“Love at first sight”: The secret inter-band love affair at the heart of ‘Karma Chameleon’
A band like Culture Club were very much a product of the 1980s, and the 1980s loved them straight back for it.
As the name most obviously suggests, the band were a smorgasbord of cultures and dispositions – Boy George was androgynous and intriguing, bass guitarist Mikey Craig descended from Jamaican origins, and guitarist Roy Hay was the typical English boy next door. But they needed a drummer, and then in walked Jon Moss.
Most bands will know the moment when the air crackles and they just inherently understand that they’re onto something good. In the case of Culture Club, that lightning strike obviously held the elements of artistic harmony, but it also carved out a storming romance between the drummer and the frontman. George and Moss were in love from the first second they set eyes on each other.
In a series of sliding doors moments while searching for the missing piece of his band, George saw Moss’s picture in an office, got his contact details, and phoned him to ask if he could come to their first rehearsal. “He turns up in this, like, very expensive Golf Convertible with this stinking and beautiful perfume, with his earrings in, and yeah, it was love at first sight, basically,” George later recalled.
Moss himself had a similar reaction, if admittedly not being so forthright about his feelings. Calling the frontman “a beautiful, exotic creature,” he quickly realised that something was in the air as he had never felt these emotions towards a man before. In one word, he was “smitten”. The rest, as they say, is history.
While the dynamic of Culture Club as a whole certainly set them on the way to success, those romantic sparks between George and Moss were impossible to avoid, to the point where it was potentially the most major driving factor towards them climbing the charts. Take a song like ‘Karma Chameleon’, their most enduring hit, as the prime example.
The idea of standing up for justice and having the good vibes brought back to you in return may sound corny or overwrought, but when you take this in the context of the affair going on within the very heart of the band, it speaks volumes about what they were trying to tell the world in the process.
Sure, not everything Culture Club would go on to do would have the same level of storming success, but that too highlighted the ups and downs in the relationship between George and Moss. When they were good together, the band could ride high. When things were not so sweet, that’s when the struggles got real.
Of course, they are far from the only ones whose band has hinged on one central relationship. Yet despite everything, all those cases have taught us is that climbing the charts is perhaps the worst mountain to scale when also trying to cultivate romance at the same time. Some things are better left apart.
