Interview

Before Leigh Bowery and his mid-’80s London club night came along, being a freak was not considered a fine art form. Pop star and DJ Boy George remembers the legendary scene where glamorous polysexual debauchery and head-to-toe body makeup went along with the music.

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“Dress as though your life depends on it or don’t bother,” Leigh Bowery notoriously said when describing the code of attire for his night on Thursdays at a club called Maximus off of London’s Leicester Square. The year was 1985, and Bowery’s venture into what had become a rather dull nightlife scene in London was called Taboo. Taboo and its radically subversive, pro-weird crowd not only drew upon the playful, decadent androgyny of the New -Romantic scene, then holding sway among London’s cooler contingents—it took those aesthetics, dipped them in plastic, vinyl, or Dalmatian-spotted fake fur, smeared profuse amounts of cartoonish body makeup on them, and strung them out on a dance floor to revel in all their freakish (and often drug-fueled) psycho-glamour. Taboo existed only from 1985 to 1986 (when the police finally shut it down), but it turned Bowery into an eternal cult figure and redefined what nightlife was to look like (New York’s campy and, eventually, bloody version, Disco 2000, was heavily inspired by Taboo). Boy George, who went on to celebrate Leigh and his gang in the 2002 musical Taboo, was not only one of Bowery’s friends, he was a regular at the party—an “elder statesman” as he likes to think of it. Here the 47-year-old musician remembers the British subcultures that led up to Bowery and the raucous nights where the only rules were that there weren’t any.

MARK RONSON: I wish we could do this in person, but obviously we can’t . . . 

BOY GEORGE: No, they won’t let me come to America. [laughs] 

MR: Are you not allowed? 

BG: I’ve got to deal with some legal things. But hopefully next year . . . [At press time, Boy George was on trial in London courts on charges of false imprisonment.]