Having topped the UK Prime 40 and peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Sizzling 100, Tradition Membership’s breakthrough hit “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?” thrust the London quartet into the center of the mainstream within the fall of 1982. Nonetheless, whereas the one’s mum or dad album Kissing To Be Intelligent additionally went Prime 5, the band knew its subsequent document, Color By Numbers, wanted to set a far greater normal if Tradition Membership have been to stay at pop’s high desk – particularly at a time when rival English acts akin to Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, and Wham! have been all changing into established family names.
Tradition Membership’s flamboyant frontman Boy George voiced this concern throughout a televised interview on British TV music and humanities present The Tube early in 1983. “With so many great bands around, people can forget about you really quickly,” he mentioned. “Especially when you’re a new band. So for us, it’s important to just keep pushing the records out so that we don’t lose our momentum.”
By the point George appeared on The Tube, Tradition Membership had notched up a second transatlantic Prime 3 hit with the heartfelt, funk-flavored “Time (Clock Of The Heart),” permitting its creators some respiratory house as they labored up the fabric for Color By Numbers. As George additionally careworn on The Tube, the brand new songs could be notably extra completed than something Tradition Membership’s debut needed to supply. “The next album is going to prove that we’re very musical,” he mentioned. “It’s a lot more mature and sophisticated… We work very closely with [producer] Steve Levine, who is almost the fifth member of Culture Club.”
Levine – whose CV additionally contains manufacturing and engineering credit with Ziggy Marley, The Conflict, and XTC – was fast to embrace the brand new know-how approaching stream through the Nineteen Eighties. An enthusiastic advocate of drum machines and the pioneering sampling keyboard, the Fairlight, his position was essential to the event of Tradition Membership’s music.
“At first, [Steve] was a big influence because he knew all of the technical aspects, and we were learning,” bassist Mikey Craig mentioned in an interview with Musician in October 1983. “Now, on the second album, he’s more like an ambassador. He directs things in the studio to make sure that people don’t clash and runs things smoothly. He’s quite good at that, actually. Apart from the good sounds he gets, he doesn’t really interfere very much with anything else.”
Actually Color By Numbers’ greatest spin-off single recommended Tradition Membership was now crafting trendy pop music with an across-the-board attraction. Ably assisted by a prevalent harmonica hook performed by famend session musician Judd Lander (Paul McCartney, Annie Lennox, ABC), “Karma Chameleon” was about as good as radio-friendly pop will get, even when Boy George’s deceptively darkish lyric offered a stark distinction to the tune’s relentlessly sunny musical backdrop.
“[Karma Chameleon] is about the terrible fear of alienation that people have, the fear of standing up for one thing,” George defined in Fred Bronson’s The Billboard Guide Of #1 Hits. “It’s about trying to suck up to everybody. Basically, if you aren’t true, if you don’t act like you feel, then you get Karma justice, that’s nature’s way of paying you back.”
With its irresistibly candy melodic contact main the way in which, “Karma Chameleon” was merely unstoppable on launch. Topping the US and UK charts, it took up seemingly everlasting residence on daytime radio through the fall of 1983. Promoting over 1,000,000 copies at house, it grew to become the UK’s biggest-selling single of the yr, and gained each BRIT and Ivor Novello Awards in 1984.
To Tradition Membership’s credit score, most of Color By Numbers’ contents matched as much as the standard of its ubiquitous signature hit. It yielded a second Prime 5 smash hit courtesy of the punchy, Motown-esque “Church Of The Poison Mind,” although it typically scored its best inventive successes when the band relaxed the tempo a bit. Certainly, Color By Numbers’ ballads, “Black Money,” the grandstanding “Victims,” and the gospel-tinged “That’s The Way (I’m Only Trying To Help You)” – with the latter offering a wonderful showcase for Boy George’s feminine vocal foil Helen Terry – all rank extremely amongst Tradition Membership’s best moments.
Additional endorsed by rave critiques (Rolling Stone recommended the document “secures lead singer Boy George’s place as a blue-eyed soul balladeer in the first rank”), Color By Numbers dominated world charts on launch in October 1983. The album was solely saved off the highest of the Billboard 200 by Michael Jackson’s Thriller, and it will definitely went on to promote round 10 million copies in all. It was – and stays – one of the crucial absolutely realized pop information of the Nineteen Eighties.
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