Latest news with #BoyGeorge
Daily Mail
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
'80s pop icon looks unrecognisable as he's pictured leaving a Hollywood hotel
A much-loved British pop star looked unrecognisable as he was pictured in Los Angeles on Monday. The flamboyant 64-year-old shot to stardom more than 40 years ago with the chart-topping single Do You Want To Hurt Me in 1982. Within a year he had become a household name, with the UK gripped by his group's latest single Karma Chameleon, which soared to Number 1 and remains a well-known hit all these years later. And he forged a successful solo career after the leaving the band later that decade, making a name for himself as a DJ, producer, fashion designer and writer, with three autobiographies about his life released. But can you guess who the star pictured in the California sunshine is? That's right, it's none other than It's A Miracle hitmaker Boy George! Sporting a fresh-faced look, the '80s icon appeared almost unrecognisable as he stepped out of a hotel in West Hollywood alongside a friend. Covering much of his face with a purple and orange hat and some coordinated sunglasses, George carried a blazer with him while donning a predominantly black outfit. More in-keeping with his usual extravagant dress-sense were his shoes, with the star slipping into a pair of eye-catching red trainers for the outing. While he may look somewhat different to his days as a rocker in the '80s, George, real name George O'Dowd, and Culture Club are still active and touring all these years later. After a brief stint as a solo artist in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the group reformed in 1998 to release the compilation album Greatest Moments. But George's successful career certainly hasn't been all plain-sailing, with the singer involved in a number of controversies in the mid-2000s and 2010s. After being sentenced to community service when police found cocaine in his apartment in 2003, George was imprisoned half a decade later after being convicted of falsely imprisoning a male escort. It came as a huge blow for the Brit, who had recently made a return to the limelight with the single Yes We Can, which was inspired by the presidency of Barack Obama. George opened up about the ordeal only last week in an interview with The Times, admitting he hopes to change people's opinions of him 'eventually'. 'It didn't need to happen,' he told the publication. 'But I can't change it and I'm not defined by my mistakes. I've transcended my own ideas of who I am. 'Now I'm on a mission to transcend the ideas people have of me. I think it will happen... eventually.' Just a matter of weeks ago George hit the headlines once again after taking a swipe at JK Rowling over a trans row. The Harry Potter author, who has been unapologetically vocal about her views regarding gender in recent years, had taken to X to celebrate a landmark Supreme Court ruling that the definition of a woman is based on biological sex. In response, George branded Rowling a 'rich, bored bully' before appearing on Lorraine late last month where he again spoke about the ordeal. During the chat Lorraine told him: 'You've always stood up for people who sometimes don't have a voice for themselves... People in the trans community, it's been very rough for them and you've said "No it's not fair".' The singer explained: 'It's real life stuff, not two celebrities bickering on the internet. Speaking about their arguments, Boy George said: 'I think it's hilarious that you're having a row with someone that I've never met. I probably never will meet. 'I feel like in the movies she creates this beautiful magic world, in real life she's a muggle. It's very disappointing it's not true.' George, who is openly homosexual, has regularly defended trans rights over the years.
Times
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Boy George at 64: ‘I don't want to be controlled — I want to be out of control'
W hen it comes to pop stars on spiritual journeys, George Harrison, Cat Stevens and Sinéad O'Connor come to mind. But Boy George? This is the singer who turned bitchiness into high art. 'The Artist Formerly Known as Get a Personality' is a putdown of Prince from which there is no coming back. George's tongue has been lacerating unsuspecting victims ever since he was the coat-check boy at the Blitz club in London in 1979. Yet here we are in his publicist's office, George in his signature look of oversized hat and colour-saturated make-up, praising the wisdom of the Buddhist-inspired philosopher Alan Watts, extolling the virtues of a spiritual path called Three Principles and generally exuding enlightenment. Albeit interspersed with the odd cackle of wickedness. 'There have been a lot of times in my life when I ask myself, 'Why do I do this?'' says George, who at 64 does have a surprising air of calm. Whether that is down to the mellowing effects of age, his discovery of the higher path or something else entirely is hard to tell.
