Boy George and Jon Moss open up about the skepticism and cruelty they faced during the early days of Culture Club in a new clip from Alison Ellwood’s documentary about the legendary English pop band.
Formed in London in 1981, Culture Club’s first batch of songs came easily thanks to how well the members gelled, as Moss recalls in the clip from Boy George & Culture Club. (The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last year but is now available to rent on streaming services.) Their earliest performances could be fun and irreverent, too, but Boy George says they were also marred by ignorant, homophobic heckling.
Archival video shows Boy George responding to one such crowd, while in an interview he quips, “Somebody shouts something, I’d just be like, ‘Thanks, you already paid for your ticket, I’m gonna by myself some eyeshadow!’”
Ellwood tells Rolling Stone of this archival footage, “It’s so wild to see Culture Club, in the very early days, getting the bum’s rush from the audience and George sassing back at them! In less than a year they’d be mobbed by thousands of screaming fans blocking motor ways in major cities.”
The doc goes on to note that, along with boorish audiences, record labels were also wary of Culture Club, even though their aesthetic was very much in the early Eighties new wave and pop mold. “Record companies, they would come and say, ‘He’s too much’ — they couldn’t see it,” Boy George says. “Anyone with makeup and a hairdo was getting signed, and we could not signed.”
They did finally secure a deal with the then-upstart Virgin Records after inviting a bunch of executives to one of their shows, and then telling all the cars they showed up in to “piss off so they couldn’t go anywhere,” as Moss recalls. “Because they’d been made to stay and get over whatever they thought, you could see that they really got it.”
Culture Club signed a deal with Virgin soon after, but even this major success came with its own concerns and confusions. “I remember just thinking, ‘Have I done the right thing?’” Boy George recalls. “And, ‘What does it mean? What have I signed away?’ I didn’t know anything! I didn’t know that I’d signed away all my rights to my music, I didn’t know what I’d done. You had your begging bowl out. It was like you’re lucky to get a record deal.”
The film digs into the band’s rise and the broader English New Romantic Scene, but also tells the story of the relationship at the heart of the band, between Boy George and Moss.
