Boy George has one goal for every Vegas audience member walking out of The Venetian Theatre this March. “I want them to think, ‘That wasn’t what I expected. That was different,’” he tells Las Vegas Magazine. And with Culture Club in town through March 28, he has had plenty of time to make good on that.
Boy George & Culture Club has been making good on promises like that since 1981. The London-born band has sold more than 150 million records worldwide, earned a Grammy Award for Best New Artist and built a catalog of songs—“Do You Really Want to Hurt Me,” “Karma Chameleon,” “Church of the Poison Mind”— that live in our collective memory.
Vegas gets all of it. The Venetian Theatre is an intimate room by Strip standards, a different animal from the arenas Culture Club commanded on its acclaimed 2024 tour, in which the band performed its first two albums, Kissing to Be Clever and Colour by Numbers, in full. George sees the smaller scale as an invitation to get personal.
“You get to relax a bit more because you’re in the one space,” he says of the Venetian Theatre. “It’s about seducing the audience for 30 minutes, and then you get to play around with new ideas and interesting covers.” He pauses, then adds: “I’m very talkative, so I kind of chat a lot to the audience. I think the audience likes a friend.”
That instinct for connection is baked into Culture Club’s music itself. Revisiting the early albums on the 2024 tour, George found that some songs had grown with him in unexpected ways. “You understand them a bit more as you get older, because you understand relationships a bit more,” he reflects. “When you’re 19, you’re just talking rubbish, but it’s from an honest place. As you get older, things sink in a bit more.”
Songs like “Victims” and “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” hit differently now—not heavier, exactly, but deeper. “You look out on the crowd and everyone’s smiling,” he says. “That’s a great sort of contradiction of how human beings work. We all fall in love, we all get our hearts broken.”
And while the classics are anchoring the setlist, George isn’t content to coast on them. He’s constantly writing—“I write every day, I write in the room, I’m always writing,” he says—and Vegas audiences may get a taste of what’s new. Culture Club has been debuting a song called “She’s Lying,” co-written with a young artist named Charlotte MacInnis. “It’s really just piano and vocals and a little bit of sax, and that’s been really connecting with the crowd,” George says.
As for what drew him to the Strip, that’s an easy answer. George loves Las Vegas the way he loves New York—for the relentless, glorious energy of it. “I’m not a big sleeper,” he admits. “You have to force yourself to go to bed when you’re in Vegas.”
Multiple nights, in a room where every seat feels like the front row, with a performer who has spent more than four decades defying expectations as a songwriter, a style icon, a provocateur. He told you it would be different. Believe him.
The Venetian Resort, 8:30 p.m. March 20-21, 25 and 27-28, starting at $59 plus tax and fee. venetianlasvegas.com
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