Album 527.
Eurythmics..........................(Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This)   (1983)













Blurb to follow as running late for an appointment. 

Last edited by arabchanter (28/6/2019 10:50 am)

Been down South for the weekend, so will catch up the night when I get home.

ZZ Top: Eliminator is the album which turned my head to That Little Ol' Band from Texas, probably the videos was the clincher, but I loved the quirky nature of Billy Gibbons's blues/pop guitar. 

Sure I read Frank Beard had a beard at one stage, but it didn't grow as well as the others so he shaved it off: think he has one now. 

Think there's a film out very recently about the band , I'll have to see that.

Album 529.
The Police.............................Synchronicity   (1983)












1983’s Synchronicity catapulted The Police into the arenas of the world on the strength of amazing singles like "Every Breath You Take" and "King Of Pain." The making of the album was a rough process, with drummer Stewart Copeland and guitarist Andy Summers playing session musicians to main songwriter Sting’s compositions, and the turmoil caused by this change in band dynamics would ultimately cause them to go on an indefinite hiatus after touring for the album.

Album 527.
Eurythmics..........................(Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This)   (1983)













I liked The Eurythmics, but always thought they were just a wee bit too arty farty for a boy fae DD4, and Annie Lennox,  androgynous or not I always thought was a f'kn rip, would give her a treat given half a chance, even now, well at least until she started going all social/political, then that would be "dislodge, and away and clean yourself up, and try no' to drip on my new carpet, your taxi will be here in 5," by christ, who would want sloppy seconds after Dave Stewart?


Anyways the album, a couple of great tracks but some cheesy efforts as well, if your expectations are based on the title track you may well be in for a disappointment, "Love Is A Stranger" is as good an opener as you could expect from The Eurythmics a good catchy earworm song but made the album flatter to deceive in my humbles, the title track also stood out, but for me the outstanding track by a distance was "Jennifer," I must admit I don't feel this has aged badly, but maybe because I remember that time vividly.


This album wont be going into my vinyl collection (although if given as a present, wouldn't be too disappointed) as I have all the tracks on Various Artists CDs, but I will be downloading some of the tracks,




Bits & Bobs;




One of the defining acts of the 80s, and certainly one of the decade’s better outfits, EURYTHMICS (Aberdeen-born singer Annie Lennox and Sunderland-born guitarist Dave Stewart) grew out of late 70s power-pop trio The TOURISTS, who also featured Dave’s erstwhile writing partner Peet Coombes. The unlikely duo’s futuristic sound was at least partly down to Stewart’s mastery of cutting edge studio techniques, while Lennox’s vocals combined impressive depth and power with a chilly sensuality. It made for an alluring combination, all the more so in an era when over production and watered down songwriting was the norm. The melodic pulse and underlying menace of hits like `Love Is A Stranger’, `Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)’ and `Here Comes The Rain Again’, stood them apart from the pack and, with a raft of other transatlantic hits, Annie and Dave could do no wrong.



Dave Stewart was the experience behind the act, he’d served his time in folk-rock project, LONGDANCER, in the mid-70s (signing to ELTON JOHN’s Rocket Records), while Ann/Annie had gotten bored of the stuffiness of studying flute and keyboards at the prestigious Royal Academy of Music. One can trace the duo’s roots back to London 1975-77, when, with Peet Coombes in tow, they were known as power-pop trio The CATCH; the rare `Borderline’ 45 is now worth nearly £50.



Adding rhythm section Eddie Chin and Jim “Do It” Toomey, the quintet adopted the London-centric moniker, The TOURISTS. Signing to Logo Records, the combo secured a handful of hits in their brief time together; `Blind Among The Flowers’ and `The Loneliest Man In The World’, were two minor hit dirges from their Conny Plank-produced eponymous debut set, THE TOURISTS (1979). Although considered to be their most productive and commercial, hitting as it did the Top 30, REALITY EFFECT (1979) featured the Top 10 smashes, `I Only Want To Be With You’ (a cover of a DUSTY SPRINGFIELD staple) and `So Good To Be Back Home Again’. LUMINOUS BASEMENT (1980) was delivered as power-pop new wave was winding down, as was The TOURISTS, whose chief songwriter Coombes (plus Chin) wanted a move in other directions; he later formed Acid Drops (and died of alcohol and drug-related problems in ’97).




Courting couple Annie and Dave re-christened themselves EURYTHMICS and began recording their debut set at Conny Plank’s Cologne studio. Featuring contributions from the likes of CAN’s Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit, DAF’s Robert Gorl, BLONDIE’s Clem Burke, as well as Marcus Stockhausen (son of Karl-Heinz), IN THE GARDEN (1981) was a radical musical departure. Icy synth-pop with avant-garde tendencies (check out `English Summer’, `Belinda’, `Take Me To Your Heart’ and `Never Gonna Cry Again’), the duo’s closest musical compadres were the lipstick ‘n’ legwarmers “new romantic” crowd, although the EURYTHMICS’ vision was unique. So unique, in fact, that the record languished in relative obscurity, given scant support by R.C.A.




Undeterred, the complex duo recorded SWEET DREAMS (ARE MADE OF THIS) (1983) , the title track giving the band an international breakthrough. This time around, the sculpted synth soundscapes were fashioned with a studied pop nous, Lennox’s mournful vocals heavy with dark implications. Visually striking, the duo’s image was also highly marketable and Annie became the chameleon queen of the new video generation, leading to overnight success in the States. A hit second time around, and a bit later in the US, lead-off cut `Love Is A Stranger’ was equally effective, while `I Could Give You (A Mirror)’ was better than merely a B-side; incidentally , `Wrap It Up’, was the ISAAC HAYES/David Porter track, now featuring SCRITTI POLITTI’s Green Gartside.




The chart-topping TOUCH (1983)  consolidated the EURYTHMICS’ position as pop frontrunners, the singles `Who’s That Girl?’, `Right By Your Side’ and `Here Comes The Rain Again’ going Top 10, the latter on both sides of the Atlantic. Incidentally, bassist Dean Garcia (later of CURVE), Dick Cuthill (wind), Martin Dobson (sax) and scoresmith/conductor MICHAEL KAMEN featured on the set; Peter Phipps – formerly of The GLITTER BAND – took up the sticks on their promotional live tour.



The mid-late 80s fixation with remix sets, TOUCH DANCE (1984) was exactly what it said on tin – and big-time producers Jellybean and Francois Kevorkian were behind the mixing desks.


Annie and Dave’s previous set proper attracted the attention of film director Michael Radford, who invited the group to score his updated adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 . If EURYTHMICS’ innovative electro-pop seemed tailor-made for the cult author’s vision of dystopia, Stewart and Lennox were left dissatisfied with the amount of music actually heard in the movie’s final cut. While both the film and the soundtrack stiffed in America, a spin-off single, `Sexcrime (Nineteen Eighty-Four)’, cracked the UK Top 5.



Far removed from the ethos of Orwell’s novel, it seemed EURYTHMICS became slaves to the rhythm from the onset, opener `I Did It Just The Same’, finding Annie scatting to a tribal dance rhythm. When one thinks of today’s rather OTT, PC climate, the aforementioned follow-on track and hit single, `Sexcrime’, was hardly the topic to be chanting and dancing at the local disco; however, that’s just what they did back in the yuppie, un-caring mid-80s. But it was still the album’s saving grace (apart from the romantic, JON ANDERSON-like hit ballad, `Julia’), which didn’t say much for the rest of the album. Flitting between songs such as `For The Love Of Big Brother’ and unthreatening instrumentals, `Winston’s Diary’ and `Greetings From A Dead Man’ (6 minutes of “poppapapa…”), the record was quite schizoid. Beatbox at the ready, the re…re…repetitive `Doubleplusgood’ was another to be short on lyrics, although Annie did get to shout instructions and numbers through that torturous voxbox. `Ministry Of Love’, meanwhile, was best left to the words of Stewart, as he described it as “Kraftwerk meeting African tribal meeting Booker T & The MGs”. Finale cue, the chanting `Room 101’ (the place where one can throw all the worst things away!) summed it all up.



Unbeknown to many fans at the time, prototypical odd couple Annie and Dave had split their romantic ties some time ago (one thinks around 1982/83), although they remained friends and professional throughout their subsequent years as a duo. BE YOURSELF TONIGHT (1985) {*7} saw Lennox in soul diva mode, belting out the likes of `Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves’ (with ARETHA FRANKLIN) and putting in a breath-taking feat of vocal histrionics on the No.1 hit, `There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart)’; `Would I Lie To You?’ and `It’s Alright (Baby’s Coming Back)’ were also substantial global hits.



Perhaps playing all those stadiums was beginning to affect the band, as REVENGE (1986) saw the band veering towards post-Live Aid big arena-rock; hit tracks like `Missionary Man’ and `When Tomorrow Comes’ (co-penned with Patrick Seymour) sounding downright clumsy. In its defence was another of the duo’s classic cuts in `Thorn In My Side’, while `The Miracle Of Love’ was a beautiful ballad.



Focusing on production and programming technique (this time provided by “third member” Olle Romo on drums), the Top 10 SAVAGE (1987), took a bit of a pasting from some critics, although once again, how could one “savage” four relatively major UK hits in `Beethoven (I Love To Listen To)’, `Shame’, `I Need A Man’ and the best of the bunch, `You Have Placed A Chill In My Heart’.



By the release of WE TOO ARE ONE (1989), the duo were clearly on their last legs, and it was obvious, on listening to the record, that the working relationship between Lennox and Stewart had finally broken down. However, with no less than four spawned hits in the proceeding year, from `Revival’ to `Angel’; `(My My) Baby’s Gonna Cry’ was a flop when released in the States, the EURYTHMICS were still big box-office.



ANNIE LENNOX went on to do charity work before releasing “Diva” (1992), her multi-platinum selling solo debut; she subsequently issued a collection of covers through “Medua” (1995). Meanwhile, Dave, or DAVID A. STEWART (to distinguish him from another artist of the same name), recorded the soundtrack to “Lily Was Here” (1990), featuring sax-diva, Candy Dulfer; he would go on to form his Spiritual Cowboys and generally receive a bit of a lambasting from the several critics. One of the hardest working musicians in the business, he’s still going strong today.



1999 saw the return of EURYTHMICS via the hit single, `I Saved The World Today’, and Top 5 album, PEACE. Not particularly enamoured by everyone outside the duo’s vehemently loyal fanbase, the Top 5 set also delivered one other Top 30 breaker, `17 Again’.



Lennox and Stewart (who’d since married and re-married other lovers) were briefly reunited musically for their swansong set.



Whether the 1991 EURYTHMICS “Greatest Hits” anthology actually needed updating was debateable, but the Top 5 “Ultimate Collection” (2005) justified its existence with the inclusion of tracks from the “Peace” album as well as a new Top 20 hit, `I’ve Got A Life’.



Over the years, EURYTHMICS covered several songs, many of them unheard until the collective CD bonus track re-issues appeared on the back of the aforementioned “best of”; these were:- `Satellite Of Love’ (LOU REED), `Hello I Love You’ (The DOORS), `Fame’ (DAVID BOWIE), `My Guy’ (SMOKEY ROBINSON), `Come Together’ (The BEATLES), `Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me’ (The SMITHS) and `Something In The Air’ (THUNDERCLAP NEWMAN).




Rolling Stone:Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)
June 23, 1983 4:00AM ET By David Fricke

As the dominant forces in the British band the Tourists, guitarist Dave Stewart and singer Annie Lennox shot some arty new life into tired old pop. Now, on their own as Eurythmics, they’ve turned their wiles to synth pop with even greater success. Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), their U.S. debut, goes far beyond the usual robotic disco and frothy Abba clichés to prove that transistorized white soul doesn’t have to be wimpy.


 Most extraordinary is the group’s transformation of the Sixties Stax/Volt steamer “Wrap It Up”; a drum machine kicks hard behind the clipped funk buzz of Stewart’s synths while a multitracked Lennox cooks like LaBelle on fire. On the striking title track, a bluesy, desperate-sounding Lennox digs into the dark corners of our pleasure zones with none of Soft Cell’s decadent smarminess. And the simple, dreamy “Jennifer” employs echoey, Philip Glass-type vocal harmonies to heighten the song’s intimations of suicide. Even when they resort to the obvious — which they do with the snappy, disco-style syncopation and shrill, girl-group-style chorus of “Love Is a Stranger” — Eurythmics always apply their electronics with nervy pop flair. At a time when most synth boogie is just New Wave party Muzak, Sweet Dreams is quite an adventure.



Rolling Stone:

 Eurythmics: Sweet Dreams Come True Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart talk about their 1983 breakthrough

By Kurt Loder.