Irish Examiner
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Gareth O'Callaghan: Live Aid captured the imagination while causing a lot of controversy
Tottenham Court Road was no stranger to bomb scares and security alerts in 1985. Cordoned-off streets in central London were common on busy shopping days. However, shopping and sightseeing clearly weren't on the city's agenda that weekend 40 years ago, as I strolled along its deserted footpaths towards the Tube station. Normal weekend activities had been postponed. In the sweltering 30C heat, it was a day for barbeques and garden parties, and being with family and friends. After months of planning, Live Aid had come to town. Preparations had started in early January. Now the countdown was complete, with all eyes on Wembley Stadium. It's long been suggested it was Boy George's idea. So overcome by the experience of recording 'Do They Know It's Christmas' months earlier, he told Bob Geldof shortly after the session they should seriously consider organising a benefit concert. Despite concerns from the highest ranks of Scotland Yard, not even the terrorists had an appetite for an opportunistic strike that day. In the words of Nelson Mandela, 'music has a potency that defies politics'. HISTORY HUB If you are interested in this article then no doubt you will enjoy exploring the various history collections and content in our history hub. Check it out HERE and happy reading Tickets and taxes Tickets for the Wembley gig were priced at £5, with an additional charity donation of £20, back in a time when you took your chance and queued for a day before tickets went on sale at record shops and at the stadium box office. Online event ticketing was still 14 years away. Some 75,000 tickets sold out within days, much like the 90,000 that had gone on sale in late June for the Philadelphia concert at JFK Stadium. Margaret Thatcher rather wisely decided to forego her invitation to the concert, following her refusal to refund VAT charged on the Band Aid single the previous December, even though the Irish government agreed to do so. One Labour MP, Alf Morris, challenged her to refund any tax she might also have been considering from the concert's proceeds. 'You cannot praise the Good Samaritan and then mug him to the tune of 15% of his aid,' he said. In his own unique way, Geldof stood up to Thatcher. In a rare U-turn, she refunded the money. I was 24 when Live Aid was beamed into the small flat I shared with two work colleagues on the outskirts of London. The 13in Mitsubishi television set — no bigger than a microwave — sat on a stack of books. My job was to tweak the 'rabbit ears' antenna every so often to improve the grainy screen quality. Between Wembley and Philadelphia, that small television delivered almost 16 hours of classic songs from rock and pop's top table, until a drunken expat fell over the books and smashed the screen. Like thousands of other stations around the world, RTÉ broadcast live feeds from both concerts while anchoring their own coverage and fundraising. Of the estimated £150m raised for famine relief in Ethiopia, £7m came from Ireland, which donated more per capita than any other country. Looking back, Live Aid was romanticism with a large pinch of realism — idealism and compassion rolled into the most perfect summer's day and night Boomtown Rats singer Bob Geldof during the 'Live Aid' concert, billed as the biggest rock event in the world. Picture: Getty Images In the rock and roll hierarchy of momentous events, it's up there at the top. But the lasting impact of Live Aid has become a much greater source of controversy. Despite the altruism, there are those who still question the motives of the concert and the indulgences of a bunch of wealthy celebrities — most of them white — who each gave roughly 15 minutes' worth of stage time to save Africa. Bob Geldof has spent 40 years rejecting accusations of being a 'white saviour' — a term attributed to white people helping non-white people for self-serving purposes, including admiration from others. Live Aid had another problem — diversity. After both concerts, organisers were lambasted for not having more black artists on the bill. 'It became this anti-colonial diatribe,' Midge Ure wrote in his autobiography, If I Was. 'You whites, telling us poor Black guys what to do.' That was despite 'every major black artist on the Billboard 200 chart and R&B chart being invited", according to legendary concert promoter Bill Graham; most of whom, including Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, and Stevie Wonder, declined. However, others, including Dionne Warwick, said they had never been contacted. Annual drought has always been Ethiopia's legacy, dating back thousands of years. Some are so bad, they cause widespread death and disease — like the one in 1984, captured so vividly by BBC's Michael Buerk, filmed by cameraman Mohamed Amin, when he talked about a 'biblical famine … the closest thing to Hell on Earth'. Mengistu Haile Mariam, the dictator responsible for Ethiopia's starving millions. Those brief minutes of news coverage led to the most acclaimed humanitarian fundraiser of all time. However, it was also a case of more genocide less nature that was responsible for doing much of the killing. Within a year, allegations were surfacing that some of the money raised was bolstering the coffers of Mengistu Haile Mariam, the dictator responsible for Ethiopia's starving millions. Migration and starvation were his modus operandi. His efforts to move indigenous tribes into resettlement camps resulted in genocide, while he now allegedly had a source of funding to buy Soviet weapons in his war against rebels. Several relief agencies begged Geldof to withhold the charitable money until a reliable framework could be established to ensure the funding would reach those suffering most. Weapons claim In 2010, following a report from Martin Plaut, the BBC World Service's Africa Editor, that some of the Live Aid cash had been used to buy weapons rather than food, Geldof claimed that not a shred of evidence had been produced to show that any of the charity's money had been diverted. Many were left asking if Live Aid had, as the July 1986 edition of SPIN magazine stated, 'exacerbated the already terrible humanitarian crisis'. Understandably, Geldof was furious at the allegations. In 1990, I met him in Dublin's Shelbourne Hotel for an interview. I was nervous because you never knew how his mood would dictate the flow. But this was a different man sitting in front of me that day. To say he'd survived the five years since Live Aid unscathed would be untrue. I had seen him interviewed in 1985, but that day was different. 'I don't want to talk about Live Aid,' he told me straight up. My first impression was that it didn't leave us with much else to talk about. I had known for four years about the allegations of fraudulent use of charitable money by Mengistu, and wanted to discuss it; but that conversation wasn't going to happen. 1985 belonged to a disconnected world — one without social media and satellite news. Deciphering the truth quickly was not as precise as it is now. Awful things were happening that we weren't being told about. The British government was well aware of a dangerous famine in Ethiopia as far back as 1982 but chose not to do anything about it. Two years later, it took an Irishman to make a difference. How many lives he saved will never be known. There will always be dictators wherever humanity is easily overthrown, where the wealthiest profit while the poorest perish. Look at what Trump is doing to his own country's humanitarian aid. 'The Achilles' heel of humanity is its hubris,' Bob Geldof once said. Too many people look the other way; whatever his critics might think of him, thankfully he didn't. Read More Jennifer Horgan: We need to find room in our hearts for the people of Sudan
Telegraph
08-07-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
When will angry men learn not to pillory JK Rowling?
