In what might be the most entertaining music memoir since Elton John’s Me, Boy George’s Karma weaves a meandering path through several decades’ of fame, success, crash and burn, before delivering him into a kind of autumnal meditative serenity, aged 62. That it is all wildly discursive, spectacularly catty and occasionally quite mad merely confirms its authenticity. This is George O’Dowd in all his exhausting glory.
It isn’t, however, his first memoir; it’s his third. Both 1995’s Take It Like a Man and 2007’s Straight proved worthy of the epithet “no holds barred”, as they recounted the tale of a south London future pop star growing up in a loud Irish family in the 1970s, a time when being out and proud – as George was – took guts and the ability to fight back.
To find that Karma, at least initially, treads identical ground is somewhat surprising but perhaps shouldn’t be: singers always were drawn to cover versions. Stories he told back then are faithfully rehashed here. Culture Club, he reminds us, was “three straight boys against the crazy queen”, thereby allowing him to snipe once more at his bandmates who’ve each obligingly developed thick skins – in particular drummer Jon Moss (who sued for loss of earnings after being forced out of the group in 2018), with whom George had a tempestuous relationship. “He liked it when I beat my eyes fierce,” he writes, adding: “platonic, my arse!”
Though he insists that Karma permits him to show how he has since evolved, it nevertheless also confirms him as the man he always was: grudges never forgotten, no slight ever entirely forgiven. When he goes to a club at which Madonna is present, she “pretended she didn’t see me”. When Sam Smith moves into the neighbourhood and throws parties to which George is not invited, it’s because “we are at different ends of the… fame experience”. When he has a photograph taken with Taylor Swift, who singularly fails to swoon: “I don’t think she had any idea who I was, which was a shame for her (LOL).”
Alongside the rants and multiple score-settlings, he offers tediously unnecessary detail about his time on I’m a Celebrity last year (“one night we had potatoes, mmm”), and recounts his legal battles with Moss with a pedantry Morrissey would applaud. The book is far more interesting when he discusses his descent into heroin (“my reputation was ragged”), and his stint in prison in 2009 for imprisoning a male escort, handcuffing him to a wall and beating him with a metal chain.
“At this point, what does it really matter what happened?” he posits, to which the only satisfactory answer can be: well, how about the truth? “He said in court that I attacked him because he wouldn’t sleep with me. [But] I did not find him attractive.” Later, he pleads: “I’m not an evil queen, just an idiot who did too many drugs and made a massive mistake.”
Elsewhere, he ’fesses up to hair transplants, a tummy tuck and a new smile. When a friend tells him he prefers the old teeth, he says: “Give me your address, and I’ll send them to you.”
Towards the end of the book, all sense of linear narrative sails out the window as he flits wildly from one topic to the next: Buddhism; why Radio 2 refuses to play his new music; the fact that he shares a birthday with Donald Trump. Upon meeting the actor Tom Hardy, he muses: “He found me see-through but he’s a dish. If he kissed me, I’d buy the calendar. Is there one?” A moment later, he asserts that “it’s a strange world that allows Jimmy Savile to roam free while others are persecuted for not being biologically female. You may shudder at the comparison.”
You can almost hear his ghostwriter (Spencer Bright) pleading with him to stop talking now, enough. But no. “My ism is social but don’t call me a lefty. I’m slender Brenda with no agenda,” he announces, and you rather wonder why.
If Boy George were the conductor of an orchestra, the cymbals would be constantly crashing. Karma is loud and vainglorious and doesn’t always paint its subject in the most flattering light. But it’s revealing, often very funny, and ultimately offers up abundant proof that some people simply live their lives at a higher frequency, and that they always, but always, demand an audience, envy, recognition, a standing ovation. Ta da.
Karma by Boy George is published by Blink Publishing (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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