It should have been a triumphant night. On Feb. 28, 2001, former Culture Club singer Boy George, having reinvented himself as a deejay a few years earlier, descended on Chelsea to play his first show at the now-defunct 27th Street dance warehouse Twilo. The night concluded a nine-date tour of America — Boy George’s first behind the decks.
It should have been a triumphant night. Except for one problem: no one showed up.
After polishing off a vegetarian platter demanded in his rider (Twilo’s former general manager Mike Bindra says it was the first time he’d ever had talent ask for anything other than a paycheck), Boy George appeared in the deejay booth to preside over a mostly empty dance floor.
So few people turned out that management worked the fog machines overtime so no one could see how empty it was. For Boy George, the gig was a long slide down from his early-’80s peak, when he and Culture Club were turning out a string of worldwide hits, including “Karma Chameleon” and “I’ll Tumble 4 Ya.”
It should have been a triumphant night. But things would only get worse.
Over the next few years the gender-bending pop star born George O’Dowd would suffer a stalled solo career, a failed Broadway show, ongoing drug addiction and two well-publicized run-ins with the law. One brought a humiliating 2006 stint sweeping garbage on the Lower East Side. The other, just last year, earned him a four-month prison term for chaining a male escort to the wall of his London apartment.
It was not a good decade to be Boy George. But now the 48-year-old singer is aiming for a comeback. He claims to be drug-free, looks thinner and healthier than before he went to prison, and tomorrow he’s releasing his first chart-worthy single in 15 years, a shimmering dance track called “Amazing Grace.” Last week, it entered the British dance charts at No. 32.
“Probably over the last few years, if you’d have asked people exactly what I do, they probably would have said, ‘Oh, he gets arrested a lot,’ ” Boy George told UK paper The Sun this month. “So I wanted to remind people that I’m a musician and an entertainer.”
And he has always been, it seems. Even as a teen, Boy George was famous around his southeast London neighborhood for punk-style dress and an outsized personality.
“He was a real charmer and very good looking and very funny,” says longtime friend Jeremy Healy, now a top British deejay. “He had all the girls in the palm of his hand, and all the guys hated him for that.”
Not that the budding star did anything with those girls. When he was 15, he came out to his parents. “Dad was really cool while it was Mum who freaked out,” he wrote in his 2005 autobiography, “Straight.” His father even gave him 60 pounds for a pair of Vivienne Westwood bondage trousers.
In the following years, he would become one of the most flamboyant figures in popular culture, dressing androgynously in skirts, colorful hats and garish make-up.
“If you think that, by passing yourself off as ‘normal’ you will ease your passage through life, you’re mistaken,” Boy George wrote.
Whether his career was going well or not, he would always be accepted in gay culture. Boy George has a huge gay following, and while in New York he would often hit the all-boys night at Bowery Bar. One attendee remembers that the singer would hold court at a table, sending out an emissary who would tell attractive men, “George says you can sit with him now.”
(One bit of trivia for anyone who accepted his offer: George has admitted he rarely let anyone see him without makeup, often rising early in the morning to put on his face before his conquest was awake.)
Ironically, it was the singer’s sex life that helped sink Culture Club. From the time of the group’s first album in 1982 to the eventual breakup in 1986, the members were often at each others’ throats. During one 1983 recording session, George called drummer Jon Moss a “spotty heterosexual c – – -,” while guitarist Roy Hay shot back, “You fat bloody wanker! Haven’t you got a party to go to?!”
Much of the tension arose from the relationship between Moss and Boy George.
“My sex life with Jon was rampant,” Boy George wrote. “We would often have sex before going onstage. We even had sex in the toilets at Whitfield Street Studios while recording the strings for ‘Victims.’ ”
Moss refused to acknowledge the relationship for years. Today, he is married with children.
As Culture Club crumbled, George became addicted to drugs. “We spent a lot of time in New York where drugs were as easily obtainable as chewing gum,” he wrote. “And then heroin took hold.”
He eventually kicked the habit, and decided to move in a new direction, career-wise.
“When he came out of his addiction and I thought he needed a bit of help,” Healy says, “I sort of befriended him again and got him some record decks and said, ‘Let’s try and do a bit of modern deejaying.’ ”
The pair had actually been spinning records since they were in their mid-teens. In 1979, the two were hired to play music at London club Planets because the owner only owned two records, while George and Healy had a collection.
“The first night at the club, [George] deejayed and I was doing the coat check. I was absolutely useless, and the coats ended up on the floor with people screaming at me,” Healy says. “The next week we swapped, and I did the deejaying and he did the coat check. He managed to steal lots of money out of the coat pockets. There were all these people out to kill him.”
After a few years on the celebrity deejay circuit, George was invited by English dance label Fantazia to mix a set of songs for 1995’s “The House Collection, Volume 2.” “He’s quite tricky to work with,” says label founder James Fantazia. “He’s always wanting to do things that are outrageous for outrageous sake.”
One example: Boy George wanted to use a song called “Useless Man” by Minty, in which the lyrics are nothing but a string of explicit sexual terms. “I told him they won’t play it in the shops or on the radio, so we won’t sell any,” Fantazia says. “I edited it out, and of course, he was not happy. He upsets people behind the scenes — promoters, etc. He does it by being arrogant.
“One time [in ’96 or ’97], he turned up for a gig and, instead of going on on-time, he decided to do an interview, then have his hair and makeup done,” Fantazia adds. “He wanted to go on an hour late, at which point it was too late. He still wanted to be paid. Why should he deny another deejay the right to go onstage because he wanted to go on an hour late? He’s not a man without an ego, is he?”
(Boy George declined to be interviewed by The Post, perhaps because he dislikes theater columnist Michael Riedel. George wrote in his book that he’d like to punch Riedel’s “lights out” for savaging the singer’s disastrous 2003 Broadway musical, “Taboo.”)
These days, George seems in a much better mood. After a 2006 conviction for falsely reporting a burglary that required him to perform community service by sweeping the streets of New York and his latest run-in with the law, which sent him to a British prison, he has changed.
“I saw him a couple months ago, and he was really on good form,” Healy says. “With addiction, you hit the bottom and then the only way is up. I think he’s probably done that.”
“He has resurfaced in a very good mood on the scene,” says London-based journalist Richard Price. “You’ll see him out several times a week. You can’t miss him. He’s going round in this bright pink hat.”
“He’s a guy who in the past has been breathtakingly rude and been incredibly full of himself,” Price adds. “Now he’s really funny and likeable.”
What he apparently wants to talk about is Lady Gaga, with whom he’s said to be obsessed. The other day, the two met backstage at a concert, and Gaga went goo-goo over George. She asked him to sign her privates.
Welcome back, Boy George.
reed.tucker@nypost.com