1982: Charisma bomb

Fast times at Top of the Pops

Strange how potent cheap music can be. It can preserve a moment, trapped in vinyl, and it can last a lifetime, accompanying, inspiring, supporting. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives.

Neon sign of the Top of the Pops logo, located at Gods Own Junkyard in Walthamstow, London. Photo by GrimsbyT from Wikimedia

It’s 22 September 1982, and Culture Club’s third single ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?’ is at 38 in the UK singles chart. It is doing better than their first two singles, which had not troubled the charts at all; but it is not doing well enough to feature on Top of the Pops. 

And then – at least, this is the legend – an ex-milkman known to his mum as Michael Barratt changed the course of pop history. ‘We actually only found out we were going to be on Top of the Pops the night before the show’, Boy George told The Guardian in 2007. ‘We were only asked because Shakin' Stevens pulled out.’ George says he stayed up all night thinking about what to wear. 

What a night that must have been. 

At this point – six weeks before the launch of Channel 4 – Britain had exactly three TV channels, and Top of the Pops was a giant presence. First shown in 1964, it had a legendary backstory; it also had media coverage to die for, relentless cross-promotion on the country’s biggest radio station, and an enormous captive audience. By the end of the ‘70s the show was cluttered with vestigial structures, including a full BBC orchestra that insisted on ‘accompanying’ live appearances under the terms of an ancient agreement with the Musicians Union. But in 1980 a whirlwind arrived in the form of a new producer, BBC lifer Michael Hurll. The changes he made allowed TOTP to ride the New Wave. He dumped the orchestra, introduced a new title sequence and a sparkly rota of younger presenters, and ramped up the hysteria with whistles and party hats. Professional dancers and cheerleaders were sprinkled throughout the audience. One of them was a young Londoner who went by the name Boy George.

In its impregnable prime-time slot – Thursday evenings, just after dinner time, 51 weeks of the year – it was watched by doctors and dockers, tabloid editors and MPs, students and shop workers, mums and dads and primary school children and pensioners. Culture Club had been getting some play on Radio 1, but ‘the only way to see George, in 1982, was Top of the Pops’ said Culture Club producer Steve Levine in a BBC documentary about that night. ‘Nobody had seen George in the flesh… I felt in my heart that if the world could see him, it would make all the difference.’ 

Twelve million people saw Boy George that night, and most of us – whether we turned into Culture Club fans or not - have never forgotten it. He looked straight down the barrel of the camera while singing the plangent intro line, and the space between performer and viewer instantly collapsed. He launched himself past the studio crew and the editing suite and the Crystal Palace transmitter, and exploded like a charisma bomb in front of all the brickies and the barristers and the grannies and the teenagers. A couple of minutes later, bassist Roy Hay – always the most straight-looking member of the group, in all possible senses – was caught by the camera looking at George with wonder and a little bit of awe, even apprehension. In these four minutes George changed his bandmates’ lives forever, and I think you can see the moment when Roy Hay realises what’s happening. 

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His bandmate and lover Jon Moss said he looked ‘so beautiful and delicate, like a flower.’ Levine described a ‘big coat and Hasidic Jew vibe.’ Smash Hits writer Dave Rimmer, in his early-’80s pop history Like Punk Never Happened, noticed ‘a cacophony of religious symbolism, hearts and swords and flames’. Every British person I know can tell a story about it; one of my friends remembers her dad shouting at the TV. Because whatever else people saw, the thing that we all noticed was that it wasn’t entirely clear whether Boy George was a man or a woman. Everything about his sex was ambiguous, but the ambiguity was precisely engineered. He was called Boy George but had long hair and a full face of make-up; he appeared to be wearing both trousers and a dress. He smiled gleefully. His movements were delicate and fluid; there was no sense of muscularity, no swagger. He danced like your nan at a family wedding and he looked like a silent film star: Louise Brooks in rainbow colours.

In schools and workplaces all over the country the next day there was only one topic of conversation. ‘There were stories of people dropping cups of tea and saying “What is that”’ recounted Moss, but ‘it’s why I fell in love with him. It’s like, “shit”. It looks like a girl. It’s not a girl, it’s a man.’  As well as fascination, confusion and instant adoration, he provoked hysteria in the tabloid press – ‘IS IT A BOY OR IS IT A GIRL?’ squealed The Sun – and fury among the homophobes and traditionalists, like my friend’s dad yelling at the telly. 

George describes himself as ‘an old-fashioned gay man’; but in his autobiography, he says that his gender-ambiguous presentation annoyed plenty of gay people too. He writes that patrons of gay clubs such as Heaven wanted most of all ‘to think of themselves as “normal”, with their James Dean and Marlon Brando obsessions, white T-shirts and Levi’s’... I’ve been turned away from more gay clubs than anyone else, with a statement like “You’re embarrassing to us. Go away”.

