Good Karma! An interview with Culture Club's Roy Hay

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After years of solo projects, inter-band spats, reconciliations, and other hurdles, iconic ’80s pop group Culture Club has reunited. The group is about six weeks into its reunion tour, and has a new album in the works, titled Tribes. Guitarist Roy Hay took a few minutes to talk about tour life, politics, and re-igniting the spark.

Congratulations on this tour. I know it’s been a long time coming with a few false starts. Are things still going smoothly?

Roy Hay: Laughs It’s been a bit like doing a middle-east peace deal putting this band back together. It takes a lot of parts to come together. Everybody’s doing other stuff, George in particular is a bit of an entity. Everybody has to be in the right place and wanting to do it, and now that we’re doing it everyone’s really enjoying it, and realizing what a really special thing it is that we have here.

How is life on the road different for you these days than when you first started touring with Culture Club in the ’80s?

To be quite honest, some tours from the late ’80s and ’90s I don’t even really remember. We would pretty much come off stage, go to the club, meet people, get back to the hotel in the wee hours of the morning, pass out, get up at 8 o’clock and sleep during the day on the tour bus or the plane, get up and do the gig, and then go off again. It’s very different now. We come off stage and usually do a little post-gig analysis, chat and hang out. Then we go back to the hotel, maybe have something light to eat and watch a movie or something. Last week we were watching the Tour de France.

I know that Boy George has been recording music as a solo artist for a while, and you’ve been doing a lot of composing. How is it coming back to work on Culture Club after you and the other members have sort of moved on musically?

I think we all have a little more to bring to the table now. When you’re young, and you get together in a band, you’ve got that vitality going and then after a few albums you sort of get a little stale. You need to get out and do other things and experience some other stuff in life, otherwise what do you write about? In a way, I think it’s been really quite fresh to all get together, and I think we appreciate each other more than we have in the past. Sometimes I just look at Mikey playing on stage and I think, “God, he’s a good bass player, he’s really locked in.” And when we’re in the studio in particular, the way George writes lyrics, I don’t know how he does it, they just sort of come out of the air. He pulls these lyrics out of the air, which is amazing to me because I don’t have that.

So the new stuff is coming along well. Is it a little bizarre returning to the old Culture Club repertoire after so many years?

It’s funny, some of the songs seem much more acceptable playing as the band we are now, like “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me,” or “Time,” or even “Miss Me.” Those songs seem to really work now. But playing “I’ll Tumble 4 Ya” as a 55-year-old man seems a little weird, I have to be honest. But I mean the crowds love it and so you sort of get everybody up and dancing, which is fun. I think we’d have riots if we didn’t play them.

Yeah, I’m sure there’s a lot of pressure to deliver on the stuff the crowd knows and loves.
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And it’s fine, we get such good feedback from them. Even if we are a little tired of playing those songs, the energy from the crowd always gets us up to perform them, so it’s fine.

Okay, last question. Culture Club first formed in a pretty conservative era — Reagan was president here in the states, Margaret Thatcher was prime minister in the UK. Culture Club was kind of at the vanguard of the queer subculture during all that, with Boy George being an openly gay frontman and all that. Things have evolved tremendously in terms of acceptance of the LGBTQ community. How has your experience as a band changed as attitudes towards queer issues have changed?

I think part of pop music is, yes it’s nice to leave a legacy of songs and of music, but it’s also nice to have a legacy of some political influence, some statement in pop culture. I think that if you grew up with a Culture Club poster on your wall, maybe you’ve grown up a little bit more tolerant and a little bit more open. We never really went on the soapbox and said, “You have to be tolerant and accept all races and all sexualities,” we never said that cause we never had to. Our image said everything. And it’s funny, you look back and think George was openly gay, but he wasn’t. He couldn’t be back then, it was different. I mean you had Freddie Mercury fronting a band called Queen in full leather S&M gear and nobody ever said, “Oh, I wonder if he’s gay.” Attitudes were slightly different, and I don’t think it was that George hid it, I just think we didn’t really have to say it. I remember getting into London cabs sometimes in the ’80s, and the driver would go, “You’re that bloke from Culture Club, aren’t you?” and I’d go “Yeah, yeah,” and he’d say, “Well is he?” and I thought, “Are you really asking me if George is gay? I mean, what do you think?” There’s a lot of factors going towards attitudes changing, and hopefully our legacy has a part in that. Maybe it has a little to do with it, and that’s kind of a nice thing to have done in your life.

Culture Club takes the stage at Chastain Park Amphitheater tonight, Tues., July 19, at 8 p.m. 4469 Stella Drive N.W. 404-733-5012.