When will the small, angry men of the Left learn what a folly it is to come for JK Rowling? She'll only make mincemeat of you, fellas. Serial court-case loser Jolyon Maugham tried it. He called her 'anti-trans', 'amoral' and a 'bigot'. Big mistake. In the tweeting equivalent of a surgical strike, Rowling did to Maugham's reputation what he did to that unfortunate fox while wearing his wife's kimono on Boxing Day 2019. Don't make me sue you, she said, not least because it would be a terrible waste of taxpayers' money to 'have to construct a courtroom large enough to accommodate your ego'. Next up was ex-pop star Boy George. He branded her a 'rich bored bully'. Bully? That's rich, she quipped, from someone who was 'given 15 months for handcuffing a man to a wall and beating him with a chain'. And now we have Owen Jones. Yes, completing the trifecta of gender-crank Rowling botherers, the Guardian's pipsqueak Leftist has come out swinging for the woman who dares to believe in biology. He seems to be upset because she had a chuckle about his erratic behaviour on Piers Morgan Uncensored last week. In response to an X user who wondered if Jones might have partaken of the white stuff before fidgeting and gurning his way through Morgan's show, Rowling tweeted: 'Well, he is known as Talcum X.' Jones is hopping mad. He's even written a 1,300-word screed on what a rotter Rowling is, which I'm sure we can all agree is a perfectly normal response to a woman making a joke. His line of attack is that Rowling has been shamefully silent on the suffering of Palestinians. She claims to stand up for women, he says, yet she's schtum on what is happening to women in Gaza. His Rowlingphobic diatribe drips with haughty sexism. He bemoans her 'useless obsessions', by which he presumably means her valiant defence of the reality of sex and her financial backing of women and homosexuals who have been persecuted for their beliefs by either their bosses or the state. Sounds pretty useful to me, Owen. He commands her: 'End your silence.' Maybe he didn't get the memo – men don't get to tell women what to do anymore. Women are free to think and say whatever they please. Radical, I know! But it's the disingenuousness of his blokeish moan that is most striking. He accuses Rowling of only caring about certain women. Yet as you read this rant from one of Britain's noisiest Israeliphobes, you realise that is far truer of Jones and his fellow woke bros than it is of Rowling. Rowling's big issue is the gender madness. She has made it abundantly clear that she thinks every woman, regardless of age, background or station, deserves dignity and liberty. No woman, she says, should be made to undress with or compete against men who masquerade as women. In both word and deed, she's been admirably consistent in her defence of the truth of womanhood and the rights of women. The same cannot be said for Jones and the other digital windbags of the 21st-century Left. Indeed, Jones' grossly inappropriate moral preening over how much he cares for Palestinian women instantly raises the question of why other women caught up in awful conflicts rarely seem to prick his conscience. Rowling's bold defiance of the gender cult is a strike for the autonomy of all women. In contrast, the myopic Israelophobia of the whackjob Left fashions a ruthless hierarchy in which the pain of Palestinians counts for more than the pain of anyone else on earth. What's more, these faux-feminists zip their lips when women are being oppressed by Islamists. They cosplay as feminists at home, holding forth on the gender pay gap and whatnot. Yet they fall silent in the face of the Iranian regime's mass murder of women who want more rights or the Taliban's medieval subjugation of its female population. They're so antsy about 'Islamophobia' that they will happily turn a blind eye to Islamism's truly brutish crushing of female freedom. Here's my question for Jones: why do you get so much angrier over conflicts involving the Jewish nation than you do over any other war? What explains that glaring disparity? Today, a report was released detailing the horrific sexual violence Hamas meted out on 7 October 2023 as part of its 'genocidal strategy'. I look forward to Jones' commentary on it. Wait – you do care about Jewish women, right?
