Boy George, Culture Club bring unifying sound to ‘scary’ time

Boy George has found in this long, hot summer that not everyone shares his sense of humor.

“Remember, I’m still a queer in a hat,” the 55-year-old says of an image that, after 34 years, remains as divisive as the country he’s touring.

Culture Club is again reunited and back on the road for the first time in 14 years, playing The Pearl at the Palms on Sunday. And the singer born George O’Dowd says the band is trying to spread a little joy in what he thinks is “kind of a scary time actually.”

“I just think we’re living in quite weird times right now. In the ’80s, we did all this great work and I felt like the world had really changed. And now it feels like it’s going backwards to me.”

Though he’s still a British citizen and can’t vote, “I am absolutely fascinated by this presidential race. I get home from the gig and put on CNN to see what’s happened now. Who’s done what? Its just so entertaining.”

But when he runs into Donald Trump supporters, “You literally cannot have a conversation with them. You can’t even have a fun conversation about it.”

He sees parallels between the Trump campaign and his home country’s “Brexit” vote for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union.

“That was about immigration, and let’s not pretend it wasn’t,” he says. And Trump’s immigration stance here is even “more weird, because this is a country built on immigration. This is a country that’s all about that. You go around America and it’s what you see. I feel quite unsettled by some of the things I’m seeing and hearing.”

Even the sea change in attitude about marriage equality leaves “a lot of work to be done,” he says.

“I’m super comfortable with who I am. I joke that my sexuality takes up about four hours a month,” he says. “But it is an issue for other people. You see that. Sometimes on the road you get these butch guys walking backstage and they’re openly unfriendly because of what you represent to them.”

What’s an iconically gay Buddhist to do?

“I suppose the other thing is I always remember I’m here to entertain people,” he says.

Audiences on this tour are much more “eclectic” and cross-generational than when Culture Club conquered MTV in 1983, he says. Teens wear Ramones shirts when they “don’t even know who the Ramones are. They buy them at Target … . So you can’t look out at your audience anymore and kind of define them. It’s just everybody.

“And that’s a good thing as well,” he adds. “Music is this wonderful unifying force. That’s what I trade on. The thing that glues us all together is music.”

This tour, pumped up with a trio of horns and two percussionists among its 13 players — “I joke that we’re like a samba band, really,” George says — is a reminder of just how much of a glue the Culture Club sound is.

Guitarist Roy Hay, drummer Jon Moss and bassist Mikey Craig each came to the band with “a very different idea of what we wanted it to be,” George says. “Just by some kind of weird osmosis, the band developed its own sound and became what people know us as today.”

Culture Club’s videos may take you back to the days of Casio keyboards and drum machines, “but our music was something else,” he says. “It was sort of world music in a way. It was everything thrown into a big scented wok, and it kind of came out in its own way.”

The signature hit “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” was at its roots a reggae song, “I’ll Tumble 4 Ya” was indeed a bit samba, and “Church of the Poison Mind” or “Miss Me Blind” had more to do with Motown R&B.

Boy George was in the audience for Lionel Richie’s Planet Hollywood debut in May. “I’ve got my eye on a Vegas residency as well,” he says. “I want to do that gig. Boy George at Caesars Palace, I like the idea of that.”

As long as Las Vegas would like the idea of Boy George today.

“I think that you basically can only be who you are now,” he says. “I see a lot of people from the ’80s and the past, sometimes you see them and they’re still doing the same thing. Wearing the same clothes, trying to pull off the same dance routines.”

Doing his own thing for the past 25 years, “I haven’t really had one foot in nostalgia,” he says. “So coming back to Culture Club is refreshing to me. But I don’t want to try to be who we were 30 years ago.”

Read more from Mike Weatherford at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com and follow @Mikeweatherford on Twitter.