Annie Lennox began her life as a man two years ago at a London discotheque called Heaven. She was onstage with Eurythmics, singing away, her ladylike frock and long black hair caught in the bursting glare of a battery of strobe lights, when a curious spectator, thinking she looked familiar, reached up and ripped off what turned out to be a wig. Suddenly, in strobe-lit slow motion, a strange new head was revealed. This one — which Annie hadn’t counted on unveiling quite so soon — was anything but ladylike. The startling, carrot-colored hair was cut cell-block short on the sides and greased straight back on top, and the crowd’s collective jaw hit the floor.  “No one knew who Eurythmics were at the time,” says Dave Stewart, Annie’s partner onstage, in the studio and, for four years, in life and love. “So the whole audience must have thought, ‘What’s goin’ on?’ And ever since then, people have been sayin’, ‘Is Annie really a man?’ “


 Annie’s response to these speculations was to start dressing like one: suit, tie, suspenders, the whole androgynous number. She had already tried being a proper blond songstress with the Tourists, the ill-fated pop group in which she and Stewart had previously toiled (and whose lack of critical esteem led to her subsequent bewigged anonymity). The response had been the usual catcalls and leers, plus occasional belittling comparisons to Blondie. Who needed that?


 “This is a more androgynous visual portrayal, but it isn’t meant to be butch,” Annie explains. “No way. It is very useful in transcending the bum-and-tits thing, though. That’s a very vulgar thing to say, but I have received that kind of abuse onstage, and one has to find a way around it.


 “Of course, you’ll never find a way around it,” she adds. “But this helps.”


 How successfully Annie Lennox has transcended the eternal chick-singer syndrome was apparent one night last June when Eurythmics — no the, please — played the Margate Winter Gardens, a beachfront ballroom in a Kentish coastal resort just north of Canterbury and some seventy miles east of London. The second Eurythmics album, Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), had topped the British charts; its internationally ubiquitous title song had hit Number Two, and their latest single, “Who’s That Girl,” was proving similarly seductive. Generally, an act of such commercial heft confines itself to headlining hip metropolitan venues and established tour circuits. But Eurythmics were warming up for their first U.S. tour, two weeks hence, with a brief blitz of small seaside dates, and inside the sprawling Winter Gardens, beneath bulging Victorian balconies, glittering chandeliers and gaudy ormolu moldings, some 1500 kids had crowded onto the vast dance floor to bear celebrity-starved witness.
  They were not disappointed: the show was seamlessly impressive. Except for three female backup singers bumping smartly in place, the band was simple: a bassist, a drummer and a keyboardist, all in black, and at stage left, Dave Stewart, a bearded, puff-haired gnome in dark glasses and a white suit who intermittently leaned out over his guitar to fiddle with a modest stack of machinery at his side. The crowd was with them from the start, when the lights went down and a chattering synthesizer riff rose from the stage on a wave of wild cheering. As the rich electronic sound built into a brassy riff, Annie, a striking figure in her mannish gray suit, marched out and snapped up a microphone. Her head was hidden by a grinning plastic mask and a white boating cap, her hands by blood-red gloves. But her voice, only slightly muffled by the mask, resounded around the packed auditorium: “This is the house….”


 A squall of applause greeted the familiar lyric from the Sweet Dreams album, and as the band leaned into the riff, Annie tore away the mask and hat, exposing her improbably handsome face, the crimson lips smiling, the stubbly hair flaming in the spotlight. “This is the story…,” she sang. “Everything changes.”


 Twisting and kicking across the stage, raking the crowd with her remarkable blue eyes, Annie created an instant sense of intimacy, working the house like some hitherto inconceivable amalgam of David Bowie and Judy Garland, her extraordinary voice soaring above the dense electronic textures of the music.


 Soulful is the word. Although Eurythmics’ music makes no pretensions to black style (and bears no resemblance to the lightweight “funk” currently so fashionable in England), this was an undeniably soulful performance — most pointedly in the Sweet Dreams cover of Sam and Dave’s raunchy “Wrap It Up.” As Stewart later observed, “Sam and Dave were really underrated over here. They still are. Over here it’s all Marvin Gaye and that sort of smooth soul. Sam and Dave were rough, and it’s their roughness I love. We want to put that roughness back in — to have a soul feeling with that English power.” 
 It’s a most attractive musical synthesis, and in Margate, all sexual speculation suddenly seemed irrelevant in the presence of such triumphant talent. At the end of the hour-long performance, with the houselights up and the crowd still howling, the popular appraisal was clear: good band, great tunes, and the singer — well, the singer, whether man, woman or none of the above, was a star.With her long legs splayed out on the barroom banquette in the quaint Margate inn where Eurythmics were spending the night, Annie Lennox, still glowing from the show, had to laugh. A star? Eurythmics is the star, and that means Annie and Dave Stewart, who, in his customary all-black street gear, had just wandered in and pulled up a chair at her table. Dave and Annie, alone, are Eurythmics; the particular band with which they’re now traveling, good as it is, is only their latest performance medium.


 “I look at our relationship with outside musicians as an ongoing thing,” said Annie, taking a sip from a bottle of port the crew smuggled in after the inn’s prim proprietress refused to bend the eleven p.m. pub curfew. “Whether they’re with us forever or for two weeks is irrelevant, you know? If somebody is interested in working with us, and we want to work with them, then we will. It’s different from a session-musician situation, where some anonymous, highly paid guy just walks in and does his thing and walks out again. This is a bit more involved.”


 On record, Dave and Annie play virtually everything themselves, and as Eurythmics, they have never toured with the same group twice. One early ensemble included Blondie drummer Clem Burke, keyboardist Mickey Gallagher from Ian Dury’s Blockheads and Eddi Reader of the Gang of Four on backup vocals. Recently, Eurythmics appeared on the venerable Old Grey Whistle Test TV show with a grand piano and a black gospel choir in tow; their current lineup is a typically mixed bag: two members are veterans of the progressive band Random Hold, and one of them, drummer Pete Phipps, used to work with Seventies whomp-king Gary Glitter. Not the most fashionable credentials to have in hip-conscious London, but then fashion isn’t something that Dave and Annie spend a lot of time noodling about. 
 “We’re not really part of the London scene,” said Annie, crooking a knee and tipping back her boating cap. “I won’t say I despise the London scene, but I’m a little wary of it. I have a raised eyebrow toward all scenes.”


 Dave and Annie’s only ties are to each other, and to a mutual vision of popular music that is singular in its obsession with cultural flux and emotional ambivalence. Nothing is clear here: even the name Eurythmics was selected for its nebulousness (it’s a Greek word that means moving in rhythm). And while Sweet Dreams does seem to fit a superficial definition of synth pop, the record is something more: the riffs really crunch, the melodies wander off on weird tangents, and — the crowning irony — Stewart plays standard, Sixties-style blues slide guitar all over the place. Ambiguities abound: Annie is a straight woman who, for strategic reasons, dresses like a man. She and Dave are former lovers whose creative relationship deepened even as their romance dwindled. They write dance songs about love, but the lyrics (“It’s jealous by nature, false and unkind”) don’t make love sound like anything worth dancing about. Yet both say they’ve never been happier than they are now. Obviously, there is more going on here than initially meets the ear.


 Their story is as muddled as the romantic attitudes embodied in their songs. Annie Lennox, who’ll be twenty-nine this Christmas, was born in Scotland and raised in the North Sea port of Aberdeen, a provincial fishing town noted, in pre-oil-strike days, for its high-quality granite, much of which found its way, like Lennox herself years later, to the pavements of London. The paternal side of her family was musical — her father even played bagpipes — and as a child, Annie took up piano, and later, the flute, and dreamed of becoming a classical musician. At seventeen, after attending Aberdeen High School for Girls, she went down to London’s Royal Academy of Music, where she enrolled in a performer’s course focusing primarily on flute, with subsidiary studies in piano and harpsichord. But a career regurgitating the classical repertoire quickly came to seem a pointless pursuit, and she grew increasingly restless at the academy. In fact, she said, “I hated it. I spent three dreadful years there trying to figure a way out.” 
 Finally, she just left. After kicking around London for two years, writing songs and singing with various anonymous groups, she encountered Dave Stewart. At first, she was appalled: “He looked like he’d been dragged through a hedge backward. But he’s a very special person, I soon recognized that.”


 Stewart, a diminutive Englishman, was two years older than Annie, and although he claims familial descent from the Duke of Northumberland, his musical roots were strictly popular. Still, there was a soothing lilt to his voice (he’d grown up in Sunderland, not far from the Scottish border), and he was at least an engaging eccentric. Stewart’s mother was a practicing child psychologist with a special interest in the relation of color to taste (“I was quite used to blue porridge and green potatoes by the time I was about seven”), and his father was an accountant. Thus, the family was, unfortunately, well off. “I always used to want to play with the working-class kids,” Stewart recalled, “but they’d always call me ‘richie’ and whack me on the head with cricket bats and things.”


 His early passion for sports ended with a broken knee in a soccer match at age twelve — a fortuitous event, as it turned out. “Somebody brought me a guitar in the hospital,” he said, “and as I couldn’t walk, I started learnin’ it. Then somebody else brought me a leather jacket, and I hung it up at the bottom of me bed. I used to look at this leather jacket and play the guitar, and wish I could get out of the hospital.”


 He saw his first rock concert two years later, in 1966. “It was this group, the Amazing Blondel, and the excitement — I’d never seen anything live, with a PA and everything. So after the gig, I just climbed in the back of their van while they were loading and hid there. And when we got to Scunthorpe, where they lived, at four o’clock in the morning, I jumped out and asked them if they’d teach me about bein’ in a group.” 
 The Amazing Blondel called the police and summoned Stewart’s parents. But they also agreed to let him come back for holiday visits, during which he’d accompany the group on concert excursions. Soon he’d talked himself into opening-act status, sitting on a stool and performing his own songs on the guitar, and before long he was appearing on radio and TV shows in the north of England and opening shows for such major folkies as Ralph McTell. At one point, a representative of Bell Records wanted to turn Stewart into the next David Cassidy (“I looked about ten,” he explained), but a school counselor wisely advised him to forget it.


 Stewart’s subsequent musical career was motley, to say the least — he played everything from folk and blues to rock & roll and beyond. Finally, in 1969, he joined a group called Longdancer, which became one of the first bands signed to Elton John’s Rocket Records in the early Seventies. But Longdancer crumpled under the influx of a sizable cash advance (more than $100,000), which the members blew in six months. In Stewart’s case, a considerable outlay went to finance his new enthusiasm for cocaine and speed. After Longdancer’s demise, Stewart went on to play with theater groups, with “half of Osibisa for six months” and with an all-girl outfit called the Sadista Sisters. In his spare time, he got deeply into drugs.


 “I once took acid for a whole year,” he said with a bemused chuckle. “Every day. It turned into a kind of holiday.”


 He remembers most vividly the time he scored eight hits of California Sunshine from some Grateful Dead roadies who were passing through London. “Try these and come back in a week,” they told him. Not realizing that each capsule was good for about eight people, he took a bus back home to Sunderland and, with his wife (from whom he’s now divorced) and six friends, consumed the whole cache. “Six of these people had never even smoked marijuana,” he said. “About ten minutes into the trip, one guy started reading a newspaper—which was actually the carpet — and another was going like this with his head” — Stewart bobbled his noggin distractedly — “sorting out the filing cabinets of his mind, so to speak.”  Stewart and his wife wound up knocking on a stranger’s door in search of help. “I said, ‘Excuse me, we’ve taken a very strong hallucinogenic drug, and we’d like you to ring a hospital.’ But the thing was, I was talkin’ to this guy who was like a northeastern miner or something, and he said, ‘Come in and have a cup of tea.’ So we went in and sat down, and there’s this woman doin’ the ironing in the corner. And she says, ‘LSD? I’ve heard about that — destroys the brain, doesn’t it?’ And my wife goes white. Then this guy comes out with the tea, and I’m tryin’ to tell him, ‘No, listen, it’s this strong drug, we took it by mistake.’ And I turn around and my wife is pouring the tea on his carpet and rubbin’ it around and makin’ these patterns, right? It was the most horrible feelin’ I’ve ever had in my life.”


 Stewart and his wife finally made their escape, but the awful memory still lingers. “I still have feelings from acid,” he said, “and this was eight years ago. I mean, I can’t remember what it was like before I hallucinated. I never take anything now — I don’t need it. I took so much, I think it’ll last me for the rest of me life.”


 A year or so later, Stewart was working with a similarly penniless songwriter named Peet Coombes in the north of London. They were getting nowhere. Then a friend who ran a record store mentioned that he’d met a girl who had an incredible voice — “one of those singers that you hear now and again and you get, like, goose bumps.” She was scraping by as a waitress in a restaurant, and Stewart and the mutual friend went to see her. After work that night, they went back to her one-room apartment and listened, spellbound, as Annie Lennox played “these amazing, really complicated songs” on an enormous harmonium she’d somehow squeezed into her flat. 
 “She sat there like the Phantom of the Opera,” said Stewart. “She was straight from classical. She didn’t know anything about pop groups. But we heard her sing and we started celebrating; then we went out to this club, and from that moment on, Annie and I lived together, and made music together, for about four years.”


