Boy George may have gotten carried away after exchanging email addresses with his musical role model David Bowie.
“I used to send him emails. I’d send these tirades of love and worship, and I’d get, like, a line back,” the Culture Club star, 63, revealed on “The Lulu Podcast: Turning Points” on Tuesday, February 25.
The “Karma Chameleon” singer confessed to host Lulu that he was an obsessive fan of Bowie from the time he was a teenager. Describing his older brother as “the original Bowie fan” in his family, Boy George cited seeing Bowie’s alter-ego Ziggy Stardust for the first time in 1973 as a pivotal moment in his own life.
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Boy George remembered “bunking off school” as a teenager to greet Bowie when he returned to London following his self-imposed exile in Berlin in 1976.
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“There’s a photo of me at Victoria Station when I was 14 that I found recently. … He arrived at Victoria Station in the big sort of Cadillac, and I remember being photographed and I remember thinking, ‘I might get in trouble because I’m being photographed. What if my mum sees it?’” he recalled. “So I recently saw [the photo] and it’s mind-blowing.”
The musician soon faced unexpected consequences when he met up with other young Bowie superfans to gather outside Bowie’s home.
“I used to sit outside his house,” George said. “There’s a famous story about [Bowie’s ex-wife] Angie opening the window and telling us to f— off. She opened the window and goes, ‘Would you just f— off!’”
Boy George understandably delighted in forming a friendship with Bowie after he too became a pop music sensation in the 1980s.
“I think Bowie was one of those people that if he liked you, it was like, ‘Oh I’m absolutely cool, don’t even try to consider that I’m not,’” Boy George explained.
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In 2001, Boy George paid tribute to his idol by performing as Bowie in the U.K. reality show Stars in Their Eyes, where contestants impersonate their musical heroes. His cover of Bowie’s 1973 hit “Sorrow” won the competition over the likes of Ladies of London star Caprice Bourret portraying Nancy Sinatra and pop icon Kim Wilde impersonating singer-songwriter Carly Simon.
Following Bowie’s death from liver cancer at age 69 in 2016, Boy George told the Daily Mail that being introduced to the rocker’s music was a “life-affirming event.”
“I have been a loyal fan since that first concert in 1973,” he added. “As a teenager growing up in suburbia, I was very much the odd one out, and Bowie was the light at the end of a very gray tunnel. He validated me and made me realize I was not alone. Listening to his early songs, I felt he was speaking directly to me when he sang, ‘We’re painting our faces and dressing thoughts from the skies, from paradise.’ Bowie painted a mythical landscape where otherness and individuality reigned supreme.”
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Bowie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. He sold more than 100 million albums worldwide throughout his lifetime and won six Grammy Awards.
His wife, the supermodel Iman, vowed in 2018 that she would never remarry following the legendary musician’s death. The couple were married for 24 years before Bowie died.
“I mentioned my husband the other day with someone, and they said to me: ‘You mean your late husband?’ I said, no, he is always going to be my husband,” she explained to PORTEREdit.
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