Boy, do you need a makeover!

5 April 2012

'Who's that in my living room?' coos Boy George from the doorway. Actually, it's me. I've been admiring the oils of ascetic Catholic saints hung on the burnt sienna walls either side of the imposing stone fireplace, I've scanned the bookshelves (Man and Boy and Gabriel Garcia Marquez among the Bolan, Bowie and Dalai Lama biogs and numerology guides), I've paused to note the massive council-estate TV, and I'm now looking through the French windows, admiring the well-tended daffodil and polyanthus beds, and reflecting on the unlikelihood of the New Romantic legend turned superstar DJ and West End impresario's possession of an immaculate garden shed.

George has invited me into his beautiful Hampstead home - an imposing Gothic pile that once belonged to bug-eyed comedian Marty Feldman - overlooking the Heath, to discuss, in his own words, 'the latest twist in the elegant shambles I call my career'. From 6 May, he'll be taking over from Matt Lucas as the late performance artist and partner-in-panstick-crime Leigh Bowery in Taboo, the Eighties musical extravaganza for which he also wrote the music and lyrics.

It's certainly been a long, strange trip for George O'Dowd over the past 20 years, from worldwide megastardom to heroin hell to Buddhist enlightenment to Mixmaster rebirth to chronicler of his own rise and fall, and claw-back. Three things have remained constant throughout, however: his irrepressibility, his taste for statement hats, and his address (he moved into the house in 1986). It's all quickly apparent the minute you walk through the door. You immediately feel you're in a fully functioning home, rather than a freeze-dried showhouse; the entrance hall may be crowned by a turret complete with stained-glass window, but a standard-issue clothes rail adorned with drying T-shirts guards the entrance to the mosaic-encrusted downstairs loo.

George's voice, all camp flutings and dramatic swoops interspersed with the filthiest of laughs, echoes down the Gloria Swanson staircase. And when he finally makes his entrance, his outfit - black suit with unravelling white piping and paint-splattered boots - is crowned by a pink fedora on which an image of Leigh Bowery in scary-monster mode has been painted. He's animated and buoyant, eyebrows arching like Tower Bridge as he throws some crazy shapes for the photographer. 'Joan Collins,' he says, pursing his lips and sucking in his teeth. Then: 'Michael Jackson circa 1985,' as he pulls his hat brim over his face.

'Have you done this before?' I ask artlessly, as the shutter clicks.

'Darling, I've done it all,' he replies, with mock Garlandesque world-weariness.

Except make a West End debut. 'But I've been on stage every day of my life, since I was about 16, just by walking out the front door,' he cackles. 'So I don't think it'll be too much of a stretch.' We've repaired to the kitchen, a light, airy room at the front of the house. We're seated at what George proudly informs me is a former Moroccan shoemakers' table. He lights up yet another Marlboro Light and regards it with disdain: 'I have to give up. I went to see Paul McKenna and everything. I lasted five hours.'

A small fountain burbles away outside, overlooked by two giant stone lions ('I heard Madonna was getting some serious ornamentation in,' he says, 'so I thought, right - I've also got to have something that needs to be winched over the fence by crane'). When I congratulate him on the success of Taboo, he comes over all uncharacteristically modest. 'I think it's lucky that the opening coincided with this huge wave of Eighties nostalgia,' he says. 'You've got Marc Almond and Gary Numan popping up all over the place, and then you've got the rappers sampling the likes of Sting because they've exhausted everything else.' He sighs. 'The pop scene is so generic. No one can think for themselves. A lot of them can't even dress themselves.'

While the casting of George as Bowery is piquant - it's like Limahl playing Marilyn, or Debbie Gibson playing Tiffany - he insists it was far from inevitable. 'Know what?' he says, blowing smoke at the trompe l'oeil Indian temple markings set into the window cornices. 'I had no aspirations to be in the show whatsoever. But when we found out Matt was leaving, I thought, why not? I knew Leigh, and I shared some amazing times with him. I remember being with him in Charing Cross Road when he was dressed in a silver mask, vagina wig and bra, and the traffic started hooting, and he got in the middle of the street and started dancing. The police came to arrest him, but they took one look at him and just told him to go away. I think they were probably scared of him.'

He was keen that the show acknowledged the darker sides of the personalities involved. 'We're all slightly cartoonised, but we played with people. We were c***s. I certainly was, at the peak of my career; you're given licence to behave in that way. I can't stand new bands going, "Oh, we'll never change." I think, give them five months and watch their arrogance and insecurity swell to monstrous proportions.' He smiles wryly. 'I've been doing it for long enough to see it for what it is. I'm past believing in the hype.'

Evidence of that 'hype' is scattered through the house - cuddly George dolls with dreadlocks; manga-style paintings from Japanese fans, who still occasionally scrawl lovelorn messages on the perimeter wall, of George in full geisha drag. In retrospect, the smack meltdown and George's subsequent transformation from icon to iconoclast, whose outspokenness, particularly on matters of sexuality, is often calculated to frighten the horses, look like concerted attempts to blow any residual winsomeness out of the water.

