POP MUSIC REVIEW : Boy George Gives an Oddly Charming Show

Boy George sandwiched his show at the House of Blues on Tuesday with David Bowie songs, opening with the Bowie-Iggy Pop tune “Funtime” and encoring with “Suffragette City.” This visit to his glam-rock roots has apparently had an invigorating effect on the singer, who transcended the personal and/or career problems that perpetually plague him to turn in an oddly charming performance.

His previous solo appearances here have been bizarre, semi-amateur affairs, and while he remains idiosyncratic, this was a solidly professional show, with a band that played tightly and sympathetically, and happily wore oversized pompadour wigs.

The glam-rock style that dominates his latest album, “Cheapness and Beauty” (career problem case in point: He and his record label have parted ways), might be psychologically fulfilling, but it yielded the set’s most dynamically flat music. When he was allowed some nuance in an acoustic segment, he showed the lightly soulful voice that seduced the pop world with Culture Club in the early 1980s. This is where he could have deepened the show by including some of the album’s more tender material and his one solo hit, “The Crying Game.”

But Boy George’s audience wants more than proper music. It wants attitude and affirmation, and the gender-bending performer obliged, flashing a sharp, quick wit (a new song, “G.I. Josephine,” sounded like a Tom Paxton or Phil Ochs take on the gays-in-the-military issue) and some barbed attacks on MTV (for “killing the imagination of rock ‘n’ roll”) and on nostalgia. Don’t take the latter too seriously though--he offered several Culture Club songs, in nicely understated readings.