I can tell you from bitter experience that there are more relaxing ways of preparing for an interview with a legendary pop star than reading their memoirs and unexpectedly stumbling across a page where they explain at some length why they think you’re an arsehole. But there it is, or rather there I am, on page 133 of Boy George’s second autobiography, 2006’s Straight, getting it in the neck as the result of an unnecessarily sour live review I wrote years and years ago. Worse, I think he’s probably got a point; although I didn’t say he had never written a good song, I did say “Culture Club never had many good songs to start with”, which rather reckons without Time (Clock of the Heart) and Victims and It’s a Miracle, among others, let alone his solo songs such as 2013’s gospelly power ballad King of Everything. At least I can console myself with the fact that I’m in pretty glittering company on the old blacklist: over the course of Straight, he lets pretty much everyone have it, from George Michael (“please shut up – throw her a cerise boa”) to Prince (“the Artist Formerly Known As Get a Personality”).  Nevertheless, it’s hard not to arrive at his publicist’s office with a degree of trepidation. But no, we’re all good. He has long distanced himself from Straight – he told an interviewer a couple of years ago that it was “the rantings of a deranged drug user”, written during a grim spiral that culminated in him ending up in prison in 2009 for assault and false imprisonment. He says he can’t remember the review in question, and he doesn’t bear grudges. “I forgive very easily, and I suppose, in the same way, I expect to be forgiven very easily as well. I grew up with that. My dad was very explosive, God rest his soul. He could fly off the handle like no one I’ve ever known, and I have definitely got that in my personality, that ability to sort of smash the house up and then say: ‘Put the kettle on,’ to have that kind of attitude of: ‘Well, I’m OK now, so everybody else has got to be OK.’ People are like: ‘No, I’m not OK, you just screamed at me,’ and I’m like: ‘Yeah, but get over it.’”  He laughs, an infectious, throaty, dirty chuckle: as the journalist Simon Price once noted, an MP3 of it should be available on the NHS. In fact, he seems in a particularly sunny mood. He looks great, dressed in clothes that would look completely ridiculous on anyone other than Boy George – black and lime green, matching trainers and hat – a bit of makeup around the eyes. He’s in London on a flying visit from his home in Los Angeles. He once said he thought he had destroyed his career in the US overnight by accepting an award at the 1984 Grammys with the words “You know a good drag queen when you see one” (“I think what happened had more to do with the fact that the band was falling apart and I started taking drugs,” he shrugs today). Now, however, he loves it there. “I love American positivity. When I went back to America, five years ago, I got my visa and I was fully expecting to get all that ‘You did community service, you went to prison, la la la,’ but nothing. Nothing. I think in America if they can see you’re in a good place, that’s enough for them, they don’t want to dredge up the miserable shit and the negative shit and I like that. In the UK, they like to put you in a box, don’t they? The National Treasure box: tolerated and occasionally revered. It’s a bit restrictive.”  Furthermore, Culture Club are once more back in business, touring the US and Australia, with a headline show at Wembley Arena next week, and it all appears to be going remarkably well, given the band’s famously combustible reputation. The last time British audiences clapped eyes on them was on a BBC documentary about their attempts to record an album and play a tour in 2014. How well that went can be gleaned from the programme’s title: From Karma to Calamity. Everyone knows that Culture Club’s stretch of success in the 80s – Beatlemania-like scenes around the world, tens of millions of records sold – was pockmarked by internal strife, mostly as the result of George’s frequently violent relationship with drummer Jon Moss. But watching them writing songs in a Spanish studio, you found yourself wondering how they ever functioned at all: the surprisingly geezerish band members seemed so utterly unlike their frontman, who, for his part, spent the programme looking like a man who would rather be almost anywhere else than in their company. And yet, here they are, 18 months on, knocking them dead at the Hard Rock Hotel, Tulsa, getting along famously.  “Well, I think at this point, you just have to let people be who they are,” says George. “You’re in a band with someone, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to agree with everything they think or do. Me and Jon have always bickered and we’ll always bicker, because, you know, he says things like: ‘It’ll be great if Trump got it, it’ll be interesting,’ with a straight face. He uses a lot of hyperbole, he says extreme things, but me arguing with Jon has nothing to do with our relationship. I mean, people say: ‘Do you get on with the rest of them?’ but I wouldn’t go on the road with them if I didn’t like them. I do love those guys, I really love them, and that’s genuine. There’s a little bit of me that feels like I wouldn’t be here without them. So, you know, I respect them, I don’t always agree with them, and I always say that there’s something very magical about us playing together, that’s when it makes sense.” Another laugh. “And the rest of the time, it’s like: ‘What the fuck am I doing on the road with you?’”  Still, he concedes, they have their moments. “Oh God, we were doing Prince’s club in Minneapolis, and I decided we were going to do Purple Rain, and we had the biggest row we’ve had in 20 years. We had a row about the arrangement, then a runner at the club said to Roy [Hay, guitarist]: ‘Oh, everybody does Prince songs when they come here,’ which just made it worse. I really kicked off, I had to go and apologise: ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I haven’t done that since 1984.’ Then we played it and the whole sound system broke down. I think it was Prince, up there” – he gestures to the skies – “shitstirring it.”  He thinks at least one of the reasons why relations have improved is because he feels “comfortable in his own skin”. He used to be much more self-conscious when he was younger, he says: he would get dressed up as Boudicca or a geisha to go clubbing, then lose his temper when people remarked on how he looked. “Yeah, kind of look at me, but don’t look at me – that’s the dichotomy of exhibitionism in a way. You want people to look at you, but you don’t want them to comment. You want to be a spectacle, but you don’t want them to home in on you, you don’t want to be analysed.”  