Boy George

Eltham, the Blitz and a very fast start

George Alan O'Dowd was born on 14 June 1961 in Barnehurst, Kent, and raised in Eltham in south-east London, one of six children in a working-class Irish Catholic family. He left school at 15, having been thrown out after dyeing his hair orange, and found the thing he was actually suited to in the queue outside the Blitz club in Covent Garden, the centre of the late-1970s New Romantic scene. Marc Bolan and David Bowie were the models, and both still turn up in the set he plays now.

Culture Club formed in 1981 around four people who did not obviously belong in the same room: O'Dowd singing, Mikey Craig on bass, Roy Hay on guitar and keyboards, and Jon Moss on drums. The band's sound was a magpie arrangement of Motown, Philadelphia soul, reggae and country rather than the synthetic pop their contemporaries were making, and the singer's face — made up, androgynous, cheerfully unexplained on daytime television — did the rest. Within two years of forming they were selling records in numbers almost nobody from that scene matched.

Two albums that did most of the work

The debut, Kissing to Be Clever, arrived in 1982 and reached number five in Britain and 14 in the United States. It carried "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me", a slow reggae-inflected single that went to number two in America, and "Time (Clock of the Heart)", a top-five hit on both sides of the Atlantic. The follow-up, Colour by Numbers, came out in 1983, topped the British album chart and reached number two in the States. "Karma Chameleon" spent three weeks at number one in America. In 1984 the band won the Grammy for Best New Artist.

It did not hold. The group split in 1986 amid the singer's heroin addiction and the collapse of his relationship with Moss, which the band had spent years not discussing in public. Culture Club reconvened in 1998 and again from 2011, and have worked more or less continuously since. Moss left in 2019 and has pursued legal action against his former bandmates; speaking to Classic Pop in April 2025, Boy George said he would like to think the two of them will get through it, and described himself as a believer in fixing things. Hay and Craig are still in the line-up.

Solo records, a musical, and a decade on television

The solo career began in 1987 with Sold, which produced a British number one in a cover of "Everything I Own". The Martyr Mantras followed in 1991, and "The Crying Game" charted on both sides of the Atlantic in 1992. Cheapness and Beauty in 1995 was the record on which he wrote plainly about his own life. There have been eleven solo studio albums in all, including This Is What I Do in 2013 and SE18 in 2025, named for the south-east London postcode of his childhood and issued on vinyl with a booklet of photographs and notes on each song.

He has also worked steadily away from records. Taboo, the musical he wrote around the Blitz scene and the designer Leigh Bowery, ran in London from 2002 to 2004 with Boy George playing Bowery himself; the Broadway transfer brought a Tony nomination for its score. He received an Ivor Novello award in 2015 for outstanding services to British music. He coached a season of The Voice UK in 2016 and four of The Voice Australia between 2016 and 2020, came eighth on I'm a Celebrity in November 2022, and played Harold Zidler in Moulin Rouge! on Broadway from February to May 2024 and again from March to May 2025. He has described the old rules of the record business as finished, and released sixty new songs to mark his sixtieth birthday rather than make the covers album he was advised to make.

2026: a rebuilt master and a single that emptied the diary

In June 2026, to mark his 65th birthday, Culture Club released a new recording of "Karma Chameleon" as the first project from Artist Included, a company set up by his manager Paul "PK" Kemsley with the entertainment lawyer and producer Jeremy Rosen, with Planet Hollywood founder Robert Earl as chairman. The track came out in partnership with BMG. Boy George sang a fresh vocal and the instrumental was recorded again from scratch; technology from the firm Syntiant, trained on approved archival demos and recordings, was then used to bring the tonal character of the performance closer to the 1983 original. The stated aim is new masters the artists themselves own. He said at the time that the point was never to replace the original but to let the song keep evolving.

A month later the same enthusiasm for the tools produced a serious rupture. "We Will Dance Again", released in late July 2026 and made using AI, was written in solidarity with Israel after he visited the Nova exhibition in London commemorating the victims of the October 2023 Hamas attack, and was read by critics as dismissing the charge of genocide in Gaza. He defended it by asking why the word had suddenly become uncomfortable. On 30 July Kemsley announced that his client would no longer appear as King Herod in Jesus Christ Superstar at the London Palladium, where he had been due to play from 3 to 15 August; the manager said he felt it right to step aside and let the production remain the focus.

The fallout has not stopped. Speaking to Israel's Channel 12 in an interview reported on 11 October 2026, he said he had faced threats, harassment and defaced posters, and had lost long-standing peers. He also said he had never claimed not to care about Palestine. He plays Tel Aviv's Menora Mivtachim Arena on 4 November, a show that sold out and prompted a second date on 7 November, and admitted he was still assembling musicians for it: the band were being looked for, and he was trying to find people brave enough to come. Earlier in the year he had featured on Senhit's "Superstar", San Marino's Eurovision 2026 entry, which finished 14th in its semi-final.

What Culture Club sound like in 2026

The American leg in February and March 2026 was not the cabaret the band's billing invites. At Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville on 1 March they played twenty songs across two hours, four of them new — "The Next Thing Will Be Amazing", "Standing Tall in a City of Love", "Letting Things Go" and "London Is Not Burning" — alongside The Clash's "London Calling", Wham!'s "I'm Your Man" grafted onto "Church of the Poison Mind", Bowie's "Let's Dance", the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" and T. Rex's "Children of the Revolution". The reviewer noted he worked the room between songs and that the show exceeded what a hits package promises.

The touring group is Boy George, Hay and Craig plus guitarist Hattie Moran, drummer Jermaine Whyte, keyboardist Carmelo Caruso, saxophonist James Gardiner-Bateman and backing singers Natalie Palmer and Vangelis Polydorou. At a German date in Bochum in June 2025 the same operation ran to 22 songs, with the singer in painted bloomers and a sign-covered jacket and an audience spanning three generations.

December in the arenas

The British run is billed as The Singles Tour and leans the other way, towards the catalogue. It opens at Bournemouth International Centre on 7 December 2026 and takes in Cardiff, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Newcastle, Glasgow, Sheffield and Birmingham before finishing at The O2 in London on 19 December. ABC and Haircut 100 are the support on all ten dates — a bill of three acts from the same early-1980s chart years, which is plainly the selling point. Tickets went on general sale on 29 May 2026 after a registered-fan presale from 27 May, with a pound from each ticket going to the grassroots charity LIVE Trust and a front-row package that includes a photograph with the singer. Bournemouth lists a 6.30pm start.