'I've never been cuddly,' he confirms. 'People still have this idea of me that's completely wrong. I never set out to be a pop idol; I never wanted to be that kind of artist. I did The Frank Skinner Show recently, and I deliberately chose to be upfront rather than "nice", and the reactions I got from gay people in particular were shock and outrage, but I've got no time for these desperate bids for assimilation.'

He's quick to deny that his spanner-in-the-works sensibility is self-destructive. 'It's more like self-preservation,' he counters. 'I threw a wet blanket over it while I was with Jon' [Moss, Culture Club drummer and secret lover of George in the band's heyday] 'but as the relationship disintegrated, I didn't care any more. Our career was effectively over when we won a Grammy and I said, "America, you know a good drag queen when you see one." But I'm genuinely not motivated by money and never have been. Maybe it's one of the reasons I've managed to keep making so much. My family had no respect for money. We were navvies. My dad would take a whole month's wages and put them on a horse.'

He did invest in property, however. While the Hampstead house isn't huge, the rooms are spacious; a big consideration for someone who shared a bedroom with his three brothers until he was 17. The d?cor has gone through what he describes as 'quite dramatic changes' in the past few years. Previous visitors reported that it was dark and womb-like; Leigh Bowery's crushing verdict was that it was 'very Joan Collins'. 'That's true,' laughs George. 'It was all frills and flounces. The bedroom was an explosion of beige and pink, and it was all white carpets and sunken Jacuzzis.'

There were more pressing reasons for a makeover, however. George's friend, American musician Michael Rudetski, died of an overdose at the height of the heroin hell period in the very room where I'd earlier looked out on the garden shed. George says he couldn't go into the room for two years; then his mum decided it should be blessed by an Irish priest. 'He doused it, said a prayer, swung a censer, the whole bit. And it worked. The room is incredibly tranquil now.' George has embraced the less-is-more aesthetic since going into therapy, donating a large proportion of his closet to Oxfam in Welwyn, his home town - 'I like the idea of some mad person walking round Welwyn in one of my hideous Eighties Timmy Mallett-style jackets' - and clearing out the white leather three-piece suites and 'all the other hideous things you buy when you first get famous and have no taste', replacing them with a skittish mixture of Arabic/Indian antiques picked up on jaunts and funky modern pieces brought back from expeditions to Brick Lane.

We go on a little tour. A signed photo from Posh Spice hangs in the kitchen: 'To the bitch, lots of love, piss off' ('I wanted her to write "To the c***",' says George). A picture of David Beckham, mouth agape, adorns the fridge door, an artfully placed piece of banana creating a torrid tableau. Two fridge-magnet mottos catch my eye: 'Man is King of his home until his Queen arrives' and 'I never met a chocolate I didn't like'.

In the living room, George points out his Relationship Corner with offerings and hanging crystals (the house has, inevitably, been thoroughly feng shui'd). 'I put a bowl of water there every morning, and flowers when I remember.' What with this, and all the Buddhist- guru figurines on the shelves and the gloomy ascetics hanging above, I'm reminded of the poster in Agent Mulder's office: 'I Want To Believe.' 'Oh, and I do, but I'm a terrible cynic,' bemoans George. 'But then, I think cynicism is just the evil twin of romanticism. A Relationship Corner is there to draw you back into... well, how awful your life is basically, and how no one loves you, and how all men are bastards.'

This is a subtle reference to George's annus horribilis last year, when a couple of close friends died, and his latest relationship, with a man he identifies only as Julian, crashed and burned. 'When I meet people I'm very honest, and I told him, if you f*** with my heart, I'll f*** with your head,' he says, in a tone that suggests that honesty, in this case at least, may not always be the best policy. 'So that's what I'm doing. I'm not a good person to have as an enemy, because I make Glenn Close look like Mother Theresa. I'll bust out of that bathtub.' He sighs. 'It's a Gemini thing. Say one thing about us and the other also applies. We can love someone and hate them. We're high and low, sacred and profane. We can be an Irish navvy and a fairy.' He's trying to even-keel himself with 9 Ki, a Japanese/ Chinese blend of astrology based on the day, month and year of birth. 'My element is thunder,' he announces, 'so I explode and pass over.'

We end up back in the hall, admiring his (fake) Warhol, and a portrait of Leigh Bowery dressed as a rubber-suited dominatrix in orthopaedic shoes. George gets contemplative. 'There was more to Leigh than a merkin,' he says. 'But his downfall was that he believed in what he wore, which is always a mistake, because fashions change. Look at all the original punks; they ended up in suburbia with 16 children, running catteries.' He sniffs. 'There's so much conformity around these days, it's scary.'

As we leave the house, pausing only to note a chair whose arms have been fashioned in the shape of, well, I believe the religious term is 'lingams', it's safe to assume that the words 'Boy', 'George' and 'conformity' are unlikely to be featuring in the same sentence any time soon.

Boy George is appearing in Taboo at The Venue, Leicester Place, WC2 (0870 899 3335), from 6 May
Buy tickets now!

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