Daily Mail
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE DJ Fat Tony discusses growing up gay on a 'rough' council estate with 'skinhead brothers' and reflects on 'never coming out' to his loved ones ahead of Pride event
DJ Fat Tony has discussed what it was like growing up gay on a council estate in a candid new interview with MailOnline. The legendary music star, 58, real name Tony Marnach, rose to fame on London's club scene in the 1980s and became best friends with Boy George and Kate Moss. He is now the go-to DJ on the celebrity scene and a favourite at the Beckhams' big family events, such as Brooklyn's 2022 wedding to Nicola Peltz. But it wasn't always such a glamorous lifestyle for Tony, who battled addiction for many years and grew up on a council estate in Battersea alongside his 'skinhead brothers', mother and father. Ahead of his return to Ministry of Pride on Saturday, Tony opened up on coming to terms with his sexuality and how his family reacted. He said: 'I didn't have to come out. My parents always knew I was. 'I grew up on a council estate in Battersea, where at that point in time it was pretty rough. My brothers were all skinheads, and it was a lot. It was a tough time growing up, but I never had to come out of the closet and say, "Okay, hey, I'm gay", my mum and Dad always knew from a really young age.' He continued: 'For me, I was very, very lucky in that sense. 'But at the same time, as you go through your teenage years, and you discover who you really are, it's always a big thing, because we give it so much power, and society gives it so much power, especially back then.' Tony seemed happier than ever during our chat, after recently tying the knot with his partner Stavros Agapiou, 32, in a lavish ceremony in London. Going on to discuss friends accepting his sexuality, he said: 'The thing about it is if anyone has got a problem with it, they're not really your friend, because friendship isn't about who you sleep with in bed. It's about who you are as a person, you know. 'My friendship circle is not based on who we have sex with, therefore, why should it be any different? If you come out to a friend, and you trust that person, nothing should change except for the fact that you've been honest, and they should respect it.' Tony and Stavros were surrounded by celeb pals including Davina McCall, Boy George, Kelly Osbourne and Gemma Collins at their wedding, held at the Welsh Chapel in Charing Cross in May. Tony had carefully picked the 19th-century church where he began his career when he was just 18. The pair have been engaged since October 2023 after Tony popped the question during a romantic trip to New York. Following the nuptials, Tony is preparing for an epic DJ set at Ministry of Pride, a full-venue takeover on Friday July 5, with tickets available online from £16.95. The all-LGBTQ+ lineup also includes Catz 'N Dogz, FAFF, Josh Harrison, Princess Julia, Reenie, Tete Bang, and NOT BAD FOR A GIRL. The multi-room event will span house, disco, underground beats, drag performance, and more, embodying the spirit of queer celebration and unapologetic freedom at one of South London's most iconic venues. Speaking ahead of the event, Tony said: 'You don't have to be LGBT to attend, you can be an ally. You can be anything you want to be. 'It's about the music and bringing everyone together. You're going to have fun, you can be who you want to be, regardless of how you identify. The whole thing is about love.' On the importance of Pride, he added: 'It's not about the partying and all of that stuff, that comes much later. It's about visibility. It's about saying, we're here, this is who we are. It's about how you do it and how you celebrate Pride that's important. 'We have pride month for many reasons, so that people don't think that they're alone, and don't end up wanting to kill themselves because they can't cope with their sexuality, or who they are, or society tells them that they're wrong. 'Pride is about letting people know that they're not alone, that they can exist.' Tony celebrated 18 years of sobriety in January, and often opens up about transforming his life to remind people to never give up. Tony discovered drugs when he was 18 and would convince himself that he couldn't DJ unless he was high, sometimes going four or five nights straight without sleeping. At one point, he was homeless and had no teeth due to his habit. Tony had an epiphany and he soon quit drugs cold turkey, spending six months in rehab to beat the addiction. He explained: 'After 28 years of putting people through hell every day of the week, you know the support and love that I got from the right people was welcomed. 'The wrong ones always are like rats off a sinking ship they go, and you know, the good thing about recovery is, the trash takes itself out.' On working in an industry where he is surrounded by alcohol and drugs, Tony added: 'We live in a society where there's a pub every 200 yards, and it's more acceptable to drink than it is not to drink. That's the society we live in. 'So for someone like me that made a conscious decision not to drink or to take drugs, I don't find it a problem because I am the problem. The other people enjoying themselves, that is up to them. I'm not one of these people that think, "Oh, my God! I can't be around that," I probably have more fun than all of them put together being sober. 'People can go out and party and and go home and go to work. The world isn't full of addicts. I on the other hand, know that I can't do that stuff. I know I don't want to do that stuff. That's the difference, and that's why I don't miss it. 'So going to work and being in that environment, it never crosses my mind. What does cross my mind is how blessed I am not to be the last one standing every night of the week.'
