Their infectious
melodies, flamboyant front man, and multiracial mix made
Culture Club a sunny beacon of 1980s pop. Now, though, it's
war.
Two of the band's
founding members told the Associated Press on Thursday
that they're furious with Boy George, who recently accepted
a songwriting award without telling them, labeled
their new vocalist "dreadful," and, they claim, has
made their lives a misery.
"We've never said
anything about George, because George has always been
George,'' said Jon Moss, the band's drummer and Boy George's
former boyfriend. ''But this has gone too far.''
Later this year,
Moss, bassist Mikey Craig, and keyboard player Phil
Pickett will be back on the road as Culture Club Reborn. Boy
George will not be joining them.
Culture Club
topped charts around the world in the '80s with songs like
''Karma Chameleon,'' ''Do You Really Want to Hurt Me,'' and
''Church of the Poison Mind.'' The androgynous George,
with his broad-brimmed hats, makeup, and beribboned
hair, became an early MTV star and a global style
icon.
By the late '80s,
the band split, plagued by flagging sales and Boy
George's well-publicized heroin addiction.
While the other
members have since combined music careers with reasonably
quiet lives, George has stayed in the headlines--most
recently during an August stint sweeping streets in
New York City as punishment for falsely reporting a
burglary at his apartment.
Culture Club
reunited successfully in 1998, but George--real name
George O'Dowd--declined to participate in
another tour this year. The band recruited 29-year-old
unknown Sam Butcher for a British tour that starts
December 7.
Boy George was
not impressed, telling an audience at a music awards
ceremony that he thought the new singer is ''dreadful.''
''I wanted to
like it,'' he said of the group's new sound, ''but I
couldn't.''
Earlier this week
he picked up a classic songwriting award at the Q Music
Awards for "Karma Chameleon"--a song credited to all
the original band members. None of the other band
members were invited to the ceremony.
''We should have
been there,'' said Craig, 46. ''George wasn't the sole
writer of the song. We wrote collectively. At the end of the
day, Culture Club was very much ours as well as
George's. He was the visual impact that everyone got,
but there was a hell of a lot behind it.''
Even the singer's
iconic name, Moss said, was his bandmates' doing.
''He wanted to
call himself Papa George,'' said Moss, 49. ''It doesn't
have the same ring to it. And he wanted to call us Caravan
Club.''
Moss, now married
with three children, has a particularly volatile
relationship with the singer. He and George were lovers at
the height of the band's success, though the
relationship was not made public at the time.
In his
autobiography, Take It Like a Man, Boy George
said many Culture Club lyrics were about his feelings for
Moss and claimed the band's breakup was driven by the
collapse of their relationship. Moss says the book is
misleading.
''He says I was
ashamed [of the relationship]," Moss said. ''I'm not
ashamed of anything. My parents know, all my friends knew.
There's no problem there.''
He said George's
claim the band split ''because he was distraught and
brokenhearted over our love affair'' was ''complete and
utter cobbler's [rubbish].''
''The only person
George loves is George.... He's like a nightmare
ex-wife,'' Moss said. ''This guy's being rude about me all
the time. I've lived with it for years, and I've just
had enough.''
Moss and Craig,
now 40-something fathers, sound like middle-aged dads
when they discuss their former bandmate. Moss recalls with
embarrassment how George swore at the audience during
the band's reunion concert at the Royal Albert Hall in
2002. ''Here's a man who's got the audience that put
him where he is, bought his house for him, and made him Boy
George,'' said Moss. ''It's not acceptable.''
They say George's
griping is spoiling the legacy of a band whose
pansexual, multiracial makeup helped transform social
attitudes in the 1980s.
''The whole idea
of Culture Club was multiculturalism, the spirit of
tolerance, the spirit of all as one,'' Moss said. ''Think of
the diversity in our band--a Jew, a black
person, an English person from Essex, and a Catholic
homosexual. That was Culture Club.'' (AP)