 For the next year or so, Dave and Annie and Peet Coombes starved and schemed and dreamed of stardom — of somehow selling their songs. Then another friend, an Australian singer called Creepy John Thomas, contacted them from Germany with the news that he had scored some free studio time with Eurorock producer Conny Plank, renowned for his work with Kraftwerk, Can, DAF and, later, England’s own Ultravox. Stewart, Lennox and Coombes were invited to come over and work on the singer’s demos, and they agreed. It was a decision that changed all of their lives. “That was when we realized what we wanted,” said Annie. “‘Cause at Conny’s studio, there was a drummer and a few electric guitars around, and we went, ‘Ah! It’s a group — that’s what we want to be, a group!'”


 The group they wound up putting together back in London in 1978 was a Byrds-influenced ensemble called the Tourists. Over the next couple of years, with Coombes writing most of the songs, they recorded three albums and toured the world, but still found themselves penniless — a situation Dave and Annie blame on a bad record contract and ugly business manipulations. (“Some of them want to use you…,” she sings on Sweet Dreams. “Some of them want to abuse you.”)


 The Tourists had a hit in 1979 with the Dusty Springfield nugget “I Only Want to Be with You,” but British critics mistook it for a crass oldies move, rather than the tongue-in-cheek tribute the band had intended. Their credibility ruined, the band broke up in 1980.


 “We were gettin’ really frustrated anyway,” said Stewart. “Durin’ the punk movement, Annie and I bought a synthesizer, and we were doin’ the opposite thing to the punks; we were gettin’ more into sequencers and the mixture of soul feeling with electronics. We’d sit in hotel rooms, and Annie would sing and I’d play the synthesizer, and we started comin’ up with the whole Sweet Dreams concept.”  With the Tourists defunct, Dave and Annie actually drew up a “manifesto” outlining their future goals, the essence of which, according to Stewart, was “We were never gonna do anything again that we didn’t like doing. We said, there’s two of us and we always want to keep it fresh, and never have this thing where you’re just touring round and round with the same people in a band, so that every night you have to pretend you’re really into it.”


 More input came from Conny Plank, with whom Annie continued to work as an arranger and session singer (most notably on an album called Latin Lover, by the extraordinary Italian singer Gianna Nannini). “Conny thought we ought to try to control everything and do everything in a smaller way,” Annie said. “That’s the basic philosophy behind Eurythmics.”


 They recorded the first Eurythmics album at Plank’s country studio outside Cologne, with an eccentric assortment of musicians that included Clem Burke, whom Annie had chatted up in a London club; multi-instrumentalist Holger Czukay and drummer Jaki Liebezeit of Can; DAF’s Robert Görl on drums and Marcus Stockhausen (son of composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, with whom Czukay had studied) on trumpet. The LP, called In the Garden, was never released in this country, but it is a minor masterpiece of pop songwriting. Brilliantly produced, performed and arranged, it seems filled with nothing but hits — some folk-rockish (“English Summer”), some almost punkish (the pummeling “Belinda”) and some, such as “Never Gonna Cry Again” and the haunting “Revenge,” pointing toward the more electronically conceived material to come on Sweet Dreams about two years later.


 “It’s a funny mixture,” said Stewart. “We were really just experimentin’, messin’ around. Then we played the tapes for RCA and they really liked them, so they put them out.” 
 In the Garden sank without much of a trace, unfortunately. Stewart, who’d been in a serious car crash years earlier, was plagued by collapsing lungs and had to have corrective surgery just as the LP was being released. Laid up for eight months, he was unavailable to help promote the record. By this time, too, Dave and Annie had given up living together.


 “So many changes had happened at once,” said Stewart. “The Tourists split up, I had this major operation, we had this new idea of Eurythmics. We were becoming very much a folie à deux — you know, the madness of two people who are just constantly together. The only way to survive was to live apart, so we split up as a couple.”


 Nowadays, in what little time there is for such things, they see other people on an irregular basis. “It’s more like friendship, though,” said Stewart. “I’m not the sort of person who would just sleep with anybody for the night. And I think Annie just hides, most of the time.”


 Although she went through a protracted period of depression, Annie said she’s snapped back and is in better spirits now than ever. “Dave and I still draw a lot of strength from each other, and when it really comes down to it, we are very, very close. We’ve ridden through the changes in our personal lives, and we value our relationship enormously.”


 With the decks of their personal lives cleared for action, Dave and Annie set about planning a serious commercial breakthrough. Despite their experimental inclinations (most noticeable on the nonalbum B sides of their British singles), commerciality is something they generally applaud. Said Dave: “I haven’t met one avant-garde performer who hasn’t loved, say, Abba and Holger Czukay, or the Velvet Underground and ‘Chirpee, Chirpee, Cheep, Cheep,’ you know? Because there’s something great in the crassness of things, and there’s something great in perfection, too.  “Annie and I love that sort of duality. It’s the subject of nearly every song we’ve ever written — the duality of everything: the tramp lying on the street while somebody walks by with a furcoat on; the feeling of love mixed up with terrible feelings of guilt and remorse. The whole of life is that sort of constant turmoil. It’s great, it’s terrible — it’s the way life is.”


 With their concept securely in mind, and with detailed technical advice from Plank and Czukay over the telephone, Eurythmics set up a low-budget, eight-track studio in a warehouse in the Chalk Farm district of London. There, working essentially on their own, they recorded a series of demos that RCA again decided to release as an album — thus was Sweet Dreams made.


 “RCA said, ‘Bloody hell, it doesn’t sound like eight-track,'” Stewart recalled. “But that’s how you should record — simply. They’re always designing things to make you think you couldn’t possibly do it yourself. This is more fun. We just have bits of stuff on tapes, like Annie playing a funny little instrument in Bangkok, and some words from over here somewhere, and a tape of a rhythm we thought out in Scotland, and we sort of pull it out and put it all together. ‘Cause the music’s timeless, you see. That’s why we don’t say we’re part of this new English pop invasion. We just say we’re in a continuum of what we have been doin’ for ages. That’s why on the Whistle Test, for instance, they couldn’t really call us a synth-pop duo, when we’re standin’ there with eight gospel singers, a grand piano and an acoustic guitar. That could have been in 1971 — or it could be 1986.”


 Sweet Dreams turned the international trick for Dave and Annie that the Tourists never could, cracking the U.S. Top Twenty and producing a hit (the title song) that butted heads with the Police’s “Every Breath You Take” at the top of the U.S. singles charts. “Love Is a Stranger,” their follow-up, looks likely to repeat that success. So, what next? Dave and Annie have leased a big stone church in north London, and they’ve installed a twenty-four-track studio; when they’re not busy with their own projects, they record their friends — most recently, good pals Chris and Cosey, formerly of Throbbing Gristle, and a “very androgynous” street duo called Flex. There’s a dance workshop on the premises, too, and there are always video and animation projects under way; Dave and Annie have taken separate flats nearby to be close to their nonstop work. It’s been a long and sometimes painful trip for them, but they have no real regrets.  “I actually embrace the idea of being happy now,” Annie said with a nonironic smile. “I’ve had my share of pain, and I probably will in the future, too. But I’ve gotta say, it’s sculpted me into the person I am now. There was a time when I looked to other people for recognition, because I didn’t have enough confidence to trust my own judgment. Now I’m not looking for reassurance, because I realize how fickle people are.


 “My own strength,” she said very evenly, “is the best strength I can have.”




"Love Is A Stranger"


 
This was the Eurythmics fifth UK single and like the previous four, it initially flopped. However it became a worldwide hit when re-released following their success with ("Sweet Dreams Are Made of This.")


 
The song was produced by Dave Stewart and Adam Williams and was self-financed at Eurythmics' 8-track facility above a picture framing factory in Chalk Farm, London. They decided on a simpler arrangement than their previous singles emphasizing Annie's vocals more.



Said Lennox: "We did decide for 'Love Is A Stranger' that everything in it would be very clear. All that is there is seen to be there and nothing is hidden in a big mush of sound."



Stewart added: "Using our own eight track we hear a song millions of times and the melody in it is always apparent to us. We realized it might not be so obvious for people hearing the song for the first time."


 
The single was accompanied by a music video which saw Annie Lennox in a number of different character guises which she later became known for in subsequent videos. At one stage of the video Annie removes a curly blonde wig to reveal close-cropped orange hair underneath, which gave her an androgynous look. Said Lennox: "The video is basically a little cameo story. I would say 'Love Is A Stranger' is a song about love objects. The concept of love in relationships is very often a person projecting what they want onto another person. We are all in love with the idea of love but what we want is not always good for us. We might get obsessed with something very dangerous. I wanted to put these ideas into a pop song. In the video, a very expensive looking limousine draws up outside a house and very pricey-looking whore leaves the house, gets into the car and is driven away by the chauffeur. Obviously a whore is a very expensive love object for sale. In the car she pulls off the wig to reveal another personality. She arrives at another house as though she's delivering something, like a dealer. The person in the house is very sadistic, there's lots of leather around and strange things in the bathroom. When the person leaves that house and gets into the car, the person has become a man. The man turns into a dummy which you see is being manipulated by the driver of the car. That's the idea behind it."


Dave Stewart said of this: "A very simple idea. To me it's like a contemporary love song. I don't mean written with contemporary music but the lyrics are how things are at the moment unlike, say, the love songs of the '50s. A lot of people nowadays want to be single and separate. The song is a comment on that."



"Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)"

"Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)"  rightfully received the most attention upon release, soaring all the way to number 1 on the US charts in the summer of 1983. A true masterpiece, the song sums up the immensely creative approaches that the duo took in creating their music. Tapping variously filled milk bottles in time during the chorus and banging picture frames against the wall for those percussive kkkkhhhhs, their DIY spirit served them well. Moreover, the song seems to have had almost providential origins. According to Annie, the group nearly split the day the song was recorded. After a terrible fight, Dave simply wanted to program the drum computer, and when it accidentally came out in reverse, Annie suddenly sat up from her fetal position on the floor to pound the main melody on the synthesizer before improvising the lyrics in one take, other than the "Hold your head up" lines which were added later. Baring its sharp teeth with a signature dark and booming synth lead, "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" is a towering statement quite literally born out of necessity, utility and a little luck that would become not only an iconic synth pop gem, but a transcendent anthem of the 80s.



In the book Annie Lennox: The Biography, Lennox explained that this song is about the search for fulfillment, and the "Sweet Dreams" are the desires that motivate us.

 
Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart were a couple for about three years while they were members of a band called The Tourists. They only wrote one song together in this time (an instrumental), but when The Tourists broke up, they formed Eurythmics as a duo and began writing together. A short time later, Lennox and Stewart broke up. Stewart tells the story in The Dave Stewart Songbook: "When we broke up as a couple for some strange reason it was like we were always going to be together, no matter what. We couldn't really break that spell so we just carried on making music. This causes many problems, yet through all of this we ended up writing a lot of great songs, some were about 'our' relationship and some were about our relationship with the world around us. Whatever we wrote always had a dark side and a light side and in a way I describe it as 'realistic music,' full of the ups and downs of real relationships and life itself."


 
In the New York Times October 30, 2007, Annie Lennox recalled that this was written by the duo just after they'd had a bitter fight. I thought it was the end of the road and that was that, she said. We were trying to write, and I was miserable. And he just went, well, 'I'll do this anyway.' Dave Stewart came up with a beat, Annie Lennox improvised the synthesizer riff, and suddenly they realized they had a potential hit.


 
This was originally a hit in Europe in 1982. A year later with the advent of MTV it reached the #1 spot in the US, giving Eurythmics their only US chart topper.


 
Stewart and Lennox had very little money, and were thrilled when a bank gave them a loan to buy some equipment and make a record. They made the most of their meager budget, using an 8 track recorder and a complicated drum machine Stewart drove 200 miles to procure. They made the most of their 8 tracks, with Stewart's Roland synthesizer and Lennox' Kurzweil keyboard added to the drum pattern Stewart created, forming the basis for the song. As Stewart tells it in his Songbook, Lennox was a bit depressed, but coming up with this track snapped her out of it and she quickly came up with the "Sweet Dreams are made of this" and "Some of them want to use you" lyrics.




Stewart said: "I suggested there had to be another bit, and that bit should be positive. So in the middle we added these chord changes rising upwards with 'Hold your head up, moving on.' To us it was a major breakthrough. It just goes from beginning to end and the whole song is a chorus, there is not one note that is not a hook."



 In an interview with Billboard magazine, Lennox talked about her days before the Eurythmics: "I was really a hybrid between Stevie Wonder and Joni Mitchell, walking the streets as a singer/songwriter, but nobody knew it but me."


 
The innovative video presented Annie Lennox with close-cropped orange hair and a tailored black suit, making it the first popular video presenting an androgynous female. The cow in the video was Dave Stewart's idea - he was a big fan of surreal artists Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel. Said Stewart: "A few people were saying, 'Dave, why the cow? Annie is so good looking.' Those people should go buy a copy of Purple Cow by Seth Dogin, about how to make your business remarkable. It was written 20 years after I had the purple cow in our video - which certainly did the trick and made my whole life remarkable."



The cow, while very eye-catching, posed a logistical problem because most studios can't accommodate them. Eurythmics found a basement studio in London with an elevator big enough to transport the animal. Lennox recalls the shoot with the bovine walking around as being one of the more surreal experiences of her life. Regarding what it all meant, she said in the book I Want My MTV: "The video is a statement about the different forms of existence. Here are humans, with our dreams of industry and achievement and success. And here is a cow."


 Nas sampled this for his 1996 song "Sweet Dreams."


 
In November 2007, Annie Lennox was interviewed extensively by Malcolm Bragg on The South Bank Show. In this program she said she didn't regard "Sweet Dreams" as a song but as a mantra. She added that people have identified with it over the years and that it's open to interpretation; it contains an overview of human existence; whatever it is that makes you tick, that is what it is.


 
The song ends with a keyboard fade out, but when Eurythmics played it live, they changed the arrangement and ended the song with the lyrics "Keep your head up" so it would end with a sense of hope.


 
When this became a hit in America, the Eurythmics became a sensation there, appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone and playing sold out shows. Stewart fell in with the Los Angeles music scene, where he wrote "Don't Come Around Here No More" with Tom Petty.


 
This was featured in the films Striptease (1996), Big Daddy (1999) and Ready Player One.


  
  

A couple of bits relating to Dundee in 1983, courtesy of RETRO DUNDEE:






John Menzies moved out of their Commercial St/Murraygate corner position in 1983, and relocated further along Murraygate to the empty premises that was once Woolworth. This is a shot from the new location of their record department, taken in December 1983. The record racks were placed diagonally at first, as above, but by the next year they changed the layout of the racks to run parallel with the wall (see December 2008 Archives for comparison).



It's quite interesting to see the large display above the door advertising the very first "Now That's What I Call Music" album...the series being on volume 74 at present!!
And so, with this image, I will now fade out from the recent music theme and crack on with a couple of weeks of retro Christmas shopping!
Photo by DC Thomson



REFORM STREET - 1983


[img]https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_TGisiI_dI2E/S9lR2JrnPwI/AAAAAAAACiI/2VDDQwY_4H4/s400/1.ReformStreet,3Dec1983.jpg[/img]


Don't know if anyone else can remember The Wimpy, but it pissed all over McDonalds in my humbles.







Not sure how many other cities had a newspaper street vendor as a cult figure, but Tommy Small certainly left his mark on the Dundee art community. He's been painted, sculpted, sketched and here, turned into a doll. It was made by Hilary Elder from Broughty Ferry and was displayed in a craft exhibition in the Marryat Hall in 1983. Tommy was then presented with the model after the show.









This ad is dated 1983, when Da Vinci's was in it's prime.


It is actually advertising their "New luxurious ground floor Lounge Bar". The "Studio" however, was upstairs where the main action was - namely, the disco.


You can click on the image to enlarge it if you want a wee read, and spot the fact they spelt Barracuda wrong!


The squares in the illustration are a reference to the glass panels that were part of the main doorway design.


Talking about the main door, I remember boss, Frankie Esposito ( who looked like Trevor Horn in his large 80's specs ) (very much a marmite character in my humbles, delusional if you ask me) used to stand at the door throughout the evening deciding who would get in and who wouldn't! If you were really really drunk the night before sometimes you had to wait a week or two before he'd let you back in, you can probably tell this was me


So then, 1983 sounds we queued up at Da Vinci's to hear blasting out the speakers would have included the likes of - Heaven 17 - Malcom McLaren - Police - The Icicle Works - SOS Band - Yazoo - David Bowie - Style Council - Herbie Hancock - Depeche Mode - Indeep - Tom Tom Club - Freeez - Michael Jackson - Level 42 - Echo & the Bunnymen - George Clinton - The Cure ....and I'm sure you'll be able to rattle off a few others!
 

Last edited by arabchanter (09/7/2019 2:46 pm)

Been looking for that ZZ Top album, for I was sure I'd bought it.

And had: on a tape.

The only song by U2 I've ever liked a lot is Discotheque (in the passing).

I've got a pal who went down to Holloway Road area to live, left as a Hun, very soon was a Man U fan.

It's amazing what shite you can learn when putting in random questions about music!



The worst gig we ever played: musicians on their on-stage lows,



Francis Rossi, Status Quo


Dundee, 1969



You used to get extra money for playing in Scotland because it was so dangerous, although luckily the Scots took to us early on. We were in this brand new room with parquet flooring, and this fight broke out. I'd never seen anything like it – 1,500 people, everybody punching everyone else: men punching men, men punching women, women punching men, women punching women … it was like the Wild West. People bottling each other in the back and neck, glasses flying. And we were onstage and there was no way out. Luckily someone told us to get our stuff, get out, and come back in the morning. We didn't argue, we just left. We came back in the morning and these 20 old washer-women were there in a line, on their knees, scrubbing the blood out of this lovely new parquet floor.

Album 531.
Culture Club................................Colour By Numbers (1983)















Culture Club had already put themselves on the map with 1982s Kissing To Be Clever debut album. A trio of singles, the calling card "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?" (hands up who thought he was a burd the first time they seen him on TOTPs?) the teen slow-dance favourite "Time (Clock Of The Heart)," and the catchy "I'll Tumble 4 Ya"---gave the group some pop musical substance to back the flashy image it had cultivated.


Released a year later Colour By Numbers backed that initial salvo with a quartet of hits, admittedly some momentum is lost in the final third of the album. But the perfectly crafted pop served up elsewhere comfortably justifies Colour By Numbers classic status---and gave them multiplatinum sales in several countries.
 

Last edited by arabchanter (11/7/2019 9:24 am)

That Police album is in my loft, and it's staying there.

My wife (to be at the time) must have bought it, 'cos I didn't.

Album 530.
Meat Puppets..............................Meat Puppets ll   (1983)













Yet another band I'd never heard of, never knew of the Nirvana connection, but really glad this book brought them to my attention. This album intrigued me on first listen, but mesmerised me the more I played it, cow-punk simply means a style of music that's a combination of country and punk. You could be forgiven for thinking that'd be an awful idea, and on paper, I guess that it is, but it works brilliantly. Meat Puppets managed to combine those two genres better than anybody else, and they even added a dash of psychedelic rock in there as well.


Now I like Nirvana as much as the next guy, but maybe the best thing they ever did was cover three songs off this album.  Not because it was a "cool thing to do", but because it gave this album the popularity it deserves.  Of course it's not like I heard any of these songs before I heard Nirvana's versions myself, but after getting into this album as a whole, I'd like to think that this album is so good, it would have eventually earned the popularity at some point anyway.


The three tracks that Nirvana covered "Plateau," "Oh Me" and "Lake of Fire" are excellent tracks, even the instrumentals worked by the second listen, of all the tracks my favourite at the moment is "Lost" the vocals strangely reminding me of "All Apologies" in part, but then that's probably just me.


This album has a very eclectic mixture that's right up my street, has some fine musicianship, and I can see how the vocals might put some off, but I do like unpredictible off the wall rather than mundane chanters. One reviewer I read said "Sounds like a half-drunk cover band playing the greatest album ever made, in a tiny, mostly vacant lounge at 1am. I pity the fool who doesn't enjoy this...rock and roll pure and to-the-point," I see where he was coming from.


So if you're up for something a little left of the dial, and you give this a couple of listens, I think you'll fall in love with this one, this album will be going into my vinyl collection.





Bits & Bobs;

Meat Puppets BiographyMeat Puppets was formed in the very early '80s in Phoenix, Texas USA, by guitarist + singer & main songwriter Curt Kirkwood, his younger brother Cris on bass and Derrick Bostrom on drums. The threesome delivered its eclectic iconoclasm with an increasingly sophisticated level of instrumental interplay, highlighted by Curt's inventive guitar runs and his and Cris' rough-hewn vocal harmonies. The trio's dynamic interaction was further reflected in their adrenaline-charged live shows; all of this led to a recording contract with SST Records.


 Although Meat Puppets would later become best known for their intriguing blend of psych-Rock, Punk and Folk, the trio's 1982 self-titled full-length debut was a furious hardcore album.


 Their sophomore release, "Meat Puppets II", came out two years later but rose to popularity in the '90s when Nirvana covered the album's three best tracks on their historic "MTV Unplugged In New York": "Plateau", "Lake Of Fire" and "Oh, Me".


 1985 saw the release of "Up On The Sun" and in 1987 Meat Puppets unleashed "Mirage", an experimental album which was followed a few months later by "Huevos" a 9-track set comprised almost entirely of heavy-Rock numbers.


 Two years later the Texan trio returned with their sixth LP, "Monsters" the final release for SST.


 After nearly a decade of do-it-yourself success, Meat Puppets made a successful transition to major-label status in the first half of the '90s, signing with London Records and releasing "Forbidden Places" in July 1991, this album included "Sam", the band's first single which leapt into The Modern Rock chart at #13.


 The follow-up album, "Too High To Die", made unexpected inroads into the Rock mainstream upon its January 1994 release; the CD peaked at #1 on Billboard's Top Heatseekers chart, reached the #62 position on The Billboard 200 and went gold, selling over 500,000 copies on the strength of the surprise hit "Backwater"; the track shot to #2 on The Mainstream Rock chart, peaked at #11 on The Modern Rock Tracks and also crossed over to The Billboard Hot 100 reaching #47; "We Don't Exist", the second single off the album, was another Active Rock radio top 30 hit.


 In October 1995 Meat Puppets released "No Joke!" but the record failed to capitalize on its predecessor's success and made a brief appearance in the U.S. Billboard 200 chart producing a Mainstream Rock top 20 hit in the single "Scum" and Cris began sinking into drug addiction.


 Despite Curt's initial efforts to help get his brother into rehab, Cris continued disappearing into a haze of addiction. He and his wife, Michelle Tardif, became increasingly reclusive. Sadly Michelle, died of a morphine and cocaine overdose in 1998.


 With all the turmoil and tragedy surrounding his family, Curt Kirkwood assembled a new quartet version of Meat Puppets, featuring guitarist Kyle Ellison, bassist Andrew Duplantis and drummer Shandon Sahm. Despite a year and a half of rehearsal before the band debuted, Curt admits that the new line-up never realized the chemistry of the original Puppets and they lasted for only one album, the lackluster 2000's "Golden Lies".


 "Rise To Your Knees" was the first album of new material to bear the Meat Puppets name since 2000 and the first in a dozen years to reunite Curt with his brother, Cris Kirkwood, who rejoined the band after a lengthy struggle with substance abuse. New drummer Ted Marcus replaced original timekeeper Derrick Bostrom. The album hit stores in July 2007 but failed to recapture their earlier commercial success.


 Two years later arrived the trio's twelfth studio album "Sewn Together" which featured the single/video "Rotten Shame".


 Meat Puppets issued their next album, "Lollipop", in April 2011 on Megaforce Records; recorded at Spoon's Hi-Fi Studios in Austin, the album features new drummer Shandon Sahm.

 
The Meat Puppets originally formed in 1980. Singer/guitarist Curt Kirkwood first met drummer Derrick Bostrom at a party in Paradise Valley, Arizona.  Kirkwood recalls, "It was a party of all his friends from the church that he went to - they were all pretty eccentric people already, listening to a lot of different stuff."


 
The Meat Puppets' 1982 self-titled album was recorded in just three days (at Unicorn Studios on Santa Monica Boulevard) and under the influence. As bassist Cris Kirkwood recalled in the book Too High to Die, "We dosed for three days in a row and recorded that thing."


 
Although Meat Puppets II is an all-time favorite of Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil, it wasn't until many years later that he actually owned a copy of the album. At the time of the album's release (1984), a friend dubbed Thayil a cassette - one side comprised of early material from Blue Cheer, the other side featuring Meat Puppets II.


 
Curt Kirkwood once broke his finger (when it was accidentally slammed in a van door), which was one of the reasons that the 1986 release, Out My Way, was only an EP.


 
After the break up of the short-lived supergroup Eyes Adrift (which saw Curt joined by ex-Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic and ex-Sublime drummer Bud Gaugh), Curt and Bud joined forces in the band Volcano. Like Eyes Adrift, Volcano only managed to issue a single self-titled album before breaking up.


 From the Meat Puppets II liner notes:

The album strikes an outsider theme right away with “Split Myself in Two”, a song based on the fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin. “The whole idea there is how you fit in as the interloper, the pariah, the outsider,” Curt says.


 From the Meat Puppets II liner notes:


…the fast country-flavored instrumental “Magic Toy Missing” [is] an implicit reminder of the many affinities between punk and bluegrass. The song, Curt claims, “was pretty much about how the moon was actually a pattern to show you where to put your Spirograph toy.”

 From the Meat Puppets II liner notes:


…Meat Puppets II was what Kurt Loder, in a four-star Rolling Stone review called “a kind of cultural trash compactor”. There’s Eighties angst and Seventies debauchery, but with the Grateful Dead influences, the cosmic imagery, the acid damage, the laid-back vibe and a heavy dose of Zen philosopher Alan Watts, it’s the spectre of the Sixties counterculture which hangs most heavily over the album. The members of the Meat Puppets were old enough to have absorbed that culture, but too young to have enjoyed it before it collapsed. So when Curt sung in “Lost,” “I’m tired of living in Nixon’s mess,” he meant it.


 From the Meat Puppets II liner notes:


“Plateau, It’s a coming of age song,” says Curt. “Getting out of the house, realizing that I wasn’t going to be able to accept whatever the status quo was going to be, that I was going to have to be satisfied with whatever level of existence that I had achieved. It’s probably the most truthful song I’ve ever written.”

 
This song was popularized when Kurt Cobain personally invited Curt Kirkwood and his brother Kris to perform three of their tunes with Nirvana during the Grunge band's famous 1993 MTV Unplugged appearance. Their version of this tune appears on Nirvana's 1994 album MTV Unplugged in New York. "I've talked to Krist Novoselic and other people," Curt Kirkwood recalled to Mojo magazine January 1995, "and it seems they listened to us a lot before they started the band. I guess they liked our stuff 'cos we took a step away from formulaic hardcore in the early '80s but still had the attitude. Also, both Kurt and I have that high and lonesome country thing in our voices, the way he'd purposely let his voice break, like Jimmie Rodgers or something. The idea of the Unplugged covers came about when we toured with Nirvana a year ago. It was clear that we were on the same trip - Kurt wanted to extend the end part of 'Plateau' for half an hour, and I'd written that song to be cyclical, so you could just space out."


 
Music writer Stephen M. Deusner noted in the book, The Pitchfork 500, that this song is "a tricky, ambiguous metaphor about consumerism, or religion, or the afterlife. If you buy into the last of those" he continued, "then all that awaits you once you die are, allegedly, 'a bucket and a mop and an illustrated book about birds.'"


 
The title of UK rapper/singer Plan B's 2006 debut album, Who Needs Actions When You Got Words, was taken from one of this song's lyrics.
 From the Meat Puppets II liner notes:


…“We’re Here” seems to be about an acid-tripper who’s reminded that there’s a world outside his skull by the arrival of some friends; appropriately, the song ends with a lambent guitar solo, blurred like acid trails.


 From the Meat Puppets II liner notes:


Four funereal tom-tom beats announce “Lake of Fire”, an epic song that lasts less than two minutes. Curt says it “was a cartoon song about the idea of the whole fuckin' Catholic nature of evil.”

 
The "Lake Of Fire" is Hell. There is a lot of biblical imagery in the lyrics, and the song can be seen about how the Christian church uses the idea of hell to scare people into following their beliefs (Meat Puppets did a version of a song called "Jesus Don't Want Me For A Sunbeam" which is also very sarcastic).



The song's writer, lead singer Curt Kirkwood, didn't set out to write religious commentary - his inspiration was far more jocose. He told us: "A lot of times I don't remember writing songs, I can't remember anything about like, how did I come up with that? But 'Lake of Fire,' we were all living together and everybody decided to go to a Halloween party, and they were all getting in costumes. And I thought, 'Man, this is one of the stupidest things - adults getting dressed up like we did when we were little kids.'



I had actually got pretty wasted on something and told everybody, 'No, I'm not going.' And then once I was alone, I just started messing around. I wrote a couple of songs that night. I wrote 'Magic Toy Missing' and 'Lake of Fire,' maybe one more. But I was just really trying to make fun of my friends for going out to a Halloween party."


 
Nirvana performed this song on their 1993 MTV Unplugged appearance, which was also released as an album called MTV Unplugged in New York the next year. Along with "Lake Of Fire," Nirvana also played two other Meat Puppets songs: "Plateau" and "Oh, Me." They were joined by Curt and Cris Kirkwood of Meat Puppets for these three songs.



Kurt Cobain was a huge Meat Puppets fan and would often mention them as an inspiration. "He was always in the moment," Curt Kirkwood told us about Cobain. "He wasn't very conversive, just really, really casual. I was pretty blown away by the whole thing, just on the level of how it was and wasn't, like my concept of it. It was a strange thing to be around, because there was so much attention at any point coming from every direction."



The Meat Puppets’ story is one of many ups (guesting on Nirvana’s Unplugged) and downs (bassist Cris Kirkwood’s drug addiction derailing the band). The new book, Too High to Die: Meet the Meat Puppets, is a comprehensive oral history of the band’s career, assembled by Rolling Stone writer Greg Prato. It features all-new interviews with band members past and present, as well as with Flea, Peter Buck, Henry Rollins, Ian MacKaye, Kim Thayil, and Scott Asheton, among others. Here is an exclusive excerpt from the book, which tells the tale of the group’s classic 1984 release, Meat Puppets II.

MEAT PUPPETS II [1984]


 Cris Kirkwood [Meat Puppets bassist]: I remember getting up one morning – we all lived together, and Cinda may have been pregnant…or maybe [Curt’s children] were real teeny-weeny – and he was sitting at the table. He was like, “I’ve got a new song,” and it was “Lake of Fire.” He played it, and I was like, “God…that’s great, dude! What cool imagery and satisfying chord changes.”


 Curt Kirkwood [Meat Puppets singer/guitarist]: It was Halloween. Everybody wanted to go to a Halloween party – we all were living together in the same house with some girlfriends. I thought the Halloween party was a really dumb idea. Being a new adult myself at the time, I was like, “Adults are always in disguises. Everybody’s got a dumb costume on constantly. Whether they know it or not, they’re all in costume, and they want to go out and put on a different costume and act like children.” I guess I was being a party pooper.

 They all went to the party, so I dropped a hit of acid, and wrote “Lake of Fire” and “Magic Toy Missing.” I sat out in the backyard and wrote them, when it was a full moon, too. “Magic Toy Missing” was from looking at the moon and it was making a kaleidoscope happen, when you’re tripped out like that. I tried to make a musical version of the Spirograph sort of thing that the moon was doing. I wrote them both in about 20 minutes. “Lake of Fire” was kind of like, “Oh, the bad people! They’re out tonight – look, it’s Frankenstein and the Mummy!” Just making fun of my friends, really.  Cris Kirkwood: “Plateau,” I thought the lyrics in that were great. Curt started writing really bitching lyrics. And it became a hallmark, it made the band what it is.


 Curt Kirkwood: Whereas I remember writing “Lake of Fire” and “Magic Toy Missing,” I don’t remember writing “Plateau.” I was experimenting with moving an open G chord up and down the neck, so I came up with that one. “Oh, Me” was kind of a ponderance on something that Derrick [Bostrom] and I were into, which was “me-ism.” Ego-ism. Just worshipping ourselves. Blind faith in ourselves.


 Cris Kirkwood: But “Plateau,” those songs have taken on extra cache or whatever, because the Cobain/Nirvana thing [Nirvana would later cover several Meat Puppets II tunes for MTV Unplugged]. And they were good choices by Nirvana. That kid really got Meat Puppets II in the way that I didn’t realize people were getting it back then like that. I didn’t realize that anybody noticed at all, because all the more straightforward punker stuff had an easier time of it in a way.


 Curt Kirkwood: We did Meat Puppets II, we had an ounce of ecstasy. We just snorted X the whole time, and it was “MDMA” back then. We were really into putting things into these double locked capsules full of MDMA, and getting high as shit. Nobody knew what X was yet.

 Yeah, we were having a blast. See, we didn’t drink, that’s the thing about the Meat Puppets. My brother would drink some, but Derrick and I didn’t drink at all in the early days. We smoked some weed – we weren’t your typical partiers. It wasn’t “rock” really, it was peer surrealist art for us, like we get to do this and emulate our heroes.

 Derrick was way into surrealists like [Francis] Picabia, and then cartoonists like Jack Kirby. We were trying to find some sort of forum for high art. And also just trying to integrate our psychedelic experience into it intentionally.  Derrick Bostrom [Original Meat Puppets drummer]: I think we did the first vocal pass, and that’s when Curt realized his old way of singing wasn’t going to match this new music. So we had to do another pass with the vocals, and it was hard for him, because before, it was just straight Captain Beefheart-style growling. And to actually sing, it wasn’t that he wasn’t able to do it, it was just that he hadn’t been used to it. It took a different strategy, and it took him a while to figure out what it was.


 Curt Kirkwood: The first album [Meat Puppets], I was high when I did that, so I screamed a lot. And then I started chilling out, and going, “I don’t want to scream my whole career.” Metallica came around, and it was like, “God, they do that a lot better anyway.” The vocals have always been what I tried to have stitched stuff together, get some nice harmonies going, and sing it pretty straight – no matter what’s going on. A lot of my favorite bands as a teenager were the Stones, Zeppelin. They had different kinds of music. No limitations stylistically.


 Derrick Bostrom: We weren’t entirely satisfied with Meat Puppets II, in the sense that the start of it was in March, and we didn’t get it mixed until November that fall. It basically languished for at least six months, and by the time it finally came out, in March of 1984, the impact that we had wanted it to have, with our country leanings and whatnot, had been somewhat blunted by the delay. That made us very uncomfortable. We felt that this was our first inkling that how you’re going to manage your label relationship to make sure you get what you want. You can’t count on anybody else but yourself to do what’s best for you. And the way that SST – who were a little weary about putting out this country rock crap on their punk rock label – started to throw a wedge in it.

  Cris Kirkwood:  I remember when Curt painted that picture [that became the cover of Meat Puppets II]. We were still living at my mom’s house. We used to hide in the bathroom and smoke grass. We were in the bathroom getting stoned, and he picked up this little piece of canvas, and real quickly, whipped off this thing. And that’s the cover. It took him about a minute to do that – we used it a few years later as the cover for the record. It’s Curt’s acrylic work, and definitely Van Gogh-inspired painting technique. It was back when you still had vinyl, so you were making this shit in terms of being “an album.”
   One of the cool things that we did was we did a photo session with this guy, Anvil Blockhammer, here in town. We drove around West Phoenix, and we were out in a field, an agricultural thing. It was Derrick’s cool arty idea – that picture that’s on the back, where we’re in silhouette.


 Dave Pirner [Soul Asylum singer/guitarist]:  It was right before their second album came out [the first time Pirner saw the Meat Puppets]. I distinctly remember hanging out with them and watching them play live. Then their second record came out, and it seemed to bring another level of awareness to the band. It surprised the shit out of me, because it was so easy to understand. The music before that was really frantic, and it was really exploring I think what they wanted to do, and they didn’t really know what they wanted to do. The second record seemed sort of like, “This is what we can do, without even really thinking about it.”


 Flea [Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist]: Meat Puppets II, man, it’s the warmest, coolest fucking record.


 Lou Barlow [Dinosaur Jr. bassist, Sebadoh singer/guitarist]:  When they became more of “a country band,” the way that they switched between the really crazy material and the county-esque material was really almost like a blueprint for Dinosaur Jr. and Sebadoh. Mike Watt told me that when D. Boon first heard Dinosaur Jr., he thought we were “the east coast Meat Puppets.”


 Peter Buck [R.E.M. guitarist]:  I got Meat Puppets II before I ever saw them. But I saw them on that tour. I traveled so much in those days – I know I saw them in Athens a couple of times. I think the first time might have been in New York. The whole post-punk thing in America was happening. It was blossoming everywhere. Everywhere you went, there was some new, different kind of band, that you’d think, “That’s interesting.” When I heard the Meat Puppets, it was like, “I can get some of their influences – there’s a little Grateful Dead in there, maybe a little Neil Young.” But there was interplay between the instruments that was just insane. It sounded like when you think of when you look at a magician, and go, “That guy spent a huge amount of time just sitting in his bedroom all by himself, learning to do that.” The Kirkwood brothers’ interlocking parts were so weirdly intense. I remember going, “This is more like jazz than anything, in its own weird way.”  Kim Thayil [Soundgarden guitarist]:  1984 comes along. That year, you had My War by Black Flag, Zen Arcade by Hüsker Dü, Double Nickels on the Dime by the Minutemen, Meat Puppets II, Surviving You, Always by Saccharine Trust, and the first Saint Vitus album [Saint Vitus]. That was the golden age of SST Records. I remember anticipating the Meat Puppets II release, because they’d become probably my favorite band of that time. I just had to hear what they were going to do next. Soundgarden formed in September of 1984. So I was tripping out to Meat Puppets II before Soundgarden formed. But when Soundgarden formed, it got played a lot. I remember playing it for Hiro [Yamamoto, original Soundgarden bassist] and Chris [Cornell, Soundgarden’s then-drummer, later singer] all the time.

 The first song I heard off of Meat Puppets II was “I’m A Mindless Idiot,” which is an instrumental. I heard it on the radio, I think it was KCMU. My jaw dropped, because it wasn’t fast and it wasn’t punk rock and hardcore. It was like the trippy thing I heard on side two of the first Meat Puppets album. They expanded upon it, and it sounded great. To me, the production sounded great. And it was an instrumental, which tripped me out even more. I was blown away.


