1988: Acid George and Jamie Reid paint PM a terrorist
Boy George released what can only be described as an agit-prop single in 1988 (he’s released stranger stuff since, under the Leigh Bowery-esque guise of The Twin). It spent months hovering just outside the UK Top 40, indicating it sold in quantity but not quickly. The song was called No Clause 28 and was a rap featuring a Margaret Thatcher impersonator, a sizeable sample from Wanna Be Startin’ Something by Michael Jackson and a quote from Joan Rivers.
The cover for the standard 7-inch, CD single and 12-inch releases featured a cartoon image of the Boy himself dressed up as Noddy, a topical choice because at the time there was talk of the Enid Blyton Noddy books being banned in Australia because the character of Noddy was said to dress ‘gay’ and have a dubious relationship with his friend Big Ears. The artwork and sleeve design was undertaken by Jamie Reid of Assorted Images, best known for his collage work on God Save the Queen by The Sex Pistols.
But it isn’t the standard version I’m going to feature here. It’s this one:
[mp3]http://www.spicycauldron.com/mp3s/No_Clause_28.mp3[/mp3]
No Clause 28 (7-inch Emilio Pasquez Space Face Mix).
Another, heavily reworked, version of the song that was released on CD single, 7-inch and 12-inch, the No Clause 28 (Emilio Pasquez Space Face Mixes) were near-impossible to find from day one owing, it was said at the time, to distribution problems. The Boy’s relationship with Virgin Records hadn’t yet broken down, and his alter-ego Jesus Loves You was to set the emergent rave scene alight with songs like After the Love, One on One, Bow Down Mister and Generations of Love over the next few years.
A version of No Clause 28 eventually found its way onto the only Jesus Loves You album that was ever released. A second Jesus Loves You album was planned but, as with so many of his post-Culture Club projects, The Boy faffed around so much it was never completed. His highly publicised drug problems and flirtation with Buddhism made headlines, not the music.
The rarest remix format of those listed above was the 7-inch. Emilio Pasquez eschewed the fake (but believable) Thatcher voice-over (which was a direct quote from the Iron Lady herself) and also ditched the Joan Rivers sample (which had only been used to full effect on the standard 12-inch extended version). Michael Jackson’s chant was also abandoned.
So what was left? Boy George recorded his vocals all over again for the remix, coming across even more strongly as a wannabe rapper (and, it has to be said, with considerably more success than Madonna when she recorded that tragic rap for her single from the album of the same name, American Life). The Boy also changed some of the words, notably adding ‘would you be so careless / as to give a fool a gun’. This was in reference to the meat of the song, Clause 28 of the then-Local Government Act, a clause that expressly forbid the ‘promotion of homosexuality’.
Gay and civil rights activists warned that the clause confirmed gay people as second-class citizens in Thatcher’s Britain. It was intended to stop schools providing information on homosexuality as part of sex education (unless, it made clear in its wording, in the context of diseases you can catch by engaging in homosexual activity—neglecting to mention you can catch the same diseases from heterosexual liaisons). Clause 28 was sufficiently vague as to make local authorities extremely wary of allowing anything to be promoted in their areas that so much as had a slight hint of the homoerotic about it, meaning there were some high-profile instances where art exhibitions were closed down for featuring male nudes (females didn’t seem to be a problem with their clothes off) and funding for services aimed at gay youth was cut back or ended altogether.
The music behind George’s vocals on the remix of No Clause 28 places it squarely in the middle of the ‘acieed’ craze of the late 80s, which saw millions donning smiley face luminous t-shirts and enough young people trying acid (LSD) in the clubs for the tabloids to have a field day producing headlines about how our zombie children were melting their brains and becoming dumb dancing automatons. The music on the track squelches and squeals and bumps along quite nicely, though it is a dated sound until such time as it comes round again.
Jamie Reid’s services were again employed for the imagery on the remixes (all formats), this time transforming Boy George not into Noddy, but Cupid—perhaps a less obviously gay image, you might think, until you see George holding the flowers and laurel leaves and think, yeah, actually. Cupid is kinda gay. In a nod to the more easily available versions, George as Cupid can be seen still wearing Noddy’s blue hat with the bell on the end.
The reverse of the sleeve repeats another, even more controversial, image from the standard versions of the single. This image—Margaret Thatcher wearing a balaclava of the kind worn by the IRA but with her trademark pearl earrings on show—made headlines all on its own, further fuelling the notoriety George had always sought, even long before his stint as cuddly drag queen frontman for Culture Club. Equating Maggie with terrorist activity was seen by the Press as disgusting, immoral, depraved—and yet the point of it was deliberately missed because of the anti-gay agenda which was so prevalent at the time.
The image drove home the fact that Thatcher was, in fact, promoting terror against gays. If the government of the day reinforces and condones prejudice, it is directly responsible every time a gay man or lesbian is queerbashed. Of course, queerbashing still takes place in Britain today but there are now laws against hate crimes of all kinds. There is considerably less violence against gays in 2007 in the UK than there was in 1988. Whether there is less prejudice is debatable, but it took a very long time for Tony Blair to make good on the promise he made, before he ever became Prime Minister, to abolish Clause 28.
When Clause 28 did, finally, fall into the dustbin of history it was against the wishes of many in the House of Lords but with a huge majority in the Commons pushing it out the door. The media, changed considerably not by choice but by force of law, was no longer able to be as fiercely anti-gay as it was throughout the 1980s and the tabloids managed in the 21st Century, for the most part, to support the abolition of this hateful piece of legislation.
Enjoy the song. It’s a curiosity piece now but nobody can say Boy George didn’t do all he could to raise the profile of this most insidious example of attempted Tory social engineering. Thanks George!
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