It's a Miracle

The most underrated track on Colour By Numbers and proof that Culture Club were a far sharper pop band than their tabloid life allowed people to notice. It struts in on a bright Motown-derived bassline and a clipped guitar figure, with brass punches, handclaps and Helen Terry's gospel-sized backing vocals lifting every chorus into something joyously oversized. The production is warm and busy in the best mid-eighties way — everything gleaming, everything moving. Boy George sings it with that soulful, slightly nasal ease of his, a voice that could deliver bitterness while sounding delighted, and here the sweetness is a knife. The lyric is a wry account of sudden fame and its cost, name-checking the absurdity of celebrity, the emptiness inside the hit machine, the miracle that any of it happened at all. It's a song about disillusionment that you can dance to without noticing the disillusionment, which is a very English kind of pop craft. Culture Club's genius was smuggling reggae lilt, blue-eyed soul, and genuine queer defiance into the most inoffensive-sounding singles on the chart. Play it in the morning, cooking, windows open; let the second listen tell you what it's actually about.