 Here’s the weird thing – I still don’t have Meat Puppets II on vinyl, because a good friend of mine in college gave me a homemade cassette. On one side is Blue Cheer – it had a bunch of stuff off Outsideinside and Vincebus Eruptum. And the other side of the cassette had Meat Puppets II. That thing, I would just play it and watch the sun rise, I would play it and watch the sun set. I’d come home from college from classes – I’d go by a local convenience store and buy a couple Buckhorn Beers, a pack of cigarettes, and some string cheese, and go and sit in my bedroom. My bedroom was a sort of walk-in closet and the window faced west. So I laid there eating string cheese and drinking my Buckhorn Beer, and I’d put on Meat Puppets II and watch the sun go down. I had to do that all the time. It tripped me out, and it was the coolest feeling – being mildly intoxicated  And Meat Puppets II was great if I smoked pot, which I rarely did, but on the occasion I did, I was like, “I’ve got to listen to the Meat Puppets!” And on the occasion of doing MDMA or anything else that may cross the path of a 22-year-old musician who is a student. That album tripped me out – it seemed to be heavy and wild in these other ways. Psychologically and emotionally. I loved it. It had these elements that I found in the Velvet Underground, the MC5. And that Meat Puppets’ second album became not only my favorite Meat Puppets album, but perhaps one of my favorite albums of all time.


 From the Book:  Too High to Die: Meet the Meat Puppets by Greg Prato

Album 531.
Culture Club................................Colour By Numbers (1983)












No' gonna spend a great deal of time on this one, decidedly 80s and for me doesn't stand the test of time very well, to be fair didn't mind most of the singles, and yes I thought it was a female the first time I saw it (Do You Really Want To Hurt Me)

As the years went by I went off Boy George, I thought he just got too sour and bitchy but not in the camp funny kinda way, almost bitter in fact. But back to the album, nothing really stands out for me, maybe at the time "Karma Chameleon" would have been decent enough but "It's a Miracle" and "Victims" sound pretty voosh these days, "Church Of The Poisoned Mind" is quite passable, but apart from that pretty uninspiring to say the least.



This album wont be going into my collection.





Bits & Bobs;


Boy George got to know Malcolm McLaren, who was managing the group Bow Wow Wow. McLaren cooked up a plan to have George join the band, either as a replacement for their lead singer Annabella Lwin or as an additional singer. He was going to perform as Lieutenant Lush. The plan fell through, and George ended up forming his own band, which became Culture Club.


 
The band wrote their songs together and shared the royalties, with Boy George writing the lyrics. Jon Moss handled many of the business affairs, and Boy George did most of the publicity. Since George was so prominent as the face of the group, it sometimes gave the impression that he was the leader, but the band shared equally in decisions and songwriting.


 
Culture Club was one of the first British bands to make a huge impact in America thanks to MTV. The channel launched in 1981, and in 1982 they put "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?" in heavy rotation, which was their first single in the States and introduced America to the very unusual Boy George. They toured America in 1983 and scored two more hits from the album. Their next album included the #1 "Karma Chameleon," and they ended up with 10 Top-40 hits in the United States.


 
Boy George was known for his very feminine look and soft singing voice, although his speaking voice is surprisingly gruff. He dressed in women's clothes and wore makeup in his school days, and accentuated the look to publicize the band. Considering the Glam and Punk looks that were popular just a few years earlier in England, it wasn't so shocking in his home country, but in America it got a lot of attention, with many viewers wondering about his true gender.


 
They were the first British band since The Beatles to score three Top 10 US hits from their debut album.


 
The band first got together when Boy George joined Jon Moss and Mikey Craig in a group called In Praise of Lemmings. George made them change the name.


 
Boy George said in 1983: "I think people think of me as very feminine, but I'm very masculine. I can throw a good punch. I'm taller and bigger than people expect me to be; I'm sure they expect a little fairy wearing dandelions."


 
George got kicked out of school when he was 15. He worked as a model and a makeup artist before starting his music career.


 
In 1983, Boy George came in second place in both the male and female "best dressed" categories in New Musical Express reader's poll.


 
Boy George once had a job as a bagger in his local supermarket. The gig didn't work out, as the future Culture Club singer was fired - for wearing the bags.


 
Their producer, Steve Levine, had a lot to do with their success. Levine was a studio wizard who introduced them to the latest innovations, including the Linn LM-1 drum machine, which he combined with Jon Moss' live drums to create distinctive rhythms. Boy George credits this forward-leaning sound for getting them a record deal. "The general consensus was that I was a drag queen, not palatable for the pop market," he told Music Week. "Steve saw through that, he saw a much bigger picture."


Culture Club, ‘Colour By Numbers’
When told that Culture Club's Colour By Numbers had been selected as one of the Top 100 albums of the decade, Boy George said, with typical playfulness, "As well it should be."


 The band's second LP, Colour by Numbers, was released in the fall of 1983 while a second British Invasion was dominating the American pop charts. But George insists the album's surprisingly mature pop polish wasn't motivated by competition with his peers.


 "We used to call Duran Duran 'bottles of milk,' they were so white bread," George said. "We certainly weren't competing with Spandau Ballet. We wanted to be more like the older people we admired."


 Colour by Numbers does display a respect for pop history. When George debuted the ballad "That's the Way (I'm Only Trying to Help You)" at a sound check one day, he said, "Everyone said, 'Oh, it's really like Elton John.'" After the album was released, George told a reporter that "It's a Miracle" borrowed from the melody of a Gilbert O'Sullivan song. And "Church of the Poison Mind" is nearly identical to Stevie Wonder's "Uptight."


 But the familiarity of the group's songs bothered at least one person. "The guy who wrote 'Handy Man' [Jimmy Jones] tried to sue us over 'Karma Chameleon,'" George said. "I might have heard it once, but it certainly wasn't something I sat down and said, 'Yeah, I want to copy this.' We gave him ten pence and an apple."


 Culture Club made its second album with the same producer (Steve Levine) and at the same studio (Red Bus Studios, in London) it had used for its debut. George attributes the band's improvement from the tropical pop of Kissing to Be Clever to the input of outside musicians, notably keyboardist Phil Pickett, who co-wrote two songs with the band, and singer Helen Terry, who electrifies several tracks.


 Within months of the release of Colour by Numbers, George's plucked brow was on the cover of Newsweek, followed by a Tonight Show bitch-off with Joan Rivers, a Boy George doll and his infamous acceptance speech at the Grammys, when George thanked the audience for "knowing a good drag queen when you see one."


 George said he last listened to Colour by Numbers three years ago, when he was trying to kick his heroin addiction. "I thought some of the singing was out of tune," he said with a giggle. "It's definitely the best Culture Club album, but I don't know if it's my best record." During three recent concerts in Australia, the only song from Colour he performed was "Victims," the album-closing ballad. Which doesn't mean he's not proud of the band he may — or may not — be re-forming.


 "We had a good formula, and other groups obviously picked up on that," he said. "I think Wham! definitely picked up on it in the beginning. I've read things where people have said the songs were awful and the only important thing was the way I looked. Colour by Numbers definitely does have a place. Above who or below who, I'm not sure."



"Karma Chameleon"


 
Boy George explained, "The song is about the terrible fear of alienation that people have, the fear of standing up for one thing. It's about trying to suck up to everybody. Basically, if you aren't true, if you don't act like you feel, then you get Karma-justice, that's nature's way of paying you back."


 
Phil Pickett, the former keyboardist of the '70s UK band Sailor, helped write this song. He contributed keyboards and backing vocals to Culture Club and did some songwriting with the group.


 
Songwriting in Culture Club was mostly a group effort, with Boy George writing the lyrics. Many of his words were inspired by his relationship with the group's drummer, Jon Moss, with whom he had an affair during the height of the group's fame. George admitted that their first single "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me" was about Moss, and their difficult lover-professional relationship was the inspiration for the line, "You're my lover, not my rival" in "Karma Chameleon." The relationship was hidden to the public and Jon never admitted it during the '80s, so in a way Boy George was communicating with him through their songs.


 
This was Culture Club's biggest hit in the UK, where 1,405,000 copies were sold, making it the biggest-selling single of 1983. It also won the 1984 Brit Award for Best Single.


 Boy George was a very colorful character, and a fixture on MTV in the early '80s before American artists began regularly making videos. The video for "Karma Chameleon" was directed by Peter Sinclair and shot on a steamboat. It's a period piece, set in Mississippi, 1870, although it was actually filmed on the River Thames in England. George is an anachronism in the video, with fingerless gloves and multicolored hair that would not have appeared in Mississippi at that time.



Judd Lander played the harmonica on this track, which is up front in the mix. Lander, who also played harp on "Church of the Poison Mind," joined the group on many of their performances. Lander, a Liverpool, England native, studied the instrument under Sonny Boy Williamson and became a top session player in London.


 
Culture Club were sued for plagiarism in this song by the writers of "Handy Man," a 1960 hit for Jimmy Jones. Boy George admitted, "I might have heard it once, but it was certainly not something I sat down and copied. We gave them ten pence and an apple."


 
The video is one of the few in which the band appears but doesn't play any instruments. The only instrument to show up is a harmonica, which is played by a black man on the river. The real harmonica player, Judd Lander, is white, but directors seem enamored with the image of black players - Lander's part was also mimed by a black actor in the Robbie Nevil video for "Wots It To Ya?"


 
In Canada this topped their charts for seven weeks and was the first single by a group to sell a million copies.


 
Culture Club performed this song in the 1986 episode of The A-Team, "Cowboy George." In the episode, a series of misadventures leads to the band playing a country bar to a bunch of cowboys. They win over the crowd, along with the A-Team (played by George Peppard, Mr. T, Dirk Benedict and Dwight Schultz), who bob along to the tune.


 
This song has been used in a number of movies and TV series. Among them:



Movies-
Electric Dreams (1984)
The Chain (1984)
Texasville (1990)
Romy and Michele's High School Reunion (1997)
Whipped (2000)
Rock Star (2001)
In America (2002)
Scary Movie 4 (2006)
Brooklyn Rules (2007)
Madea's Witness Protection (2012)
The Call (2013)
Pride (2014)
Sex Tape (2014)
The Bad Batch (2016)



TV-
3rd Rock from the Sun ("Frankie Goes to Rutherford" - 2000)
The King of Queens ("Bun Dummy" - 2002)
Cold Case ("Greed" - 2004)
Dexter ("Blinded by the Light" - 2009)
The Office ("Here Comes Treble" - 2012)
Life in Pieces (Pilot - 2015)



 Boy George’s Nightmare A special report on the fallen pop idol’s bout with his drug addiction


 BOY GEORGE, THE FLAMBOYANT pop star who’d seduced the world with his sweet soul music, looked a mess. Standing in a backstage trailer at an Artists Against Apartheid rock concert held on Clapham Common in London on June 29th, the twenty-five-year-old singer was desperately trying to do something about his makeup.


 Since his last public performance, in the summer of 1985, Boy George’s appearance had changed dramatically – so dramatically that the bouncers backstage at the antiapartheid concert hadn’t recognized him at first and had refused him entrance. Once slightly plump, George was now thin and emaciated. His long hair had been cut short and dyed blond and was concealed by a broad-brimmed knit hat. His blue-green eyes, once so full of life, were concealed by round, dark granny glasses. His clothes, which he’d always arranged with great care, appeared thrown on at random, and some rather strange expressions were printed on his coat: one read, FUCK ME STUPID, another said simply, SUCK MY NOB. Across the back of his shoulders was a third slogan: HEROIN FREE ZONE. And now, to make matters worse, the scorching ninety-degree heat was causing George’s makeup to run.  Boy George’s performance at Clapham Common was to be a solo outing; the other members of Culture Club apparently realized that this might not be the best moment to join their leader onstage. They already knew that over the last six months, George had been using heroin. According to one of the singer’s brothers, twenty-one-year-old David O’Dowd, and one of his best friends, twenty-year-old “Fat Tony” Marnoch, George was now doing as much as two grams of heroin a day.


 When George finally took the stage, he looked even worse than he had in the trailer. A makeup artist had told him that because of the heat, there was nothing she could do, so he had wiped his face with a towel and then applied a facial. To the crowd, though, it looked as if George had splashed water on his face and then dipped it in a bowl of flour. “It was unbelievable what people were saying as he went onstage,” one of George’s business associates said later. “People were going, ‘Look at him, he’s stoned. He looks ridiculous. What an imbecile.’ ”  The audience responded to George’s brief set – which included a gripping version of “Black Money” and two other songs – by hurling nearly two dozen bottles and cans at him. Before leaving the stage, George bid the crowd a sarcastic goodbye from “your favorite drug addict.”


 Unfortunately, there was more to it than his sarcasm would suggest. Boy George, the world-renowned pop star, was about to become a world-famous junkie.



 SHOCK. HOW ELSE COULD ONE RESPOND TO THE REVELATION that Boy George was now addicted to heroin? This was not some openly decadent hedonist like Keith Richards, who had based his public image on being a bad boy of rock. Quite the opposite. Boy George was the harmless, lovable windup doll of pop, a cartoonlike fantasy figure who could sing like a white Smokey Robinson and trade glib one-liners with Joan Rivers and Johnny Carson. He always had time to sign autographs for his fans and to answer their letters. He once said he preferred a cup of tea to sex. And he was outspoken in his disgust with drug use of any kind. He considered drugs to be stupid and a sign of weakness. He was the pop star whom everyone from your grandmother to your little sister could like.