He says Culture Club’s vast success only compounded matters. He looked like someone born to be a pop star, but often found the experience weirdly uncomfortable. Onstage, he couldn’t look at the audience: “I used to go and see Bowie or Grace Jones, who were just awe-inspiring, they had that confidence, they were in command, and I would think: ‘I need to be more like that.’”  Offstage, he continued to struggle with attention. “It’s all fun at the beginning because you’re being carted everywhere in limousines and trucks and then when you start wanting to go out in the real world, it doesn’t quite work. It takes years to get your head around how to have some sort of normal life whilst also enjoying the spoils of being Boy George. I think I’ve got that balance now. If someone comes up and wants a selfie, I’m not going to be rude or hostile or arsey. I just pull a silly face. If in doubt: pout.”  He understandably doesn’t want to talk about drugs or prison – “I’m nine years sober in February, just short of a decade, so there’s got to be a point where it’s like ‘Move on, I have’” – but it’s still pretty clear what happened in 2008 was the big turning point in his life. “I unceremoniously fucked things up myself. There was a point, nine years ago, where I said to myself: ‘You really fucked this up, and you’ve really got to fix it, and you can fix it.’ I knew it would take time, but I really believed it.”  Certainly, his career now seems to be blooming again. His recent documentary for the BBC about life in the suburbs in 70s Britain was rapturously received. There’s talk of him launching his own makeup range and of a Vegas residency with Cyndi Lauper. He’s not returning as a judge on the UK version of The Voice; instead, he’s currently a contestant on The New Celebrity Apprentice in the US, now helmed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, rather than the president-elect, alongside “a lot of footbally, sportsy-type American guys and Vince Neil from Mötley Crüe”. There was even talk of his own US reality series, but he abandoned the idea. “It was going to be about me moving to America, but I think I was too interesting. I’m not really a fan of that whole reality show ‘Let’s create a scenario’ thing. I don’t need to create scenarios. Look at my life! I’ve got scenarios coming out of my ears.”  You can understand the lure of primetime US TV, but it still seems a shame he’s given up The Voice. For one thing, he was very good on it: funny and generous and engaging. For another, it was just nice to see someone try to flip the usual, boring script of TV pop talent shows on their heads. He went out of his way to pick the weirdest contestants, then gave them Antony and the Johnsons songs to sing. It was as if he was trying to singlehandedly will pop music back to the way it was when Culture Club broke. Watching their early Top of the Pops appearances on BBC4 recently, what was striking wasn’t so much how extraordinary Boy George looks, but the fact that, with the benefit of hindsight, he doesn’t look that out of place: the chart was still largely a playground for freaks and eccentrics.  “It feels like the mainstream has been hijacked by hitmakers, people who are really good at writing songs that all drop in the right places, they’re all pleasant, but there’s not many people who really give of themselves, if you know what I mean,” he says. “When I was 19, there was still the mystery of rock’n’roll, there was still the wizard behind the curtain. Kids now, they know how to make records, they know where to get their clothes. They don’t have to walk to Deptford High Street to look at the platform shoes in the window, they can go online and get them from Asos, whereas we had to dream about it: is this possible? Now, it’s like: ‘Yeah, you can be famous, you get on this show, you do that, you do this,’ but I think the thing is, I don’t think it necessarily means that much. I’m glad I had that exciting first part of my career in a decade when you could make a cultural difference of sorts, you know? There’s a lot of no-neck tracks around with 400m hits and you think they don’t mean anything, whereas Madonna’s cone bra still has some sort of resonance! But then, maybe if you’re 14, they do. I still get excited about lots of music, but it’s not stuff that you hear in the mainstream. I love the Knife, the Lower Dens – if it was the 80s the Lower Dens would be massive. I saw Let’s Eat Grandma on TV and I fucking loved them. I can say I like Zayn Malik, he’s got a beautiful voice, he’s beautiful looking, but it’s not the same feeling as I get from looking at Jam Rostron from Planningtorock. I think she’s amazing, so beautiful, but it’s a kind of distorted beauty. Looking at her and hearing the message of her music, for me, it’s just the same as it always was. It’s great pop music and it’s about something.”  Despite the reality TV and the makeup range, he says he still thinks of himself as a songwriter first. He’s been working with his old friend and sparring partner Marilyn, there’s a new Culture Club album due next year and he’s been mentoring a trio called Brando who he describes as “total glam, total Roxy, massive Smiths fans”. “Worrying about the industry and the radio and all of that, it’s just pointless, you just have to get on with it. ‘OK, that door’s shut, let’s go through another door.’ That’s always been my policy. I’m very adaptable. Very Darwinian.”  I start saying something about his new, positive outlook on life, but he corrects me. “No, I’ve always been positive. I wouldn’t still be here if I wasn’t. I think you’re always who you are, but life distracts you, particularly because of fame – everybody treats you different, therefore you end up with a distorted idea of who you are. Don’t you think that life’s about growing into yourself in a funny kind of way? You’re looking for answers and I think as you get older, you realise there aren’t really answers. You just have to kind of get on with it. Life is kind of like clinging to a rock, isn’t it? We’re all clinging to a rock, and some people have got a better grip than others. Some people look bedraggled,” he smiles, “and other people look like Jerry Hall dressed as mermaid on that Roxy Music album cover.”  Culture Club play SSE Arena Wembley on 14 December
Nine years sober and back on tour, the Culture Club star talks about the power of positivity and why pop needs mystery