Hello there and thanks for joining us for another edition of Sodejoker on songwriting.

This is Brian, here with Simon and Graying Episode 277 is a Grammy and Ivan Avello winning singer

and songwriter who first made his mark on pop culture over four decades ago as the flamboyant,

gender-bending lead singer of Culture Club.

During a long, colourful and astoundingly

prolific career, he's worked in a dizzying array of creative mediums and performed or recorded

with the likes of Luther Vandross, Paul Weller, Dolly Parton, Smokey Robinson, Fateless, Mark

Ronson, Nile Rogers and Anthony and the Johnsonsons. As this episode reaches you in early December 2024, Culture Club are thrilling audiences nationwide

on a UK tour, performing their first two studio albums in their entirety for the first time,

and we recently had the tremendous pleasure of sitting down with their inimitable frontman

in London to hear all about his writing process.

We're thrilled to welcome the fabulous boy George to the show.

Our guest was born George O'Dowd in 1961 and grew up in Eltham, South East London, one of five

children from a working-class Irish Catholic family. He had a strong urge to perform from a very early

age and as a child would sing music hall standards for the residents at a local all- people's home. Meanwhile, his builder dad would bring home piles of records rescued from

properties he cleared and George would eagerly rifle through them, developing his wide-ranging

musical tastes in the process. As well as being a Bowie acolyte and a huge fan of glam rock

pioneers Mark Bolan and Alice Cooper. He also enjoyed jazz and classical music,

crooners like Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, and classic singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan and

Joni Mitchell. A rebellious pupil, to say the least, George was kicked out of school at 15

and spent some of his late teens living up in the West Midlands before returning to London

where he became a regular at Covent Garden's infamous

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