Boy George: Boy from the black stuff

A dark side to Culture Club's blissful pop gems? Surely not. But Boy George tells Glyn Brown: 'You had to know what was going on to understand the songs. On the surface they seem really happy, but underneath they were melancholy'

I'd been looking forward to interviewing Boy George. Oh, I'd heard he had a barbed tongue, but I assumed that these days he kept that for night-time entertainment. (Despite what he told Russell Harty years ago, he obviously doesn't always prefer a cup of tea to sex.) Some people think George O'Dowd, now 41, is an odious, self-publicising windbag, and autobiography is certainly his middle name – he's spilled his guts on every floor from here to Ibiza. But he's witty with it, and honest and self-aware. He'd be such fun to meet. That's what I thought.

The peg for our chat is an impending Culture Club box set – four CDs and a 72-page booklet. The location is George's Gothic pile in Hampstead. Inside crumbling Addams Family walls, thick with graffiti ("You saved my life – Sven from Norway"), wide steps lead up past an algae-covered pool flanked by pagoda dogs and a fishing gnome. Inside, stained glass filters the light around an imposing carved stairway. Masks from Taboo, the musical George has written and in which he played camp performance artist Leigh Bowery, leer down, in between disinterested Buddhas. Citizen Kane's Xanadu is Teletubbyland in comparison.

And here is George, who rose at three and kept everyone waiting while he took two hours for make-up. When I try to see how our photos are going, he coldly dismisses me – "I'll be with you in a moment' – so I stand awkwardly in the kitchen, reading fridge magnets ("Men are like floor tiles; lay them right the first time and you can walk all over them for years").

But finally we're facing each other at the table, up to our elbows in false lashes and slap. George is vast. His head alone is immense – you can almost hear stone rasp as it turns. He's wearing a bowler and a nose-to-ear chain spelling "Taboo". His neck is shaded black, his eyes are spiders, fake blood coagulates down his face. In the semi-dark, I'm thinking Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. Oh, come on, this is silly. It's cuddly George, for God's sake, at whom little girls threw teddy bears 20 years ago at Guildford Town Hall. As I gaze, rapt, he snaps: "Got a tape recorder?"

Yup, and a question about recent solo album U Can Never B 2 Straight. It's folky, acoustic. Was it time to do the singer- songwriter thing?

"I've always been a singer-songwriter." Icy chill.

The track, "If I Could Fly" – so brutal, such finesse. Lines like "You look so ugly as you're lying asleep" and "I feel so special when I'm making you cry". It's hating yourself...

"No, it's not!" George laughs, but not pleasantly. "It's a diary, I'm singing about things that have happened to me."

Quite. And with a lyric like that, don't you feel that if you don't like yourself, then you're hating whoever is in love with you?

His head moves back on his neck, a snake about to strike. "Are you suggesting I don't like myself?" The voice is husky, the demeanour a razor slicing skin. I've got it: he's Lenny the Lion possessed by Lord Voldemort.

I thought it seemed that you didn't. I don't know. "Because I do, I do like myself." He chortles mirthlessly, looking around at his retinue. I'm pleased. So you were just being cruel?

"What? Why am I being cruel?" Oh dear. "If I was writing about a girl, you would never ask me that question." Yes I would. "No, you wouldn't." He's hissing. "It's because I'm a gay man writing about other men. Isn't it?" He seems jolly pissed off.

If I wrote that song about a man, I tell him, it would still be offensive. George shoves his face into mine. "Well, I don't wanna be rude, but I don't feel I'm obliged to explain my music. I do what I want, when I want. All right?" Absolutely. And in a way, you've answered what I asked.

Culture Club, then. Formed in 1981 out of former architect Mikey Craig (bass), Essex hairdresser Roy Hay (guitar), and ex-Damned drummer Jon Moss. Apparently, Tracey Emin was nearly in the band, too. George remembered her from punk days, asked what she played and when she said she didn't, signed her up. She forgot the audition so it never panned out, "Though she's done quite well for herself." The band took off like a Harrier jump jet, from "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?" (written, as were most of the hits, for George's lover Moss) through "Time (Clock of the Heart)" and "Church of the Poisoned Mind" to "Karma Chameleon"... What, I wonder, was George's drug of inspiration? "Men," he breathes lustily, though for whose benefit? "Men and the misery they bring." He lights another cigarette. He doesn't offer me one, but I tell him anyway I'm trying to give up. He regards me witheringly. "Don't bother." This is getting quite funny, so I smile, which irritates even more. "I think you have... a couple of vices, don't you? And they're smoking and masturbation."

Ho hum. Can we talk about "Shirley Temple Moment"? This track, towards the end of CD1, is a little X-rated recording session out-take, and it should destroy sister George's chirpy Widow Twankey image for good. Although he's not the only player in what turns out to be a moment of pure theatre; disgustingly funny, it features the band bad-mouthing each other as they try to finish a number, George berating Mikey ("C'mon, you'll get a free air gun if you do this...") and the engineer berating George ("You'll get a free rent boy if you do this...").

"Well, I knew that tape was flying around for years, 'cos there's a few like it – the Troggs out-take" [this one's quite notorious] "and a Rory Gallagher one, I think, where he hits a cellist. Ours is not staged, that's exactly what happened. Funny thing was, we were recording 'Victims'." A track so tender, it points up the pain in all that snarling, which culminates with Jon and George in a hellish lovers' tiff. As a relationship, theirs was startlingly volatile. Moss apparently broke a couple of fingers in fights with the six-foot geisha. Adds George: "He even broke his arm once, too, trying to hit me." (How could anyone want to punch George?) He sighs at the memory. "It was love."

And for a while, that worked. You may look back at the 1980s and shudder, but George turned out a string of impeccable pop gems, driven by passion. He shrugs. "You had to know what was going on to understand the songs. On the surface, they seem really happy, but underneath they were quite melancholy. That was the irony of Culture Club." Eventually, of course, the band – never workhorses – tired of it all. By 1987, the central love affair had come to bits, and with it George's impetus. Singles stopped charting at number one and came in, like "The Medal Song", at 32 or not at all. George got stuck into heroin, unleashed some appalling tirades in Moss's direction and retired hurt, until his family forced him off smack, after which he became a Buddhist, wrote a macrobiotic cookbook ("100 easy-to-follow recipes!") and staged a solo comeback. He has since added successful DJ (and West End musical writer) to his CV. As for the rest of the band, they're dabbling in various music-related projects, and probably happy enough. They'll regroup for a couple of dates at the year's end, though nothing too lengthy; when last they tried that, in 1998, George nearly went mad, howling that it had got just too Gerry and the Pacemakers.

And is Mr O'Dowd happy? He says he is; most of the time. But what he also keeps doing, as he gradually warms and becomes very nearly friendly, is bringing the conversation back to the dark side of love. Why aren't people honest? Why do they disappear and not call you back? Why are people users? "When potential lovers meet someone like me, they have this idea that I'm really strong and independent, and then the minute you show any sign of vulnerability, they are gone." He throws back his head like Norma Desmond. "Out the door. Fly like ET!"

The question is not so much why people do this as, perhaps, why he makes them. Maybe there's a clue in a song he plays me before I leave. It's not finished but, sure enough, it's all about hating yourself and, in the nearest he'll get to an apology, he tells me, "Bitter, eh?" Like all bullies, he's a coward, too, desperate for reassurance, to pour it all out – to strangers or lovers – again and again. And that's probably why there's four CDs'-worth of good, bad and bruising stuff about to hit a store near you.

The Culture Club box set is released on 2 December