Music: Picking the Pockets of Pop

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Culture Club stirs up shock waves with some smooth tunes

Hold on, take it easy. The sex stuff is coming up in a minute. First, listen to the music.

Culture Club is the hottest band of the moment from England or, very likely, from anywhere else. The group's success is almost as wild as the opera poof masquerades of its lead singer, Boy George. Consider: three Top Ten singles from Culture Club's first album, Kissing to Be Clever, which sold more than a million copies; a fourth, fresh single, Church of the Poison Mind, already snug at No. 11, with another, Karma Chameleon, ready to take off; and a new album, Colour by Numbers, storming the LP charts.

Culture Club whips up a smooth, seamless sound that proudly picks every pocket of pop for inspiration: reggae, soul, country and western, mainstream rock. The results are whimsical, joyous and occasionally mysterious detonations of apparently casual inspiration. Very cool, very catchy and, to borrow a favorite word of the lead singer's, never naf. "Naf' stands for out of it, rotten, done over and overdone—and not, clearly, for Culture Club, which seems, at this somewhat disjointed juncture on the hit parade, to define the very core of contemporary pop.

Part of the soul of this success, a good deal of the inspiration and most of the attention have been laid at the swinging door of Boy George. Says Percussionist Jon Moss, at 26 the band's elder statesman: "Boy George is our anchor. You're never going to be able to spot a Culture Club record by just the music. It will be George's voice that identifies us." The voice is an excellent instrument, gliding over notes like a Slinky toy that springs downstairs on its own power. As the saloon singers of an older generation might have put it, the kid's got a great set of pipes.

He is, in fact, a regular Pan. A little like the guy with the hoofs, a lot like the flyboy who wouldn't grow up and, yes, apparently pansexual too. This last aspect of Culture Club has caused many titters, generated a lot of speculation and produced countless photos of Boy George, resplendent and unrepentant, winking or moue-ing in four-color splendor. His wardrobe is a tip-to-toe tutorial in the applied art of sartorial shock: coats that Scaramouche might have worn had Scaramouche been a color-blind butcher, a rabbi's black felt hat and unorthodox ties that seem to glow radioactively. His makeup is heavy: mascara (more under the eye than over), raspberry-colored lips, lots of foundation and cantilevered eyebrows. "I try to make my eyes look like Elizabeth Taylor's," he says. "And really, I have one picture of myself that looks so much like her."

The paradox is intriguing: the soulful voice and the drop-dead campiness. It also invites a few questions, which Boy George, 22, can handle expertly. "I'm not gay," he says. "I'm as gay as I am heterosexual. O.K., I've experimented with both sexes, but I'm not a limp-wristed floozy and I'm not a transvestite. Transvestites show tits, man. I'm 6 ft., I'm a man, and I have no delusions." As for his appearance, Boy also says that he has "experimented" a good deal but "I'm just convinced that this is the way I look best."