Music & Concerts
An evening with Culture Club
Founding guitarist Roy Hay says the band is looking ahead
Culture Club is (from left) Mikey Craig, Boy George, Jon Moss and Roy Hay. The band’s current tour marks the first time they’ve toured in more than a decade. (Photo by Dean Stockings)
Culture Club
Monday, Aug. 10
8 p.m.
$30-60
Filene Center
1551 Trap Rd.
Vienna, Va.
A reunited Culture Club brings its summer North American tour — its first here in 12 years — to Wolf Trap on Monday, Aug.10. The band, famous for ‘80s classics like “Karma Chameleon” and “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” has regrouped after postponing a tour last fall when lead singer Boy George suffered a throat ailment. A new album called “Tribes” is slated for fall.
We spoke with guitarist Roy Hay by phone from New York last week as he was en route to their show that night at the Grand Theater in Mashantucket, Conn. His comments have been slightly edited for length.
WASHINGTON BLADE: How does it feel to be out with the band again?
ROY HAY: It was a little frustrating to have the false starts but now that we’re up and running it feels great. I have to say, the response from the audience has been beyond my wildest dreams, to be quite honest. It’s just been fantastic. A really magical moment actually.
BLADE: Has all the bad blood of old been laid to rest or do little frictions still flare up?
HAY: I wouldn’t say bad blood, but to be honest, George is not always the easiest person. As Keith (Richards) said about Mick (Jagger), he has an LSD problem — lead singer disease. So there’s been a bit of that going on, but I haven’t gone to his room and punched him like Keith would have done but you know, it’s OK. George is a bit of a perfectionist and particularly as he’s had his own thing going on for so long, to now be in the culture of a band again instead of being the focal point of his entire universe has been a bit of a challenge for him. Which is true for all of us, because we’ve all been doing our own thing. But for him, being out there DJing, which is a very isolated pursuit, and doing his solo thing for the past two years, you’re sort of the captain of your own ship, so now to suddenly be part of a democratic process is somewhat challenging for him. So if you bear all that in mind, it all makes sense.
BLADE: George has said the other members are all “kind of” straight. Do people get that or has there always been a perception that Culture Club was a gay band?
HAY: Well I like to think that people know but I have ended up in quite awkward situations socially with this sort of, “Oh God, I thought you were gay.” And I’m like, “No, go back and put your clothes on and take that pink ribbon off your penis.” (laughs) I’m not kidding — that will be in the book.
BLADE: How are you keeping this tour from being an exercise in “nostalgia purgatory” as George puts it?
HAY: For us, the life blood of being in a band is being four guys in a room making music and writing songs, so what’s good about this is that we’re playing new songs and we’re slotting them in with the old ones and it’s like people aren’t even noticing because there’s a certain familiarity about the way we write. So by the second chorus, we’ve got the whole place dancing to the new songs. Part of the reason we’re doing this right now without the new album out yet is to kind of restore our reputation a little bit live and get people to realize, “God, they’re a good band, I’d forgotten.” We got a little bit forgotten over the years. Obviously it’s our own fault, we haven’t worked. So I think we needed to come out and do a little bit of damage limitation if you like. And particularly after the last tour got canceled because of George’s vocal issues, we really wanted to come back out and get the band back out there a bit, so then when we do come out with the album and the big tour next year, people will be more willing to come along. It’s never been a sort of “Danny Collins”-type thing for us where he gets trapped into just playing his hits for like 30 years and the money is so good and the fame is so big, he can’t stop. It’s not about that for us. If it was, we’d just put the four of us on stage and run pro tools, but we have a 13-piece band and we’re playing live and rocking the hell out of it, so I think people really appreciate that.
BLADE: The new album is done?
HAY: It is, it’s in the can and I think we’ve made a great album. It’s the album we should have made in 1986 after “Colour by Numbers” but we had that third album syndrome and didn’t have anything to write about but now we … have a lot more musical ideas. It’s ready to go but we really want to pick our release date and plan things properly so when we do come with it, it doesn’t just go to album heaven. Obviously we don’t expect to sell 10 million copies again, but we’d like to at least get it out to the people who would like to buy a Culture Club record. There was a great quote in one of the reviews last year — we briefly had a single out that kind of got withdrawn when the tour got cancelled — but it said this would be a number one record if bands like Culture Club were allowed to have number ones. The point is we feel we should be allowed to have number ones, so we want to clear the way and try to make that happen. Not from any other point of view than we’ve written some damn good songs, some damn good tunes and you could stick them on the radio next to Bruno Mars and it would work. It’s going to be a hard job, but you never know.
