At Worst . . . The Best Of

BOY GEORGE/CULTURE CLUB: "At Worst . . . The Best Of" (Virgin Records)

ANY ALBUM with a title as cutely twisted as At Worst . . . The Best Of deserves a similar line to kick off this review. Okay, so the good news is that we can get the bad news out of the way first. And the bad news is that missing from this long-overdue compilation by Boy George and Culture Club is both his soulful solo single 'Sold' and his politically-pointed 'Section 28'. Each exclusion is inexplicable and an obvious loss, yet what's here really does compensate to a great degree.

The saddest aspect of Boy George's career, on a purely musical level is that his talents as a vocalist, songwriter, showman and theatrical performer all became subsumed to his status as a celebrity, or even a "freak-show" event after his bust for heroin and his declaration of homosexuality. Each factor clearly influenced the music, but the sum total of Boy George always was far more than most people realised at the time.

Now the headlines, hopefully, are lost in a faded past; the boy is a man apparently very much in love and all we have to judge him on is the music. And what this compilation proves, conclusively is that Boy George/Culture Club created some of the finest pop records in Britain during the early '80s. Forget the self-professed "confused drag Queen," as Boy George refers to himself in the sleeve notes of this CD - just marvel again at the many musical wonders of 'Do You Really Want To Hurt Me', 'Church of the Poison Mind' and 'Karma Chameleon'.

If one object of art is to involve audiences, to make them want to respond in kind by singing out, by dancing, by perceiving themselves in a slightly different way because they encountered your work then Culture Club easily met all these requirements. And Neil Jordan revealed both his genius and his quirky sense of sexuality by getting Boy George to sing the title song from 'The Crying Game'. No one else would have been as suitable.

Besides, how can you not be mad about the boy who once said "tell Bono that if he still hasn't found what he's looking for, to look behind the drum kit."

• Joe Jackson