Courtesy of Boy George
Merely because a band has been relegated to the nostalgia circuit doesn’t mean they can’t put on a show with current relevance and worthwhile new music. Culture Club proved both ideas true with a show at the Riverside Theater that found the mid-1980s mainstays both eager to please and triumphant.
The triumph comes in the group’s four principals reconciling long-seeded acrimonies to make their current tour happen. And, as he referenced in prefacing one of his group’s newer numbers, lead singer Boy George has overcome drug abuse and other struggles to emerge a seemingly stronger man.
That strength hasn’t necessarily extended to the upper range of George’s vocal range. That kind of spry singing lent a hint of aural androgyny to the gender-fluid wardrobe he flaunted during the early years of MTV. He has, however, developed a richer lower end that added powerful luster to the 15 tunes he, three other Club mates, a bevy of background singers and ancillary musicians shared for an audience crazed for Ronald Reagan Decade reminiscing.
Opening boisterously with David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” affirmed the group’s comfort with being purveyors of nostalgia. George later shared that his mother complained that Bowie couldn’t sing after her son played “Space Oddity” for her, but in an early display of his wit, he told his mum, “You’ll get used to it.”
His eagerness to please with Culture Club’s own run of hits came with a soft dismissal of overly obsessive fans demanding that the group play B-sides. “I don’t even remember writing (that),” George harrumphed in a bit of amazement that others would recall the dregs of their catalog fondly. Though Culture Club’s amalgam of ’60s-’70s soul, skittering Afro-pop, lovers rock, reggae sweetness and undercurrents of country made for one of the more artistically nuanced sounds Star Hits readers glommed onto back in the day, George acknowledged with apparent humility that they’re entertainers and privileged to be so.
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One of the more entertaining twists of the band tackling their smashes is the way they would elongate some numbers. That could mean upping the quotient of dub effects for reggae-indebted numbers such as “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” and George’s late-’80’s U.K. #1 hit reworking of Bread’s “Everything I Own;” a mini-jam reprising “It’s A Miracle,” and a soul-gospel vamp by one of their four background singers amending “Different Man,” a tune from this fall’s forthcoming album, Life.
That and other numbers such as “Runaway Train” and “Let Somebody Love You” plumb the same multi-cultural stylistic wells as Culture Club did in their salad days but with autobiographical allusions, about which George was coyer on pieces like their show-closing biggest single, “Karma Chameleon.”
The only misstep of the evening was their cover of Robert Palmer’s “Addicted To Love.” By the time they played it, George had already revealed himself to be a far humbler and relatively earnest guy than the arrogant horndog of Palmer’s original rendition, making it was a tough sell. But it wasn’t much of a blemish on an otherwise engagingly glossy evening of fondly recalled musical memories.