BLADE: “From Luxury to Heartache” now kind of feels like the forgotten Culture Club album. How do you feel it’s held up or not held up?
HAY: For me, that was always one of our finest works. I always wanted to work with (producer) Arif (Mardin). … May he rest in peace. He was really a magical man to work with. I learned so much from Arif that helped me move on in my life and with other projects, producing and songwriting and going into commercials, film and television. It was just a study in classic producing and the life lessons from that man were amazing as well. I don’t know necessarily if he was the best producer for the band. He was used to working with the Arethas and the Chaka Khans, even the Bee Gees in a way, they just come in and do their vocals and you know Barry does his thing with the music. I don’t know of he caught the band on that album but the songs were good, man. There were some good songs on that album. … “I Pray” and “God Thank You Woman.” I’m proud of all our work over the years. Even “Don’t Mind If I Do” (1999), I thought had some good moments as well.
BLADE: Have you sensed Culture Club fans want new material?
HAY: Well I hope they do because they’re getting it. I think they want it if it’s the right new material. … This band would never last on the nostalgia line. There’s too much artistic integrity with its members. If it were only that, we wouldn’t do it. I’d rather go off and do another TV show or do movies, George would rather do his solo thing. The spark and writing new songs is really the life’s blood of this band.
BLADE: So do you roll your eyes when you see the Stones or Fleetwood Mac going back out every few years and their last albums were 10 or 15 years ago?
HAY: I don’t know really. Build it and they will come, I guess, you know? As long as people keep coming, they’re going to keep going out. There’s obviously a magic with the Rolling Stones. I’m reading Keith’s book right now and I get it. It’s a very different style of music, but it’s the same way they started in a basement in London just playing records and we were much the same way. We were in a rehearsal studio in Shepherd’s Bush listening to records and John was really a driving force back in those days. George wanted us to be the next Bow Wow Wow and John said, “No, let’s write some real songs,” so we were playing everything from ABBA to Booker T & the M.G.’s and we really got into songwriting and became Culture Club during that stage. We really just lived and breathed music. … It was a magical time. You never get that back, but we have tried.
Music & Concerts
Underdog glorious: a personal remembrance of Jill Sobule
Talented singer, songwriter died in house fire on May 1
I’ve always prided myself on being the kind of music consumer who purchased music on impulse. When I stumbled across “Things Here Are Different,” Jill Sobule’s 1990 MCA Records debut album on vinyl in a favorite Chicago record store, I bought it without knowing anything about her. This was at a time when we didn’t have our phones in our pockets to search for information about the artist on the internet. The LP stayed in my collection until, as vinyl was falling out of fashion, I replaced it with a CD a few years later.
Early in my career as an entertainment journalist, I received a promo copy of Jill’s eponymous 1995 Atlantic Records album. That year, Atlantic Records was one of the labels at the forefront of signing and heavily promoting queer artists, including Melissa Ferrick and Extra Fancy, and its roster included the self-titled album by Jill. It was a smart move, as the single “I Kissed A Girl” became a hit on radio and its accompanying video (featuring Fabio!) was in heavy rotation on MTV (when they still played videos).
Unfortunately for Jill, she was a victim of record label missteps. When 1997’s wonderful “Happy Town” failed to repeat the success, Atlantic dumped her. That was Atlantic’s loss, because her next album, the superb “Pink Pearl” contained “Heroes” and “Mexican Wrestler,” two of her most beloved songs. Sadly, Beyond Music, the label that released that album ceased to exist after just a few years. To her credit, the savvy Jill had also started independently releasing music (2004’s “The Folk Years”). That was a smart move because her next major-label release, the brilliant “Underdog Victorious” on Artemis Records, met a similar fate when that label folded.
With her 2009 album “California Years,” Jill launched her own indie label, Pinko Records, on which she would release two more outstanding full-length discs, 2014’s “Dottie’s Charms” (on which she collaborated with some of her favorite writers, including David Hadju, Rick Moody, Mary Jo Salter, and Jonathan Lethem), and 2018’s stunning “Nostalgia Kills.” Jill’s cover of the late Warren Zevon’s “Don’t Let Us Get Sick” on “Nostalgia Kills” was particularly poignant as she had toured with him as an opening act.
