Boy George _320
“If I talk about it, it’s because it’s what I am, it’s normal, like having a cappuccino or a bag of crisps.”
Make-up now is “for special”, and he insists he feels just as comfortable au naturel. “It’s a great invention, but I don’t feel I can’t be seen without it,” he says.
“That would be the ultimate pressure to me. I think I’m pretty with make-up, but I’m not ugly without it.”
When arrested for cocaine possession in 2006 in New York, however, his flamboyance became a problem.
“I knew I wasn’t going to be treated fairly, no matter what.
“Before I went, I worked myself into a bit of a frenzy about how awful it was going to be. I went to my mum ‘I really don’t want to do this’ and she said, ‘Get over there, get on with it, don’t cause any problems, you’ll be back in a week. Where’s the big drama?’”
He looks on his punishment as his “media service”.
“I knew they were going to make my community service into a photo-op. I had the police commissioner following me around the first couple of days, trying to get in the pictures.”
He teamed up with a “nutty Puerto Rican girl who’d broken the law about 100 times”. They took great pride in their work.
It won’t be his last brush with the judiciary. Hanging over him is a court case involving the alleged false imprisonment of a Norwegian man – a charge he denies.
But Boy George’s new philosophy of living life in the moment seems to be holding up. He doesn’t take too much notice of headlines.
“Those things don’t define who I am or diminish who I am, they’re just kind of things that happen,” he says. “I don’t want to make it into a career move, which is what most pop stars do. Like George Michael apologising for taking drugs.
“The only people you’ve really got to apologise to are yourself and your family.”
And with that he puts on his shades and slips unseen out of the back of the bus, neatly avoiding the waiting fans. He knows which George they want to see.
* BOY GEORGE stars in the Here & Now tour, featuring Altered Images, Kim Wilde, and Howard Jones, among others, at the Echo Arena, Liverpool, on May 14, 2009. For tickets, call the box office on 0844 8000400 or go to www.accliverpool.com
