Recommendations of the Editorial team
Boy George and Jon Moss openly discuss the skepticism and hostility Culture Club faced in their early years – seen in a new clip from Alison Ellwood’s documentary about the legendary English pop band.
Founded in London in 1981, Culture Club’s first songs came about naturally because the members immediately harmonized, as Moss explains in the clip from “Boy George & Culture Club.” (The film premiered at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival and is now available to rent on streaming services.) There was a rollicking, carefree quality to the early performances – but Boy George says they were also poisoned by ignorant, homophobic hecklers.
Archival footage shows Boy George reacting to just such an audience. In the interview he countered dryly: “Someone is shouting something and I just thought: ‘Thanks, you’ve already paid for your ticket – I’ll buy eyeshadow with it!'”
Ellwood on the early days
Ellwood tells Rolling Stone about this archive footage: “It’s absolutely crazy to see Culture Club in its very early days being booed by the audience and George shouting back. Less than twelve months later they were besieged by thousands of screaming fans blocking entire highways in major cities.”
The film also highlights that it wasn’t just the audience that was skeptical – record companies were also reserved about Culture Club, even though the band’s aesthetic fit perfectly into the new wave and pop world of the early eighties. “The record companies came and said, ‘It’s too much’ – they just didn’t see it,” says Boy George. “Anyone with makeup and a fancy hairstyle got a contract, except us.”
Eventually they secured a deal – with the then young label Virgin Records. The trick: They invited a bunch of managers to one of their concerts and then had all the cars the people had arrived in driven away “so they had nowhere to go,” as Moss describes it. “Because they were forced to stay and overcome their reservations, you could see that they really got it.”
The contract and its pitfalls
Culture Club signed with Virgin shortly afterwards – but even this huge success was accompanied by doubts and confusion. “I remember just thinking, ‘Did I do the right thing?'” Boy George says. “And: ‘What does that actually mean? What did I sign?’ I had no idea! I didn’t know that I had signed away all the rights to my music, I didn’t know what I had done. The begging bowl was held out. It was like you were happy to even get a record deal.”
The film delves deep into the rise of the band and the wider English New Romantic scene – but also tells the story of the relationship at the heart of the band: that between Boy George and Moss.