 In the early days of Culture Club, Boy George – whose real name is George O’Dowd – didn’t smoke or use drugs; for him to drink more than one beer was unusual. He laid down the law about drugs and Culture Club: the two were simply not compatible. During a 1984 tour of Japan, bassist Mikey Craig was worried as he smoked some hash with a journalist, afraid that George might hear them giggling and realize they were breaking the band’s rules.


 In many ways, George’s story is sadly familiar. A young boy from a working-class English family becomes, at the age of twenty-two, an international superstar. Overnight, he’s rich and famous. The next three years are an accelerating whirlwind of activity, as more than 10 million records are sold around the world.  Then things begin to go wrong. In George’s case, the trouble began in late 1984, after the release of Culture Club’s third album, the mediocre Waking Up with the House on Fire. The public, seduced by new stars like Madonna and Wham!, gave the LP a cool reception. Culture Club’s first two albums had yielded seven Top Ten hits in the U.S., but just one song from me third LP made it into the Top Twenty. And despite an elaborate million-dollar stage production, the group’s world tour was also a disappointment.


 When the tour was over, the members of Culture Club realized it was time for a long vacation. Manager Tony Gordon moved to Spain, spending a year there as a tax exile. Guitarist Roy Hay spent time in well, while Mikey Craig sojourned in France. Only drummer Jon Moss – George’s longtime friend and lover – remained in London.

 But George and Jon were drifting apart, a situation only exacerbated when George took up residence in New York with Marilyn, a transvestite and would-be pop star who had changed his name from Peter Robinson. And Boy George was also becoming bored with Boy George. For three years, he had lived and breathed Culture Club. His every waking hour had been spent working. He designed his clothes, his record covers, his image. He co-wrote the songs and hung out in the studio through-out the recording of the first two albums. He did hundreds of interviews, as well as numerous photo sessions and TV appearances. He starred in Culture Club videos and toured the world. It had all taken its toll.


 “He became his own worst enemy”, said Steve Levine, 28, the producer of Culture Club’s first three albums. “At that time George’s mouth was extremely big. I remember watching him on Johnny Carson, the second time he was on, and I just thought, ‘The vibe’s gone.’ He wasn’t interesting anymore.”


 “Basically, he was Boy George for three years,” said Fat Tony. “Now he just wanted to have a good time and do what everyone else was doing. It was like ‘Forget the bloke [Jon Moss], forget everything.’ ”  Separated from both his family, who were all living in England, and his band, Boy George became, as one acquaintance put it, a “party boy.” “Although it’s well known that George is homosexual, he wasn’t camp,” said Levine. “He wasn’t a queen. But he began to hang around with a very camp set of people, who are also known for taking drugs. People who live life to excess. George is very much a sponge; he absorbs people’s personalities. So when he gets in with wrong crowds – i.e., people who take drugs – then he just would do that. That was the beginning of the end in terms of the downward slide.”


 THE FIRST TIME GEORGE’S FRIENDS HEARD ABOUT THE pop star’s drug use was in late June of 1985, when Philip Sallon – a flashy, staunchly antidrug friend of George’s who runs London’s trendy Mud Club – returned from a week in New York. Sallon had gone there to help George celebrate his twenty-fourth birthday. A party was held at Area, a popular New York nightspot, and George and his entourage greeted people from a bed set up in the club.


 “George is really getting into drugs in New York,” a disturbed Sallon told his friends upon his return to London. In fact, George was snorting cocaine, doing ecstasy and drinking. He was also smoking cigarettes and marijuana.


 According to David O’Dowd, Marilyn had helped introduce George to drugs during a visit to Jamaica in 1982, but the singer didn’t go beyond a bit of curious experimentation at that point. George’s friends claim that Marilyn – who could not be contacted for this story – had used drugs for many years. “Marilyn is, well, he’s just not very human,” said Jane, a sixteen-year-old friend of George’s who lived with the singer in his New York co-op at the end of last year. (She asked that her surname not be revealed.) “If he wants something from you, he’ll just charm it out of you. He goes, ‘Oh, come on, we’re best friends, and it’s such fun. Come on, let’s go buy some drugs.’ He’s so charming you think that you just want to be loved by him, because he acts like he’s got so much to give, and that’s why I believe that he did that to George.”  Living in Manhattan – far from the more stabilizing influence of his band mates, family, manager and record company – didn’t help George either. Throughout the summer, he could be found hanging out at clubs like Area and the Palladium and at an after-hours place called Paradise Garage.


 For a time, George busied himself with trying to get Marilyn a record deal, producing a version of the old Norman Greenbaum hit “Spirit in the Sky” for him. He flew to London to attend Live Aid, though he didn’t perform. As preparations for Culture Club’s fourth album got under way, George was bouncing back and forth between London and New York. In September, Fat Tony saw George taking “the odd toke” of pot at a London photo session. Later that month, back in Manhattan, a journalist was in one of the stalls in the bathroom at Area when George and Marilyn entered an adjoining stall; according to the writer, they “were certainly snorting something or other.”


 In October, Culture Club was in Montreux, Switzerland, recording most of its fourth album, the appropriately tided From Luxury to Heartache. David O’Dowd claims his brother was using cocaine during the recording sessions, but Arif Mardin, the album’s producer, said he was unaware of any drug use. Mardin, however, did admit that George flew back to London a couple of times and was not always around when it was time for him to record his vocals. “We all assumed it was a lot of partying,” said Mardin. “Because when he was back [from London], it was business as usual. We are used to working with a lot of prima donnas, so if a man is late, we say, ‘Fine, we’ll do the guitar first’ This is not a military operation.”


 When his work on the album was done, George returned to New York and began to party with a vengeance. From mid-November through late December, George and a group of his friends – including Marilyn, Fat Tony and Jane – were living in his two-bedroom co-op, just down the hall from the co-op owned by Duran Duran bassist John Taylor, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.  Marilyn had taken over one of the bedrooms, covering it, as Jane put it, “from floor to ceiling in gay porno magazines.” George occupied the other bedroom, sharing it with a string of gay lovers. The rest crashed on couches in the living room. “George has a double bed, and one night we had five of us in the double bed,” said Jane. “It was really silly. We were pretending to be animals and things.”


 At the time, the apartment was painted in pastels – pale peach and pink – and photo-realist paintings of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis and James Dean, as well as an immense collage of Madonna, decorated the walls. There was a Jacuzzi in George’s marble bathroom and, of course, video equipment and a stereo in the enormous living room. A box of marijuana sat on the coffee table. “There were people coming around and selling grass all the time,” said Jane. “I saw a lot of drugs.”


 “You know, George never wants to be left out, really,” said Fat Tony. “If everyone else was taking drugs, he’d sort of have to take them. When you come down to it, everyone had their finger in the pie – they got into drugs. Everyone’s been a very bad influence, I think. No one is to actually blame. The only person to blame is George, but everyone lent a helping hand.”


 By November, George had graduated from cocaine to heroin, which he was using on a fairly regular basis. On one occasion, he acquired some “really synthetic smack,” according to Jane, and became violently ill. For several days he was so sick he couldn’t leave his bed. Once he recovered, though, he started smoking and snorting the drug. He apparently never used a needle. “He’s never injected, ever,” said Fat Tony. “When someone thinks of a junkie, they always think straight away of a syringe. That’s got nothing to do with it. Snort it, burn it, whatever, it’s all the same thing. I don’t think he understood whatsoever how heavy a sort of a hold it would get on him. At that point he thought he could stop it at any time.”  In reality, things were zooming out of control. George and his friends would sleep all day, often rising at four or five in the afternoon for a night of parrying. One night, a soused John Taylor wandered into George’s living room and proceeded to have a battle of the bands with the Culture Club singer. George played a new Culture Club song, then Taylor played something of his own; George popped a video into the VCR, then Taylor retaliated with a clip of his own. “They were having this real ego fight,” recalled Fat Tony. “It was like ‘Yeah, listen to this track.’ ‘No, listen to mine.’ This was going on all night . . .”


 The two pop stars’ fun and games came to a sudden halt when Marilyn sneaked behind the TV and slipped an explicit gay porn video into the VCR. “George went bright red and started screaming at Marilyn,” said Jane. “And when John Taylor left, George just really got mad at Marilyn, saying, ‘You’ve embarrassed me in front of John Taylor.’ “


 One night George went to dine at Trader Vic’s, the posh restaurant located in the Plaza Hotel. “He nodded off,” said Fat Tony. “I went to the toilet, and when I came out, this woman said, ‘Oh, I just saw Boy George falling asleep in his snowball’ – they do this coconut-ice-cream thing that they call a snowball. When I got back to the table, he was sort of slouched. There were different people nodding off. I just kept kicking everyone: ‘Wake up, wake up.’ I’d wake him up and he’d scream, ‘I’m not asleep, shut up.’ It was funny.”


 George and his friends would often go out on shopping binges: once he and Fat Tony bought sixty-eight pairs of Calvin Klein underpants and about forty undershirts; another time, George spent around $1000 on a Yohji Yamomato designer suit for a casual acquaintance. In the early morning hours, after the nightly forays into club land, George and the gang would stop at a twenty-four-hour supermarket and load up on sweets, spending $300 without blinking an eye. Tubs of Haagen-Dazs ice cream filled the co-op’s freezer.  The drugs were now openly affecting George’s personality. Out on the street, the once-gracious pop star had turned ugly. “He used to be so sweet,” said Jane. “Now he would just be so rude. These poor girls would go, ‘Hey, are you Boy George?’ and he’d just go, ‘Oh, piss off, piss off.’ “


 In late December, George returned to London, where he still maintained two houses. On Boxing Day, the day after Christmas, he held a party at his Hampstead home. For a while, he was in good spirits. Then one of his friends arrived with a present: some smack. The drug caused George’s mood to turn foul. “Me and Tony and Marilyn just left and went out,” said Jane. Later that evening, they ran into George at a London club, where, according to Jane, things erupted into a screaming match. “Tony stood up to him and told him he was stupid. George said, ‘I’m never talking to any of you again. You just left me and didn’t say goodbye.’ “


 The following month, George and the rest of Culture Club went to Los Angeles for three weeks to film an episode of The A-Team. With the support of the band, George stopped using heroin for the duration of the project; David O’Dowd says a doctor prescribed Valium to help George deal with his problems. But as soon as the filming was completed, George joined Marilyn in New York, and by the time he had returned to London, twelve days later, he was using smack again. Shortly thereafter, George and Marilyn – whose relationship was always stormy – had a falling out, and George stopped seeing him. “George was going in and out of the stage where he hated the fact of what he was doing,” said David O’Dowd. “He was saying how degraded he felt. But every time he cried for help – and he did – someone gave him some more before the family or anyone who cared about him got there.”


 In April, George traveled to Jamaica for a two-week vacation. “He was very sick, he was looking ill and asking for help,” said David. “He knew he didn’t want to be on it [heroin], but he was on it.”  Upon his return to London, George continued to sink deeper and deeper into drug addiction. At times, he was spending an estimated 500 pounds ($750) a day on drugs, food and gifts for himself and those who were keeping him company. “I remember he used to get really frightening,” said Jane. “He used to have this laugh, this really evil cackle that would really frighten the hell out of me He used to think he was being really nice to someone, and then you’d suddenly notice this really evil cackle. He was just becoming totally twisted.”



 FOR MONTHS, JOHN BLAKE, THE POP-MUSIC GOSSIP columnist for the Daily Mirror, a British tabloid, had been hearing rumors about Boy George’s drug problems. Sometime after the first of the year, Blake, in an effort to get the story, apparently put out a contract of sorts on Boy George. Fat Tony said he was approached by one of Blake’s assistants, who offered him 60,000 pounds ($90,000) for an airtight story confirming George’s habit. Blake denied he was willing to pay that price, but he did admit that such an explosive story is worth a great deal on Fleet Street. Soon, all of England’s sensationalist tabloids – any one of which makes the New York Post seem intelligent, the National Enquirer appear levelheaded and reasonable – reportedly had their checkbooks open, offering similar rewards to any of George’s friends who would talk.


 Finally David Levine – the brother of producer Steve Levine – took the bait. “I’m the one person in the world who can be blamed for all this,” said the twenty-six-year-old photographer, ” ’cause I went first.” Levine’s reasons for speaking out remain unclear. In one interview with ROLLING STONE, Levine – who had done numerous photo sessions with George and the band over the years – seemed extremely bitter about what he considered lack of proper compensation for his work. He later said, however, that his sole motivation was concern for Boy George.  According to a source at the Daily Mirror, the newspaper paid Levine about 14,000 pounds ($21,000) for his story. Working with Daily Mirror reporters, Levine set about gathering the evidence needed to buttress his first-person observations about George’s drug use. At one point, he called his brother and pumped him for information concerning George. “It was in June,” Steve Levine said, “just after my birthday, and my brother phoned me up and said, ‘Oh, I’m really sorry I missed your birthday,’ ” Steve Levine recalled. “He said, ‘I booked this photo session with George the other day, and it was really bad because he was untogether. He was a day late for the session, and there were drugs there. What do you know?’ I said, ‘I don’t really know anything,’ ’cause I hadn’t seen George for ages. It was like a very casual conversation. . . . That was it.”


