stuff too.
King of Queens, a pictorial autobiography of the chameleonic performer George O’Dowd, is the official scrapbook of the Boy George phenomenon. BG, the KQ, offers it as a limited-edition vanity project of fine quality and high-blown grandiosity, nothing less than fans should expect from Boy George.
It’s all here and PG-rated, from O’Dowd’s infancy (which seems to have consumed much of his life—“I’ve only grown up in the last five years,” he writes, “so I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking I was really grown up and I wasn’t at all.”) to the present day. The book holds concert posters, cards, notes, letters and pix, the scraps and wisps that evidence the life of this pop star, cultural iconoclast, post-punk fashionista, Broadway librettist, acid house DJ and convicted felon. It’s 250 oversized, high-gloss pages crammed with photos of stuff just like I collect in my life.
Only it’s, you know, Boy George stuff.
By the early ‘80s, punk music had punched disco in the face and beaten the sensitive singer-songwriter senseless. Anarchic and nihilistic, punk left the old guard staggering, on the ropes. But punk music offered little to fill the musical void it created, and the masses grew restive. When the Boy George Culture Club supernova exploded, it found a world starved for feel-good, listenable pop music.
Culture Club offered an antidote to punk, a reaction against DIY austerity and anti-fashion. It came with hummable melodies, big choruses and over-the-top style. Culture Club seemed both of punk and apart from punk—strongly anti-status quo but keen to make music for the masses. Where punk nipped at the heels of mainstream music like a mad schnauzer, Culture Club came at the mainstream full-bore, a single-minded Rottweiler bent on world domination.
“I thought it would be more of a case of lock up your sons,” O’Dowd writes of his calculated grasp at fame, “I was going to be dangerously weird, on the edge, Bowiesque, a sort of marginalised freak. In a way my career was kind of like a beautiful accident.”
Culture Club truly was a culture club: a Jew (Jon Moss, drums); a black guy (Mikey Craig, bass); an ethnic Englishman (Roy Hay, guitar); and the androgynous, outré, fashion plate (Boy George, singer). All members share credit for the songs, though O’Dowd wrote the lyrics and became the voice and the face of the group.
In its heyday, Culture Club sold millions of records and cast an enormous cultural influence. Heroin, cocaine and internecine warfare then imploded the group in the late ‘80s.
O’Dowd spent the intervening years reinventing himself with some success, as a solo artist, as a DJ, as a playwright, as a fashion maven. But through the years he seemed to serve one master: outlandishness. Whether outlandish style or outlandish behavior (including drug addiction and criminal convictions), Boy George holds court in the realm of the outlandish.