Concerts

You really want to see Boy George & Culture Club in Medford

The indelible early '80s hitmakers will delight an audience brought up on MTV at Chevalier Theatre on Sept. 9.

2 minutes to read

Culture Club’s star burned fulgently but fleetingly in the early 1980s.

Between the springs of 1983 and 1984, the Boy George-fronted British quartet scored six top 10 hits in the U.S.

“Karma Chameleon” spent three weeks at No. 1, while only Michael Jackson’s seven-week chart-topper “Billie Jean” and the six-week reign of Irene Carey’s “Flashdance … What A Feeling” could keep “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?” and “Time (Clock of the Heart),” respectively, from reaching Billboard’s apex.

Unsurprisingly, Culture Club was named Best New Artist at the 1984 Grammy Awards.

The group’s other top 10 entries were the equally memorable “I’ll Tumble 4 Ya,” (No. 9; and the “4” in the title seems to predate Prince’s replacing of words with numerals), “Church of the Poison Mind” (No. 10), and “Miss Me Blind” (No. 5). They reached the top 40 four more times between mid-1984 and mid-1986, with “It’s a Miracle” peaking at No. 13 and “Move Away” at No. 12.

Half of these songs — which contained elements of new wave, blue-eyed soul, and Caribbean-influenced instrumentation — can be sung word-for-word (or at least hummed note-for-note) 40 years later by almost everyone I went to elementary school with.

And I must confess that 6-year-old me was a bit taken aback by lead singer Boy George’s style.

However, with other MTV regulars such as Annie Lennox and The Human League’s Philip Oakley sporting similarly androgynous looks, I learned at an early age that what I would later learn was called cross-dressing or gender-bending was — at a minimum — acceptable if not fully accepted by everyone. (I am willing to bet that more than a few people who sang along every time a Culture Club song came on the radio started changing the station once they saw what the man born George O’Dowd looked like.)

To give you some idea of Boy George and company’s pop culture embeddedness, the band appeared on the Feb. 11, 1986, broadcast of “The A-Team” as themselves. Three Culture Club songs — including that year’s “God Thank You Woman” — were included on the episode.

But perhaps the inevitability of changing popular music trends was accelerated in the ’80s by the advent of MTV. Whatever the case, the band’s seemingly effortless ability to cook up a top 40 hit had pretty much completely evaporated by the end of 1986. The discontinuance of their commercial success was only one of the factors that led to their 1987 breakup.

However, 35 years later, Boy George, guitarist/keyboardist Roy Hay, and bassist/keyboardist Mikey Craig are back together for their third coast-to-coast tour of the U.S. since 2016.

Their Sept. 9 show at Chevalier Theatre is sure to be equally nostalgic and life-affirming.