Tradition Membership’s debut Kissing To Be Intelligent is now considered probably the greatest British pop albums of the early 80s, but at one stage it seemed prefer it won’t even be recorded. The band’s first two singles, “White Boy” and “I’m Afraid Of Me” each missed the charts and Virgin Data solely sanctioned an album following the U.Ok. success of their third 45, “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?”
Amazingly, although this music is now extensively accepted as Tradition Membership’s signature hit, frontman Boy George was lower than assured that it may flip his band’s fortunes round when it was first launched within the fall of 1982.
“George was really not sure about it,” producer Steve Levine recalled in a High Of The Pops YouTube documentary. “It was a really difficult track to release. It’s a very unusual flavor. It is a reggae track, but it’s not a sort of authentic reggae track, it was our interpretation of reggae.”
Any lingering doubts had been quickly banished when “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?” shot to No.1 within the U.Ok. and nearly repeated the identical trick within the U.S. In actual fact, after only one High Of The Pops look – throughout which Boy George effortlessly seduced the broader public together with his soulful voice and androgynous picture – Tradition Membership out of the blue grew to become the band everybody was speaking about.
By this level, Virgin definitely did desire a Tradition Membership album and Kissing To Be Intelligent didn’t disappoint. A assured assemblage of on-trend pop songs, it noticed funky, dancefloor-friendly exercises equivalent to “Take Control” and “White Boy” rubbing shoulders with the samba-inspired “You Know I’m Not Crazy” and the calypso-flavored “I’ll Tumble For Ya,” whereas the sleek, dub-inflected “Love Twist” adopted “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?”s lead by taking reggae as its template.
Taken as a complete, the achieved, radio-friendly Kissing To Be Intelligent was simply what Tradition Membership wanted to construct upon their preliminary success – and its arrival was timed to perfection. Within the U.Ok., the band had been in vogue because of their hyperlinks with the New Romantic motion, whereas their music was additionally an ideal match within the U.S. in 1982: a yr when British contemporaries equivalent to Duran Duran and The Human League additionally made quite a few raids on the higher echelons of the Billboard charts. Accordingly, Kissing To Be Intelligent made a sizeable splash on either side of the Atlantic, going High 5 within the UK and making the High 20 of the Billboard 200 on the best way to transferring an estimated 4 million copies worldwide – an unbelievable consequence contemplating the band’s future had been on the road barely six months earlier.
“[Success] really was kind of almost overnight for us,” Boy George stated, recalling this rollercoaster interval in a 2015 interview with Metropolis TV. “You know, one minute we were an unknown band that literally couldn’t get signed, but once we got on TV, it was the public more than anything that decided they liked us – and I think that’s always been the case with Culture Club.”
Store for Tradition Membership’s music on vinyl or CD now.
