Best known for his soulful voice and his androgynous appearance, Boy George has been the lead singer of the pop band Culture Club since the group's formation in 1981.
74 Facts About Boy George
2.
Boy George's music is often classified as blue-eyed soul, which is influenced by rhythm and blues and reggae.
3.
Boy George grew up in Eltham and was part of the New Romantic movement which emerged in the late 1970s to early 1980s.
4.
Boy George's look and style of fashion was greatly inspired by glam rock pioneers David Bowie and Marc Bolan.
5.
Boy George formed the Culture Club with Roy Hay, Mikey Craig and Jon Moss in 1981.
6.
Boy George was the lead singer of Jesus Loves You between 1989 and 1992.
7.
Boy George has performed with Culture Club in reunion shows since 1998, and began his career as a DJ in the late 1990s.
8.
Outside of music, Boy George has been involved in many activities, among them songwriting, DJing, writing books, designing clothes and photography.
9.
Boy George has made several appearances in television, most recently appearing as a contestant on the 22nd UK series of I'm a Celebrity.
10.
Boy George has released seven DJ albums, three EPs and a soundtrack album.
11.
Boy George has received several awards as a solo artist and as a member of Culture Club.
12.
In 2015, Boy George received an Ivor Novello Award from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors for Outstanding Services to British Music.
13.
Boy George was raised in a working-class Irish Catholic family; his father was born in England of Irish descent and his mother is from Dublin.
14.
Boy George has one older brother Kevin, as well as two younger brothers Gerald and David and a younger sister Siobhan.
15.
Boy George has an older half-brother Richard, who was born out of wedlock in Dublin in 1957 when his mother was just 18; she moved to London with him to start a new life and escape the stigma of being an unmarried mother.
16.
Boy George was a follower of the New Romantic movement, which was popular in the UK in the early 1980s.
17.
Boy George lived in various squats around Warren Street in Central London.
18.
Boy George eventually left the group and started his own band with bassist Mikey Craig.
19.
Boy George was the last solo artist to deliver his lines, at 6 pm, having just arrived in the studio from Heathrow Airport after a Concorde transatlantic flight.
20.
In 1986, Boy George performed a guest-starring cameo role in an episode of the television series The A-Team titled "CowBoy George".
21.
In 2006, the band decided to again reunite and tour, but Boy George declined to join them.
22.
On 27 January 2011, Boy George announced to the BBC that there would be a 30th anniversary Culture Club reunion tour sometime later in the year, and that they would be releasing a new album in 2012.
23.
In November 2016, in a pre-tour interview on TVNZ, Boy George walked out after the interviewer asked him about his 2009 criminal conviction.
24.
In 1987, Boy George released his first solo album, Sold, which garnered success in Europe.
25.
Boy George was therefore unable to be in America to help promote the album.
26.
Boy George did score his first solo US Top 40 hit with the single "Live My Life" from the soundtrack to the film Hiding Out.
27.
In 1989, Boy George formed his own record label, More Protein, and began recording under the name Jesus Loves You, writing under the pseudonym Angela Dust, a word play on angel dust.
28.
From March 1990 to April 1991, Boy George presented a weekly chat and music show on the Power Station satellite channel called Blue Radio.
29.
In 1992, Boy George had a hit with the Pet Shop Boys produced song "The Crying Game", from the soundtrack for the film of the same name.
30.
Larry Flick from Billboard complimented Boy George's "genius reading" of the song.
31.
Boy George has enjoyed a second career as a notable music DJ.
32.
Boy George then completed some compilations for them, four of them being the Annual I to IV.
33.
In 1993, Boy George was featured on the PM Dawn single "More Than Likely" which became a moderate hit in the UK and the US.
34.
Boy George released the rock-driven album Cheapness and Beauty in 1995.
35.
In 1999, Boy George collaborated on songs with dance-oriented acts.
36.
Boy George remained a figure in the public eye, starring in the London musical Taboo, based on the New Romantic scene of early 1980s England.
37.
Boy George was nominated for a Tony Award for the "Best Musical Score" and Taboo was highly successful in London's West End, running for two years and receiving four Laurence Olivier Award nominations, though a heavily altered US production produced by Rosie O'Donnell in New York City was short-lived, running for 100 performances.
38.
In 2002, Boy George released U Can Never B2 Straight, an "unplugged" collection of rare and lesser known acoustic works.
39.
Boy George wrote the foreword for a feng shui book called Practical Feng Shui by Simon G Brown.
