Boy George says the best thing about Narcotics Anonymous meetings

04:01 Boy George 0 Comments

Boy George says the best thing about Narcotics Anonymous meetings is that “you can sit down and not say a word”. That I would love to see. He is impossibly candid, his tumbling words roughened by that gravelly, camp brogue and flurries of laughter: half-nervy, half-playful. Despite all the therapy and self-help he has immersed himself in, he’s as opinionated and indiscreet as ever. Today he’s got advice for Amy Winehouse and George Michael. He claims to have renounced drugs for good. He bellows across a car park for a cigarette lighter. George says he gave up drugs – specifically cocaine – last October, after returning from New York, where he swept the streets in orange overalls as his punishment for wasting police time. He had admitted to falsely reporting a burglary at his Manhattan apartment; when the police arrived prosecutors said they found 13 plastic bags of cocaine. Boy George said they weren’t his and charges of cocaine possession were later dropped. “It was surreal and quite fun,” he says of the street sweeping, apparently now inured to being the centre of media firestorms, although the US authorities continue to deny him a work visa, which means he cannot tour there. “But that’ll be sorted out,” he says airily. He has a new single. He’s just starting a UK tour. “Everything’s great.” Is it? There’s a rather large elephant in the room. George, 47, is due back in court next month in London, charged with falsely imprisoning a 28-year-old man in a flat he lived in temporarily in East London in April 2007. “I will be pleading not guilty, of course,”