The Culture Club star can still entertain, but Lou Reed's attempt to show his metal falls flat

There's a mum in the audience of Boy George's Up Close and Personal show with one gay son, one straight daughter, one straight son and two gay daughters: Brightonian pluralism encapsulated in one family.

It's to her that a song with the words "You always knew, didn't you, mother?" is dedicated. "People don't celebrate what they are," the singer complains, "even in these so-called liberal times. I've done too much to apologise."

No kidding. The angelic, genderless Boy George my 15-year-old self ran away from home and slept rough to follow (well, for one night) would later be replaced by a more flawed and realistic persona. But in recent years, through all his crimes and misdemeanours, he's attained a new nobility. And it's this battered-but-unbroken George who stands before us tonight in a lime green titfer and (hopefully) fake ermine stole, and he's all the more loved for it.

"This is a song I wrote when I was on holiday last summer," he says to gales of knowing laughter from a crowd only too familiar with his bizarre 2009 sentence for false imprisonment and assault. The song is "Pentonville Blues", and features the refrain "HD7073, that's what they call me ..." – a reference both to Toots and The Maytals' prison memoir "54-46 (That's My Number)" and C33X, Oscar Wilde's number in Reading Gaol.

These new compositions are scattered lightly in a set that spans the Culture Club years with "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me", "Karma Chameleon", "I Just Wanna Be Loved" and an ovation-grabbing "Victims", solo hits such as "Generations of Love" and "Everything I Own", as well as covers of "Blue Moon" and Marc Bolan's "Get It On".

This hardcore atheist could live without the Krishna-pimping "Bow Down Mister" and the trad spirituals ("Down by the Riverside", "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen", "This Little Light of Mine"). That said, he delivers the best version of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" I've ever heard, as if Dylan's song had been waiting 37 years for the right voice to sing it...

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/reviews/boy-george-dome-brightonbrlou-reed-southbank-centre-london-1953394.html