Jill was a road warrior, constantly on tour, and her live shows were something to behold. My first interview with Jill took place at the Double Door in Chicago in early August of 1995, when she was the opening act for legendary punk band X. She had thrown her back out the previous day and was diagnosed with a herniated disc. To be comfortable, she was lying down on a fabulous-‘50s sofa. “I feel like I’m at my shrink’s,” she said to me, “Do you want me to talk about my mother?”
That sense of humor, which permeated and enriched her music, was one of many reasons to love Jill. I was privileged to interview her for seven of her albums. Everything you would want to know about her was right there in her honest lyrics, in which she balanced her distinctive brand of humor with serious subject matter. Drawing on her life experiences in songs such as “Bitter,” “Underachiever,” “One of These Days,” “Freshman,” “Jetpack,” “Nothing To Prove,” “Forbidden Thoughts of Youth,” “Island of Lost Things,” “Where Do I Begin,” “Almost Great,” and “Big Shoes,” made her songs as personal as they were universal, elicited genuine affection and concern from her devoted fans.
While she was a consummate songwriter, Jill also felt equally comfortable covering songs made famous by others, including “Just A Little Lovin’” (on the 2000 Dusty Springfield tribute album “Forever Dusty”) and “Stoned Soul Picnic” (from the 1997 Laura Nyro tribute album “Time and Love”). Jill also didn’t shy away from political subject matter in her music with “Resistance Song,” “Soldiers of Christ,” “Attic,” “Heroes,” “Under the Disco Ball,” and the incredible “America Back” as prime examples.
Here’s something else worth mentioning about Jill. She was known for collaboration skills. As a songwriter, she maintained a multi-year creative partnership with Robin Eaton (“I Kissed A Girl” and many others), as well as Richard Barone, the gay frontman of the renowned band The Bongos. Jill’s history with Barone includes performing together at a queer Octoberfest event in Chicago in 1996. Writer and comedian Julie Sweeney, of “SNL” and “Work in Progress” fame was another Chicago collaborator with Sobule (Sweeney lives in a Chicago suburb), where they frequently performed their delightful “The Jill and Julia Show.” John Doe, of the aforementioned band X, also collaborated with Jill in the studio (“Tomorrow Is Breaking” from “Nostalgia Kills”), as well as in live performances.
On a very personal note, in 2019, when I was in the process of arranging a reading at the fabulous NYC gay bookstore Bureau of General Services – Queer Division, I reached out to Jill and asked her if she would like to be on the bill with me. We alternated performing; I would read a couple of poems, and Jill would sing a couple of songs. She even set one of my poems to music, on the spot.
Jill had an abundance of talent, and when she turned her attention to musical theater, it paid off in a big way. Her stage musical “F*ck 7th Grade,” a theatrical piece that seemed like the next logical step in her career, had its premiere at Pittsburgh’s City Theatre in the fall of 2020, during the height of the pandemic. The unique staging (an outdoor drive-in stage at which audience members watched from their cars) was truly inspired. “F*ck 7th Grade” went on to become a New York Times Critic’s pick, as well as earning a Drama Desk nomination.
In honor of the 30th anniversary of Jill’s eponymous 1995 album, reissue label Rhino Records is re-releasing it on red vinyl. Jill and I had been emailing each other to arrange a time for an interview. We even had a date on the books for the third week of May.
When she died in a house fire in Minnesota on May 1 at age 66, Jill received mentions on network and cable news shows. She was showered with attention from major news outlets, including obits in the New York Times and Rolling Stone (but not Pitchfork, who couldn’t be bothered to review her music when she was alive). Is it wrong to think that if she’d gotten this much attention when she was alive she could have been as big as Taylor Swift? I don’t think so.
Music & Concerts
Tom Goss returns with ‘Bear Friends Furever Tour’
Out singer/songwriter to perform at Red Bear Brewing Co.
Singer Tom Goss will bring his “Bear Friends Furever Tour” to D.C. on Sunday, June 8 at 8 p.m. at Red Bear Brewing Co.
Among the songs he will perform will be “Bear Soup,” the fourth installment in his beloved bear song anthology series. Following fan favorites like “Bears,” “Round in All the Right Places,” and “Nerdy Bear,” this high-energy, bass-thumping banger celebrates body positivity, joyful indulgence, and the vibrant spirit of the bear subculture.
For more details, visit Tom Goss’s website.
Aussie pop icon Kylie Minogue brings her acclaimed “Tension” world tour to D.C. next Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at the Capital One Arena. Tickets are still available at Ticketmaster.
The show features songs spanning her long career, from 1987 debut single, “The Loco-Motion,” to “Padam, Padam” from her album, “Tension.”
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