40.
In 2005, Boy George released Straight, the second volume of his autobiography.
41.
In January 2007, Boy George released "Time Machine" on Plan A Records, a song co-written with Ivor Novello Award-winning songwriter Amanda Ghost who co-wrote "You're Beautiful" with James Blunt.
42.
Boy George has run his own fashion line for some years, called "B-Rude", which has shown at fashion shows in London, New York and Moscow.
43.
On 24 December 2006, Boy George appeared on a one-off BBC TV programme Duet Impossible in which he performed with himself from the 1980s and joked about his street cleaning.
44.
On 25 February 2007, Boy George was special guest DJ at LGBT nightspot, the Court Hotel in Perth, Australia.
45.
Boy George cancelled his planned 2007 October tour via an announcement on his official website.
46.
Boy George played a special residency at the Shaw Theatre in London from 23 January 2008, followed by a full UK tour.
47.
Boy George took part in Night of the Proms, which is a series of concerts held yearly in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Spain which consist of a combination of pop music and popular classical music.
48.
In January 2016, Boy George joined the fifth series of The Voice UK, replacing Tom Jones as a mentor.
49.
Boy George's final act, Cody Frost, finished third place overall.
50.
Boy George left the series after just one season and later went on to join The Voice Australia as a coach for its sixth season to replace The Madden Brothers.
51.
Boy George returned for the show's seventh season, in 2018, its eighth season, in 2019 where his final contestant, Diana Rouvas won the competition, and its ninth season in 2020.
52.
In 2017, Boy George participated in the last season of The New Celebrity Apprentice on NBC, in which he supported the charity Safe Kids Worldwide and came in second place.
53.
On 2 and 26 March 2020, through his YouTube channel, Boy George respectively released 2 new solo songs entitled "Clouds" and "Isolation" taken from his forthcoming album Geminis Don't Read The Manual which was due to be released later in the year, but was postponed.
54.
Boy George said that he would have withdrawn from the show had his mother died in hospital.
55.
Boy George stated many of the songs he wrote for Culture Club were about his relationship with Moss.
56.
Concurrently with developing his career as a DJ in the late 1990s, Boy George adopted a macrobiotic diet, which he had been attempting to follow since 1988.
57.
In 2001, he published the Karma Cookbook, a macrobiotic cookbook co-written with Dragana Brown, whom Boy George met in 1986.
58.
Boy George has multiple tattoos, including a Christian cross on the side of his face and a Jewish Star of David tattooed on the top of his head.
59.
Boy George has a tattoo of David Bowie on his right arm and one of Marc Bolan on his left.
60.
Boy George said in 2013 he was "quite drunk" when his head was shaved and tattooed.
61.
Boy George said when he stopped drinking alcohol he lost the desire to have further tattoos on his head, finding it "too painful".
62.
Boy George attempted to perform concerts while under its influence.
63.
On 7 October 2005, Boy George was arrested in Manhattan on suspicion of cocaine possession and falsely reporting a burglary.
64.
In court on 1 February 2006, the cocaine possession charge was dropped and Boy George pleaded guilty to falsely reporting a burglary.
65.
Boy George was sentenced to five days of community service, fined US$1,000 and ordered to attend a drug rehabilitation programme.
66.
Boy George's attorney informed the court that he had advised Boy George not to appear at that hearing.
67.
On 14 August 2006, Boy George reported to the New York City Department of Sanitation for his court-ordered community service.
68.
On 5 December 2008, Boy George was convicted in Snaresbrook Crown Court, London, of the April 2007 assault and false imprisonment of Audun Carlsen, a Norwegian model and male escort, who initially stood for a photography session with Boy George.
69.
Carlsen claimed that he had been handcuffed to a wall fixture and beaten with a metal chain during their next meeting, although Boy George has always maintained that only the handcuffing was true and that he never beat Carlsen.
70.
On 16 January 2009, Boy George was sentenced to 15 months' imprisonment for these offences.
71.
Boy George was initially incarcerated at HM Prison Pentonville in London, but was then transferred to HM Prison Highpoint North in Suffolk.
72.
Boy George was given early release after four months on 11 May 2009.
73.
Boy George was required to wear an ankle monitor and submit to a curfew for the remainder of his sentence.
74.
On 23 December 2009, while he was still on licensed release from prison following the conviction, Boy George had his request to appear on the seventh series of Celebrity Big Brother turned down by the Probation Service.