Name	Culture Club
Height
Naionality	London
Date of Birth
Place of Birth
Famous for

Should anyone ever doubt the amount of charisma Boy George once exuded, the fact that Culture Club was able to generate such extraordinary popularity on the basis of such utterly ordinary music ought to be proof enough. Listening to them now, it seems incredible that these albums produced six Top 10 singles (eight in Britain); one can only wonder what sort of national delusion would have resulted in such success.

Yet it wasn't delusion, really, it was charm, pure and simple. Just listen to George's tremulous tenor imploring, "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me" on Kissing to Be Clever; how could anyone resist a voice so guileless? Never mind that the rest of the album is chockablock with bleached funk and bland reggae, offering only the denatured carnival rhythms of "I'll Tumble 4 Ya" as inducement (or that "Time [Clock of the Heart]," which Epic eventually appended to the album during its original run, has since been deleted by Virgin); sheer force of personality was what carried the day back then. And the same goes for Colour By Numbers; outré as the metaphor in "Miss Me Blind" might have been, outright silly as the chorus to "Karma Chameleon" truly was, the point remains that Boy George made us believe, if only for a moment.

So what happened? Well, sad to say, the Boy turned serious. Waking Up With the House on Fire opens with the overwrought "message" of "Dangerous Man," and goes straight downhill from there, through the insufferable sanctimony of "The War Song" to the sheer inanity of "Crime Time" and "Mistake No. 3." Worse, the closest to catchy any of the above gets is "The War Song," which is overstuffed to the point of making "Hair" sound like a Dylan tune. By From Luxury to Heartache, the slide into irrelevance was so complete that the album's only real virtue was Boy George's voice -- an obvious case of too little, too late. Nonetheless, Boy and the lads reunited in 1998 for the inevitable wallow in nostalgia, the apex of which was the band's appearance on VH1's Storytellers (conveniently available in album form for those who forgot to set the VCR). (J.D. CONSIDINE)