Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?
By Roy Hay, Boy George, Mikey Craig and Jon Moss
After two lacklustre single releases that bordered on commercial flops, ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?’ was Culture Club’s third and final chance to score an album deal. It went straight to No.1 in Ireland, the UK, and across Europe, and only narrowly missed the top spot in America, held off by megastar Michael Jackson’s smash hit, ‘Billy Jean’.
At the heart of the band’s success was the charisma of lyricist and vocalist ‘Boy’ George O’Dowd, whose parents Jerry and Dinah O’Dowd, were both Irish. Boy George had hung out at Blitz, the London club that spawned the post-punk New Romantic movement, which involved a return to a glamorous aesthetic, with cross-dressing a regular feature. Influenced by the glam side of David Bowie and Marc Bolan, George cultivated a flamboyantly androgynous appearance that appealed to teenage girls as well as the growing gay market. But, right from the outset, he was a serious songwriter. The lyrics of ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?’ deal with the theme – albeit ambiguously – of being gay and victimised for your sexuality. It was hardly an obvious recipe for pop success, but the band – and their record company – were stunned when ‘Do You Really Wanna Hurt Me?’ became a commercial smash, even gaining vital airplay on America’s famously conservative radio stations. The band’s biggest hit, ‘Karma Chameleon’ would ultimately take them to No.1 in the US and sell more records, but ‘Do You Really Want To Hurt Me’ remains by far their most covered song – and the one that most obviously connects with the Irish song tradition on which Boy George had been raised.
The Story Behind The Song
George O’Dowd aka Boy George has a colourful Irish ancestry. His great uncle Thomas Bryan was in the Irish Republican Army during the War of Independence and was arrested and executed by hanging, by the British authorities, three days before St. Patrick’s Day, on 14th March 1921. His father Jerry O’Dowd was born in London of Irish parents and his mother Christina Glynn (Dinah O’Dowd) was born in Dublin. Dinah was forced to leave her native Dublin in the late ’50s when George’s older brother Kevin was conceived 'out of wedlock', as it was widely termed at the time.
George has credited his rebel heart to his Irish heritage. When he burst onto the New Romantic scene in a riot of Romany-inspired colours and shapes, it was like nothing the music business had ever seen before. Groomed for stardom by Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren via the London club circuit, and an association with the band Bow Wow Wow, George split with McLaren to form Culture Club with Mikey Craig (bass) and his on-off-boyfriend Jon Moss (drums), before auditioning for a guitarist and striking gold with Roy Hay.
With an Irish gay man as lead singer, a black Briton on bass, a blond Englishman on guitar and keyboards, and a Jewish drummer, the name Culture Club was very deliberately chosen. While George had never written a song before, he soon found his groove, putting lyrics to riffs confected on Hay’s guitar, until they’d built the idea into a full song.
While Culture Club’s first two singles ‘White Boy’ and ‘I’m Afraid of Me’ went down a storm on the trendy London underground club scene, they failed to ignite with the wider record-buying public. The band buckled down and perfected their chord sequences and keyboard changes and produced what George called their “first song written as a song”, ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?’. Reggae-infused, and rumoured to be about his troubled relationship with Moss, it subtly addressed the issue of homophobia. But it had a wider universal appeal for anyone who had been hurt by love.
Boy George, photographed for Hot Press at the RDS, Dublin, by Cathal Dawson
Boy George, photographed for Hot Press at the RDS, Dublin, by Cathal Dawson
‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?’ was released as the A-side of a single in the UK and Ireland on 6 November 1982 – and the landscape shifted. The defining moment came when the band cut the first live version of the track, for a session slot on BBC Radio 1. Having taped renditions of their first two singles, they were left with just 15-minutes to record ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?’ There was no time to overdub the vocals, and the resultant recording captured George’s phenomenal talent as a singer. The impact was such that when they recorded the single version of the track, in Red Bus Studios in North West London (stomping ground of Spandau Ballet and Bananarama), the vocal was deliberately nailed in the same way, live with the band playing as George sang.
Publicity still of Culture Club, including George with Gilbert O'Sullivan cap, shot by Jamie Morgan
Publicity still of Culture Club, including George with Gilbert O'Sullivan cap, shot by Jamie Morgan
Dubbed “light white Reggae”– with elements of lovers rock added for good measure – the single became BBC Radio 2’s Record of the Week and started to fly off the shelves: an appearance on the key UK music show of the era, Top of the Pops, beckoned. The band, who were touring the UK in a transit van at the time, started noticing that fans were turning up at their gigs in unprecedented numbers. Boys and girls alike started showing up to Culture Club gigs dressed in Boy George’s androgynous style. Considerable radio play on both sides of the Atlantic helped the band reach a wider audience. Fans all over the UK, Ireland, Europe and, soon afterwards, the USA and Canada had been wooed successfully. By the time George and the gang reached Glasgow, in Scotland, they were the biggest new band in the UK. The single stayed at No.1 for three weeks in Britain. It topped the charts in 12 countries in all, and just stopped short of No.1 in the US, peaking at No.2, with only Michael Jackson’s incomparable ‘Billie Jean’ above it.
Signed to Virgin, Culture Club's debut album Kissing to Be Clever went platinum. The video to ‘Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?’ – which was directed by punk film-maker Julian Temple – has since been viewed over 104 million times. Culture Club went on to become the first band since The Beatles to have three top 10 hits in the US from their debut album, with George’s soulful vocals drawing comparisons with Smokey Robinson.
Culture Club in their heyday, with Boy George all in black, shot by Andre Csillag
Culture Club in their heyday, with Boy George all in black, shot by Andre Csillag
The band’s second album, 1983’s Colour By Numbers, sold 10 million copies worldwide, while the single ‘Karma Chameleon’ went to No. 1 in 16 countries. It was their biggest ever track, selling over 5 million copies – with the YouTube video being viewed almost 589 million times to date. But ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?’ has the special, timeless quality of a great, enduring song. It has been translated into Icelandic, Japanese and Finnish, among other languages. It was the lead song in a Culture Club medley by Irish family popsters The Nolans. And it has been covered by an extraordinary array of artists, including country star Rita Coolidge, Argentinian bossa nova songstress Karen Souza, Milwaukee alternative rockers Violent Femmes, folk star Melanie, Australian superstar Kate Ceberano (on her Gold-disc winning album Nine Lime Avenue), Australian-Filippino megastar-in-the-making Sheldon Riley, burlesque queen Deeta Von Teese and Sébstien Tellier, and German pop-dance group, Blue Lagoon (whose excellent version was a hit in Germany, Sweden, Demark, Austria and Switzerland), among dozens more.
“Everything’s not what you see,” Boy George sang. He was right about that.
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