Culture Club & Boy George Video Archives 2005-2013 Volume IX

Description

1. The Madness of Boy George Documentary 10/17/2006: Documenting the days and weeks preceding Boy George’s appearance in a New York courtroom in June 2006 for cocaine possession and his subsequent sentencing to 5 days community service as a street cleaner by order of the US justice department. Boy George visits his New York City Apartment. Footage of the UK Production of Taboo, in studio recording of BG with Producer John Themis and BG DJing at a night club and “B. Rude” George’s Clothing Line. Includes exclusive interviews for this documentary with Boy George, Michael Craig, Marc Almond of Soft Cell, Costume Designer for Taboo Mike Nichols, Frank Niedlich George’s Co-Manager, BG’s Lawyer at the time Lou Freeman, Music Journalist Miranda Sawyer, Matthew Wright Broadcaster & Journalist, Amanda Ghost George’s Friend,  and Dinah O’Dowd (George;s Mother),

2. The House That Made Me 12/08/2010: Look at the hideous wallpaper! And those nasty sofas! Ah, bless! There’s a funny old black-and-white TV and packets of No 6 fags on the sideboard. Within minutes of being taken back to the house on the Middle Park estate in Eltham, London, where the living room had been restyled to look exactly as it had when he and his five brothers and sister lived there in 1971, Boy George had a hissy and wanted out. I knew exactly how he felt: a temperamental 80s pop star and another property makeover show are both things I can easily do without too.

But after the first break, Boy George had calmed down and so had I; once The House that Made Me (Channel 4) stopped making a song and dance about the annoying Edwardian Farm style contrivance of its setup, it developed into a fascinating exercise in memory as largely a work of the subconscious imagination.
For it wasn’t the carefully recreated pieces of 70s design and Woolworths art that particularly affected Boy George; they were just the Proustian tipping points. What he remembered were precisely the things that weren’t there – the smoke, the screaming and the anxiety. When the O’Dowd family moved in 1974 to a house in Shooters Hill – a little bigger but decorated in much the same style – those same objects triggered nothing but happy feelings.

The difference was not in the concrete but the internal. What had changed in the three years was George: whereas in 1971 he had been struggling with his difference, his sexuality and a bullying father, by 1974 he had largely come to terms with all three.
Curiously, Boy George wasn’t even, for once, the star of his own show. That honour went to his four brothers and his mother – the only people, I suspect, whom Boy George can’t and doesn’t bullshit. Boy George may be the one who has had years of therapy, but when he came to the realization at the end of the film that “I’m just a gay version of my father”, none of his siblings batted an eyelid. They had clearly come to the same conclusion long ago. I couldn’t help wondering, though, what happened to his sister Siobhan. Who wrote her out of the story? Siobhan or the family? felt: a temperamental 80s pop star and another property makeover show are both things I can easily do without too.

But after the first break, Boy George had calmed down and so had I; once The House that Made Me (Channel 4) stopped making a song and dance about the annoying Edwardian Farm style contrivance of its setup, it developed into a fascinating exercise in memory as largely a work of the subconscious imagination.
For it wasn’t the carefully recreated pieces of 70s design and Woolworths art that particularly affected Boy George; they were just the Proustian tipping points. What he remembered were precisely the things that weren’t there – the smoke, the screaming and the anxiety. When the O’Dowd family moved in 1974 to a house in Shooters Hill – a little bigger but decorated in much the same style – those same objects triggered nothing but happy feelings.

The difference was not in the concrete but the internal. What had changed in the three years was George: whereas in 1971 he had been struggling with his difference, his sexuality and a bullying father, by 1974 he had largely come to terms with all three.
Curiously, Boy George wasn’t even, for once, the star of his own show. That honour went to his four brothers and his mother – the only people, I suspect, whom Boy George can’t and doesn’t bullshit. Boy George may be the one who has had years of therapy, but when he came to the realization at the end of the film that “I’m just a gay version of my father”, none of his siblings batted an eyelid. They had clearly come to the same conclusion long ago. I couldn’t help wondering, though, what happened to his sister Siobhan. Who wrote her out of the story? Siobhan or the family?

4. Later with Jools Holland 10/03/13: Down By The River Side LIVE

5. Later with Jools Holland 11/07/13: King Of Everything, Love And Danger and Everything I Own and closing Segment.