 The next morning, two reporters from the Daily Mirror showed up at Steve Levine’s London recording studio and started asking about Boy George. Levine said he didn’t know anything. “We have reason to believe that you do know,” Levine recalled one of the reporters saying. “You spoke to your brother yesterday, and we tape-recorded the conversation.” David Levine denies tape-recording his brother.


 As it was originally written, David Levine’s expose revealed Boy George’s heroin problem. Blake claims he spoke with George shortly before the story was to run. “George came on the phone screaming,” Blake said. “He was screaming, ‘Anyway I don’t care. I’m fab, I’m happy, and I get fucked every night’ He was funny.”


 But the story that appeared on June 10th, with a three-inch headline proclaiming, DRUGS AND BOY GEORGE, didn’t mention heroin. Instead, the Daily Mirror reported that George turned up late for a photo session with Levine and then borrowed money to buy cocaine. The Mirror‘s attorneys had gotten cold feet at the eleventh hour.  George breathed a sigh of relief; he thought that the worst was over and that his habit wouldn’t be revealed. And he continued to use drugs.


 His family, of course, knew about George’s problem. One brother, Kevin, had even bought drugs for George. “If Kevin was near to George, then at least we [the family] had one foot in the door,” said David O’Dowd. “He was there. If none of us was around, no one could help him. He was more or less an ally. He was there for a reason.”


 George’s mother had another approach to helping George get straight. She would come out to George’s St John’s Wood house and go through her son’s drawers, throwing away any drugs she could find.


 Concerned that George was doing nothing to end his drug addiction, David O’Dowd gave an interview to The Sun, another British tabloid. The story, headlined JUNKIE GEORGE HAS 8 WEEKS TO LIVE, appeared on July 3rd and revealed for the first time that George was addicted to heroin. David hoped the publicity would force George to seek a cure. “I saw my parents on several occasions actually crying their hearts out,” David said. “They couldn’t understand why their son, who used to be a really fun-loving, happy guy, had just dropped to the depths. He had become dependent on it; it wasn’t a giggle anymore. Within a couple of hours of getting out of bed, he would be going mad to get some of this stuff. Seeing the parents like that, I thought, ‘Well, I’ll end it now. He can do one of two things: carry on until he’s dead and everyone starts calling him a rock legend, or for a very short while get hounded and hounded and hounded by the press until he absolutely admits it to himself.


 “George called me the day the story came out,” David added. “He said, ‘You sold me.’ He said some really nasty things like ‘That’s it, I’ll never speak to you again.’ But the thing was, though it was upsetting at the time, I still knew I was talking to a drug addict.”  From there the pace of events picked up considerably. George, sitting for a News at Ten television interview the night the Sun story ran, denied he had a drug problem. The next day, all of the tabloids began running daily front-page stories on the singer’s DRUG AGONY.


 On Tuesday, July 8th, the London police staged raids at five locations around the city, including George’s St John’s Wood house, where they reportedly gained entrance by smashing the front door with a sledgehammer. George was not there – according to David O’Dowd, he was hiding at the apartment of Helen Terry, Culture Club’s former backup singer. The police were able to round up several of George’s associates. Marilyn was released on bail after being charged with possession of heroin; Kevin O’Dowd and three others were ordered held on charges of conspiring to supply George with heroin. Jon Moss, Philip Sallon and Helen Terry were also brought in for questioning, then released.


 On Friday, Richard Branson, the head of Virgin Records, revealed that George had phoned him the previous Sunday and “broke down about the drugs he had been taking.” Branson said that he had taken the singer to see Dr. Meg Patterson, the Scottish surgeon who had previously helped Pete Townshend, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards kick drugs through the use of NeuroElectic Therapy, a technique that involves the use of a black box that stimulates the body with small doses of electricity. “Sadly, he experimented with heroin,” Branson told the British music magazine Melody Maker, “and the problem is you’ve only got to experiment once with that and there is a danger that you can’t stop. It had a negative effect on him, not just physically but mentally, and he realised that he was becoming a fairly negative individual as a result, and completely out of control, which is the effect of that drug.”


 On July 12th, George was arrested at the private nursing home where he was receiving treatment. After more than eight hours of questioning by the police, he was charged with being in possession of an unspecified amount of heroin in the Greater London area on or before July 7th, 1986. He was then released on bail.


 CLOSE TO MIDNIGHT ON SATURDAY, JULY 19TH, ALMOST two weeks after George had begun receiving treatments to kick his habit, he walked into the Wag Club, another trendy London hangout Fat Tony was the night’s DJ, and he sensed that this was a very different George from the man who, on Boxing Day, had screamed, “Fuck, I’m not speaking to you again.”


 Word was already out among George’s friends that the old Boy George was back. He had rung up Steve Levine and arranged to come into the studio to do some recording. “Listening to him on Tuesday, I would say that it’s more than passed and he’s looking forward to working,” said Levine. “That’s the sort of thing that’s better than any doctor’s prescription. I would say the future looks extremely rosy.”


 At the Wag Club, George was all dressed up. His face was perfectly made up, he had a white baseball cap atop his head, and every article of his clothing – his shirt, pants and leg warmers – had BOY inscribed on it. He looked every inch the healthy pop star as he danced to Gwen Guthrie’s “Ain’t Nothin’ Goin’ On but the Rent.” At one point, George wandered over to the DJ booth. “So how are you?” asked Tony.


 “I’m fine,” said Boy George. “I’m doing really, really good.”






 Do you really want to out me?: The trial of Kirk Brandon vs. Boy George 10.27.201412:05 pm



 
The golden rule: Never sue anyone unless you know you are going to win.



 Eighties pop star Kirk Brandon should have considered this when he sued Boy George (aka George O’Dowd) for “malicious falsehood over allegations of homosexuality” contained in the singer’s autobiography Take It Like A Man and his song “Unfinished Business.”
 
 
Brandon is known as the frontman of band Theater of Hate, who had several hit singles in the 1980s most notably “Do You Believe in the Westworld?” Boy George is Boy George, and as everyone knows has achieved global success as a solo artist, DJ and with the band Culture Club notching up a string of number one records. Back in 1980, Brandon and George were members of the Blitz Kids—the young trendsetting New Romantics who were creating a club scene.


 In 1997, Brandon was incensed that George had “outed” him by writing about the couple’s “alleged homosexual relationship in the early 1980s.” (What’s wrong, I wonder, with just saying “relationship”?) Brandon said the “gay allegations” had damaged his career as a musician, claiming he “was terrified of being ridiculed as `some blond peroxided poof’.” A damning quote that tells you all you need to know about Mr. Brandon.
 
The Blitz Kids: Kirk and George, 1980.



 
By 1997, Brandon was married and had a child, his wife Christina said, “It’s every woman’s worst nightmare to be told their partner is gay”.Christina, 28, first read about the alleged affair in the gender-bender’s autobiography, Take It Like A Man, which was published in July, 1995.


And as she skimmed through the book in a bookshop her world fell apart.



“We had only been married a year and I just couldn’t believe what I was reading,” she says. “I knew that Kirk had been friendly with Boy George. I loved hearing about their time together. But, all of a sudden, I was reading about this intimate, sexual relationship they were meant to have had. I felt confused. Betrayed and humiliated. Tears started rolling down my cheeks. Then I felt angry.


“I rushed home to confront Kirk. I wanted the truth. Why he had lied to me? This could so easily have destroyed our marriage.


“But I know Kirk really well and I believe him when he says it’s not true.”

 Yet, Brandon’s litigation was to prove otherwise.
 
 
Brandon and George in the early 1980s.



 
When the case came to trial in April 1997, bucking the trusim that the man who is his own attorney has a fool for a client, Brandon represented himself. He told the court how he had helped Boy George from his first band and that they were good friends, adding:


He would sometimes stay at the singer’s squats—but was away on tour when he is alleged to have had the affair.



Mr Brandon said: “[Boy George’s] career took off and his mind was otherwise occupied. He was totally ambiguous and never confirmed or denied any sexual preference, terrified of rejection and the obscurity which would follow.


“Unbeknown to me, in the midst of his wealth, his obsession for me turned into something bitter, some might call it evil, a grudge. Somewhere in his mind he believed I had dumped him. Perhaps somewhere in his drug problems or whatever, his hatred focused on me. Some years later became a cleverly calculated possibility. As [George] stated himself, his book would be his revenge. He wrote his book and wrote of the relationship he really imagined he had had.”



Mr Brandon said he also believed that the attempt to ‘out’ him which would gain publicity for the book and song was part of a ‘sickening and totally reprehensible strategy.’ 
 
Brandon’s opening gambit made him sound as if he was the man obsessed with Boy George, and bitter at his former lover’s success. He then began to interrogate Boy George asking him if he thought outing people in the public arena was a good idea? A question that implied Brandon himself had been in the closet.



“I don’t think you should be ashamed of what you are,” O’Dowd replied. “I don’t think you should wilfully drag people out of their closets, but our relationship was public knowledge. It was not something you denied at the time, You denied it later on.”



He told Brandon he was being “homophobic” in bringing the court action. “I said in my book that you were very talented and I loved you,” O’Dowd said. “Where is the damage in that? I am much more brutal about myself in the book about myself than anybody else.”


 Avoiding the accusation of “homophobia,” Brandon changed tact accusing George of having “a kind of vendetta” against him:



“Why have you been obsessed with me all your adult life?”



O’Dowd: I am not obsessed with you.



Brandon: You were obsessed and you probably still are. Have you ever thought of leaving me alone?



O’Dowd: I would not say I am obsessed. I would say the obsession would be more on your part if you thought I was insane, why take this action? Why not just shrug and say: ‘He’s mad?’



Brandon: I would say you are a professional liar. 
 
The questioning shifted to the lyrics of Boy George’s song “Unfinished Business” from the album Cheapness and Beauty that George admitted was about Brandon.



He said the lyrics the lyrics included the line “You lie” and “You walk like a jack but are more of a queen”.



He added: “It says that [Brandon] has lied about our relationship and continues to do so. Songs are a way of exorcising feelings.”



Brandon: You get pleasure out of writing vindictive songs.



O’Dowd: Kirk, you were in a band called Theatre of Hate. You weren’t called the Blushing Flowers.



Brandon: Theatre of Hate was an art-house name. 
 
The questioning sounded like the petty tiff of two former lovers rather than a formal cross examination. Any points Brandon thought he had scored were undermined by the appearance of one of Brandon’s former lovers Naimi Ashcroft who suggested the two men had been sexually intimate.



She said that she and Brandon had to hide from O’Dowd in nightclubs: “He did say George was upset and was looking to beat me up.”



Brandon told her: “You are here to fit Mr O’Dowd’s jigsaw. Can’t you just simply forget about me and get on with your own life?”


 Every piece of a jigsaw has its own place and the picture the trial revealed was not one that Brandon particularly wanted to see.
 
 
Brandon admitted sharing a bed with George in a squat in central London in 1980 but denied any sexual activity.




George recalled: “I said, ‘I don’t have a spare bed,’ and he said: ‘I will be safe won’t I?’” Both kept their T-shirts and underwear on as they shared the mattress.



George added: “Kirk pulled hold of me and we started kissing.



“But on the first night, it was mainly hugging, kissing and touching, very affectionate, but no sexual activity.”


 George admitted that in the morning he was unsure if he would see Brandon again in such an intimate way, but he returned with a bag and stayed for several days at the squat. George admitted he was very inexperienced at the time.



“Kirk never said he thought of me as a woman, but outside of the bed I did a very good job of looking feminine,” added george, “We slept together more than 100 times.”



George went on: “We were very close. Kirk was the great love of my life at that time. We were inseparable, holding hands in public and I was walking around in high heel shoes.”


 Eventually the relationship finished and Brandon moved out claiming he needed “space.” George described how he “smashed up” his room and “cried for a while and walked in the rain.”


 The trial lasted seven days at the High Court in London, with Judge Douglas Brown ruling in favor of Boy George, describing him as “an impressive witness.” As he gave his verdict, Kirk Brandon sat staring straight ahead as the Judge said:



“It’s difficult to believe Mr Brandon did not have a physical relationship with Mr O’Dowd.




“Mr Brandon agrees he knew Mr O’Dowd was a homosexual who was sexually interested in him, but went and stayed in his bed without protest, and without asking whether there was an alternative place to sleep.”


 The judge added he did not believe Brandon:



“I am satisfied he has not been truthful about their physical relationship.”


 Brandon was ordered to pay an estimated £250,000 in costs, but said he was unable to do so as he was bankrupt. Outside the High Court, he told reporters he had no regrets in taking Boy George to court:



“It was a matter of honour.”


 The trial wasn’t about “honour” it was about Brandon’s misplaced personal sense of pride and vanity. His actions made him look foolish, petty, and dishonest. Boy George was vindicated, and left the court telling reporters that the verdict was “a great, great day for gay rights.”

 
"The best thing you can do is work on your personality, because we're all gonna get ugly"


Boy George.



"I'm very uncomfortable with the idea of vaginas. They bother me in the way spiders bother some people."


Boy George.