CoronaVinyl Day 13 ('80s): Colour By Numbers by Culture Club

For an explanation of CoronaVinyl, click here.

Back in 1984, as a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed six-year-old, I made a life-changing decision to use my own money -- likely saved from my birthday or Christmas or lifting from my mom's wallet -- to purchase my very first album of my own.  It was Culture Club's Colour By Numbers, and I bought it on cassette tape, of course, as that was the preferred musical medium back then.  I played it on my battery-powered light brown Fisher Price portable tape player, which was my only music playback hardware until I was given a dual cassette AM/FM boom box a couple years later for my birthday.

While I have a ton of vinyl albums from the '80s, I had to go with Colour By Numbers for today's CoronaVinyl category.  Culture Club was led by the flamboyant cross-dressing Boy George, whose choice in clothing and fashion seemed completely normal to a six-year-old suburban Texan boy.  After all, it was the '80s, so everything was weird.

Colour By Numbers was the band's second album, following 1982's Kissing to Be Clever, which pretty much immediately pushed the band into superstardom behind three Top 10 hits in the U.S., "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me" (#2), "Time (Clock of the Heart)" (#2), and "I'll Tumble For Ya" (#9).  There was no sophomore slump with Colour By Numbers, which went quadruple platinum in the U.S. and triple platinum in the band's native UK.

Colour By Numbers was the band's highest-charting album in the U.S., reaching #2 on the Billboard album charts, and it was a massive hit internationally, going #1 in the UK, Canada, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, and cracking the top ten on the album charts in eight other countries.  Al four singles from the album released in the U.S. rose to #13 or higher on the Billboard Hot 100 -- "Church of the Poison Mind" (#10), "Karma Chameleon" (#1), "Miss Me Blind" (#5), and "It's a Miracle" (#13).  The band never quite found the same amount of success after that, releasing two more albums before breaking up in 1986 due to in-fighting, the romantic break up of Boy George and the band's drummer Jon Moss, and drug addition.  Boy George then embarked on a moderately successful solo career, highlighted by the haunting "Crying Game" (which hit #15 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1992), which, of course, was the theme song for the transgender movie of the same name, and featured in the infamous dong reveal scene.

Favorite song from Side 1:  "Karma Chameleon"
I think "Karma Chameleon" is hands down one of the best pop songs of the '80s.  It's just so damn catchy, and every knows the words, or at least the chorus.  It's the band's only #1 in the U.S., holding down the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks in early 1984.  And it also hit #1 on 15 international singles charts and went Top 10 on another four.

Favorite song from Side 2:  "Church of the Poison Mind"
"Church of the Poison Mind" was actually the first single released off of Colour By Numbers, and its success prompted the band's label to move up the release of "Karma Chameleon."  It's just as catchy as "Karma Chameleon," and backing vocalist Helen Terry really makes the song with her impassioned vocals during the choruses.