Pop
Boy George
Boy George, the British singer of Culture Club, has a concrete link with Montreux: it was at Mountain Studios, inside the Casino, that the band recorded the album “From Luxury to Heartache” in 1985 and 1986, produced by Arif Mardin and mixed in New York. Like Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Freddie Mercury before him, he also stayed at the Duck House, the lakeside villa in Clarens rented to visiting musicians. In May 1985, Culture Club also performed “Karma Chameleon” at the Festival de la Rose d’Or, Montreux’s television festival.
Boy George in Montreux: an album recorded in the eye of a storm
One producer, then two
To relaunch Culture Club’s sound, the band replaced Steve Levine, producer of their first three albums, with veteran Arif Mardin, already behind Aretha Franklin and Dusty Springfield. But the sessions at Mountain Studios dragged on: Boy George had just gone through his messiest split with drummer Jon Moss and, within months, went from near-teetotal to a severe heroin addiction (Classic Pop, Jon O’Brien, April 2021).
Mardin ended up handing the final vocal takes to sound engineer Lew Hahn, credited alongside him as co-producer on the whole album.
Tenth in the UK, then thirteen years of silence
“From Luxury to Heartache” came out on 1 April 1986. It reached number 10 in the UK charts but fell off them after just six weeks, far from the band’s early peaks. Culture Club split that same year; it was the compilation “This Time – The First Four Years”, released in April 1987, that sealed the end of the adventure. The band would not reform for another thirteen years.
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