Karma by Boy George: A by-the-numbers celebrity tale

Boy George isn’t wearing any shoes. It is the night of Culture Club’s first appearance on Top of the Pops – a key moment in the young band’s trajectory – and, instead of mentioning the more relevant details of the occasion (say the date, song performed, or any of the attendees) the artist formerly known as George Alan O’Dowd details simply the outfit he chose to wear, all the while barefoot in homage to Sandie Shaw. (“A printed smock with a big Star of David on the front and Cultural Movement written in Hebrew with giant roses around it and a red fedora hat” in case you were wondering.)

This is the manner in which Karma, the third memoir by Boy George, following Take It Like A Man (1995) and Straight (2011), is written: detail-light, staccato and not dissimilar to a holiday postcard. Perhaps this was intentional. O’Dowd, lest we forget, has lived many lives; that of a heroin addict; creative squatter; scared child of a violent father; and, finally, Hare Krishna. And that’s all without mention of his decades-long, hugely successful music career – few details of which actually make the book.

Instead, we get an unvarnished ride through O’Dowd’s singular, whiplash-inducing career trajectory, with the occasional zinger, for example, “If someone puts their penis through a glory hole, you don’t get to know their star sign.” To its credit, the one element that Karma doesn’t skimp on is wit. O’Dowd, recalling when Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott, The Who’s Pete Townshend and nightclub host Steve Strange enter a toilet cubicle in one of London’s many fleshpots, remarks glibly that “they were probably praying”.

O’Dowd has his own ghostwriter, of course – the “auto” in “celebrity autobiography” is always a loose concept – in Spencer Bright, the music journalist responsible for his first autobiography as well as two Peter Gabriel memoirs. Bright has an eye for the finer details, such as when Madonna calls O’Dowd bitchy and “dressed head to toe in Westwood”, only for the author to riposte: “I was wearing Sue Clowes.” To Bright’s credit, his matter-of-fact writing style guides the book as best it can, even though his work is ultimately overpowered by O’Dowd’s determination to bring an essence of “this was written in a hurry, post-I’m A Celebrity fame” to the book as a whole.

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Unfortunately, Karma hits all the high notes of a by-the-numbers celebrity tale: the misunderstood-child-to-sudden-meteoric-success pipeline, tales of sex, drugs and jail time and little else but navel-gazing. While the indecencies of fame, addiction, mental illness and a difficult childhood are patently not funny, it feels difficult to empathise with O’Dowd. It turns out it’s surprisingly tricky to emotionally connect with someone who myopically writes about all those who surround him as mere extras in the movie of his life.