Boy George describes not one, but three rude encounters with Janet Jackson in his new memoir, “Karma.”
The former Culture Club singer shares that he met Jackson around 1986 on the set of the TV series “Solid Gold” and was a huge fan of her single “What Have You Done for Me Lately?”
George, whose last name is O’Dowd, writes that he approached the pop star backstage — but wasn’t wearing his usual over-the-top makeup — and told her he was a huge fan.
“She wasn’t friendly and didn’t try to be,” he writes.
Later, a crew member approached him with a video camera and asked him to record a message for Jackson.
“So I did,” George remembers. “‘Next time you meet someone, be nice,’ I said.'”
The blunt message shocked her team, and George was soon “summoned to her dressing room” — where Jackson explained that she had been brusque because “she didn’t recognize me.”
“I said, ‘That makes it worse. Are you saying you would have been nice to me if you knew who I was? What if I’m just a fan?,'” he writes. “We parted on awkward terms.”
George had two other equally uncomfortable encounters with the “Rhythm Nation” singer.
One was several years later at the British television show “Top of the Pops” where “she looked straight through me.”
“I thought, ‘She’s never going to change,'” he adds.
Their most recent meeting was in 2019 at the British Fashion Awards, where George performed while Jackson kept her back turned and “stayed in that position during my performance.”
“When someone is a bit rude you never get over it, which is an important Post-it note to myself,” he notes. “Be nice.”
A rep for Jackson did not reply for comment.
The “Karma Chameleon” singer writes that Prince, who died in 2016 at age 57, wasn’t rude but was odd.
The two met only once, at a Paris Fashion Week event, when the “Purple Rain” singer asked George over to his table where he was sitting with his wife, Mayte Garcia, and “then he didn’t speak for ten minutes.”
“A plate of carbonara arrived for the wife and Prince started feeding her,” George writes. “I’m thinking, ‘What planet are you on, baby?’ The arrival of the carbonara gave me the perfect excuse to say goodbye.”
George also writes of seeing Adele in Las Vegas and how she sent him a “beautifully signed tour program saying, ‘I can’t believe you are here,’ but she did not meet me. I thought was odd.”
The celebrity DJ is candid about his drug addiction and a 2009 stint in prison for assault and false imprisonment of a Norwegian model and male escort.
He also writes of his tortured relationship with Jon Moss, the drummer of Culture Club.
George even fesses up to having had three hair transplants and a tummy tuck — which “was the most painful thing I’ve ever done because I went on tour straight after with Cyndi Lauper with the blood bag attached.
“I’d previously lost seven stone doing the metabolic balance diet and I needed to get rid of the excess skin,” he explains.
George will soon be stateside: appearing on Broadway in “Moulin Rouge” from Feb. 6 to May 12.