I’m not remotely qualified to talk about what it was like to be a gay clubber in the early 1980s. But if the trad-masculine dress code was as strictly enforced as George claims, it’s not difficult to see how that might have come about. At this point, men who experimented with femininity were considered risible in and of themselves. British comedy of the 1970s and the early 1980s was blighted by an uncomfortable form of light-entertainment drag, in which middle aged men snickeringly dressed up in plastic boobs and garish makeup before performing comedy sketches about sexual exhibitionism and desperation. Two deficient identities in one, women and gay men, explicitly elided: what else is a man in a dress if not a poof, and what is a poof, if not a woman? 

After the first AIDS diagnosis in the UK in 1981 gay people were gathering their communal political strength for the fights to come: for public understanding and healthcare, for respect and safety, and for legal and social parity. The perception that gay men were typically effeminate was costly in terms of public support; emphasising ‘normality’ was good political strategy, an example of what Australian election supremo Lynton Crosby calls ‘scraping the barnacles off the boat’. 

But while some of his pop star contemporaries were all-in on the political objective of gay liberation, George had a separate agenda. ‘Let me tell you what I’m doing’, he told Dave Rimmer in 1985. ‘I don’t try to walk around in a check shirt and I don’t try to look normal. What I’m doing is making people accept effeminate men.’ His project was to persuade Middle England that men with a feminine gender presentation were not scary or unpleasant, and could comfortably be brought into the broad social fold. In prioritising this, George barely acknowledged that he was gay at all. Right through the peak of Culture Club’s success, he never spoke publicly about loving other men. 

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Wham!’s first appearance on Top of the Pops, on 4 November 1982, came just six weeks after Culture Club’s. The story has a similar shape: a struggling second single wallowing outside the Top 30, a last-minute call because another artist had dropped out. And although their appearance was not specifically astonishing in the way Boy George’s had been, it had a similarly combustible impact on their career. 

It seems ludicrous, now, that we did not notice that George Michael was gay. His clothes that night – espadrilles, tight denim turn-ups, a sleeveless leather waistcoat – didn’t seem remarkable, but in retrospect they were a spin on the James Dean template that Boy George had identified at London’s gay clubs. Interviewed for the Channel 4 documentary Outed, London drag queen DJ Fat Tony remembered meeting Michael at a club, before he became famous: ‘I’m not being funny,’ he says, but ‘all the signs were there.’ 

Wham!’s signature look quickly devolved into a kind of Day-Glo fuck-boy costume: tight tops and sleeveless vests, muscles and tans, languorous oiled bodies in snap-to-fit swimming briefs, a hyper-performance of masculinity and male desirability. This had nothing to do with Michael being gay; Andrew Ridgeley was in charge of the clothes, and he was what you might call a noted heterosexual. But it was worlds away from Boy George, who had taken care to present himself publicly as almost sexless. 

Wham! aimed straight at the hearts and hormones of teenage girls. Watching their videos now feels almost indecent, even after the intervening decades of pumping and twerking and grinding, and the acres and acres of bouncing arses. It isn’t just that sex is such an explicit presence; it’s the Barbara Cartland romanticism, the way these young men have such a heavy consciousness of their own allure, the soft-focus Princess Di eyes moving up to meet the camera with aching slowness. As Simon Napier Bell – who went on to become Wham!’s manager – says in Outed, their early Top of the Pops appearances had ‘an incredible erotic intimacy’. The problem for George Michael was that the vision of fuckability Wham! were selling to young women was, in his case, specifically, painfully incongruent. ‘I never realised that I was going to be selling my physical persona. It took me up a road that I never thought I was going to go up.’

Michael didn’t come out until 1998, after the infamous ‘lewd act’ in front of an LA police officer. A lot had changed in that time, and despite tabloid references to ‘secret shame’ and deep pockets of residual bigotry, the public’s response was largely affectionate, especially once they had seen the video for ‘Outside’. Michael understood that merciless piss-taking is the British love-language; as he said on Parkinson, ‘if you can’t laugh when everyone else is laughing, you’re in trouble. And god knows everyone else was laughing.’ Michael had become comfortable with something Boy George had intuited 16 years earlier: the enormous power that resides in a charismatic figure presenting themselves with authenticity and vulnerability, and the culture-shifts that can happen in an instant when you make millions of people drop their tea at the same time.

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For more on changing attitudes to gay rights in the ‘80s, try our piece on Withnail and I and Doctor Who: