Boy George insists he’s not the curmudgeon of media lore. “Everything you say these days is taken literally. You become a sound bite. People have this idea of Boy George now, particularly the media: that I’m tragic, fucked up.” He laughs. “I mean, I’m all those things, but I’m also lots of other things. Yes, I’ve had my dark periods, but that isn’t all I am.”

Boy George knows how to take hecklers like a man. The last time he was in Sydney for Mardi Gras, a decade ago, a chap he didn’t know sang out at the airport: “Keep away from our children.”

“I walked up to him,” says George on the line from Stuttgart where he is DJing, on the eve of his return to Australia to spin discs at this year’s Mardi Gras party. “And I don’t think he realised quite how big I am.

“I said: ‘Do you want to say that again?’ And he didn’t.” George laughs, something he does quite a bit of in the interview. “I’m not apologetic about it, and I find that kind of thing offensive. But most people are really cool.”

The 45-year-old one-time gender-bending front man for the wildly popular 80s pop band Culture Club still wears a little makeup but these days an elaborate Star of David and lotus flower tattoo adorns the back and top of his balding head.

George has never been a poster boy for cool restraint. Anti-gay hecklers at a press call for the Vodaphone Music Awards in London in October incurred the Boy’s wrath. He shouted they were “chavs” (bogans) and “I know I’m a queer. Shut your mouth till I knock you out!”, strutting up to them and smashing a champagne glass against the wall, a frantic PR operative chasing after him, urging him to come away.

Then there were his celebrity payouts on last year’s documentary The Madness of Boy George, shown on Britain’s Channel 4 but yet to be seen in Australia, which documented George’s five days of community service last year picking up garbage in New York following his arrest for cocaine possession.

Madonna, he offered, was a “vile, hideous, horrible human being”. Robbie Williams “could use my help; the last album was terrible”. Elton John appealed to “common-or-garden homosexuals”. He’s feuding with Little Britain’s Matt Lucas and David Walliams, too, for reasons not quite clear, but which appear to date to Lucas’s appearance in George’s life story musical Taboo, a favourite on London’s West End but a flop in the US.

Kylie, however, fares better in our interview. George designed some clothes for her current tour, and he’s writing songs for her.

“In the last few months, I’ve got a lot more friendly with her, and she’s adorable. I have to say I’ve been converted. One of my favourite Australians, after Dame Edna.”

George insists he’s not the curmudgeon of media lore. “Everything you say these days is taken literally. You become a sound bite.

“People have this idea of Boy George now, particularly the media: that I’m tragic, fucked up.” He laughs. “I mean, I’m all those things, but I’m also lots of other things. Yes, I’ve had my dark periods, but that isn’t all I am.”

George plays an average two DJ gigs a week, and mixes dance and electronica albums. He still writes material for himself and has been recording a new album, with a solo single due out in a few months. In December, he released the duet Time Machine with singer-songwriter Amanda Ghost, who co-wrote James Blunt’s smash You’re Beautiful.

Time Machine has only been released as a digital track, however, rather than a CD release, because George knows he won’t get airplay on UK radio. His last top 40 chart hit on both sides of the Atlantic was The Crying Game, in 1992. Fair to say he’d love another hit? “No,” he laughs. “I mean, I deserve it. Do I think I’m talented? Yeah, I think I’m very talented.

“In England, what pisses me off the most about my country, I’ve always paid my taxes, and yet I get no radio play. I think I should go to the tax man and say, ‘You know what, give me some of my fuckin’ money back.’ At the height of my career I ploughed millions of pounds into the UK.” He suggests he could have moved to Ireland, a tax haven for performers, but, he insists, he believes in paying taxes and in the welfare state.

While he loves the United States, he’s back in England to stay, living in his East London flat and hoping to reclaim his Gothic house in Hampstead from tenants this year. He waxes lyrical about YouTube and MySpace as a way to disseminate his music, where he uploads his videos and songs.

George intends to write in future about his arrest for cocaine possession in New York in 2005. He had confusedly called the police himself, reporting an intruder that was never found. The New York Police were “vile, absolutely vile”, he says now.

“In America, when people get into an authoritarian position, they become like robots … Some of the things they did were quite shocking: a lot of emotional torture, fear tactics.

“I was put in these electronic handcuffs that clipped onto the back of the seat … and they would pull tighter and tighter. They would say: ‘Do you have a weak heart?’ They terrorised me, and they got away with what they thought they could.”

Last year, Culture Club reformed and went back on the road. George wanted no part of it, but the other three former band members went ahead anyway, replacing him with newcomer Sam Butcher. George protested that Butcher couldn’t sing and should not be allowed anywhere near his songs, many of which are paeans to lovers, including Culture Club drummer Jon Moss.

“If I’d gone out as Culture Club without them, they would have probably taken me to court,” he says. “If they want to [reform the band], and they want to cheapen it, that’s their problem. I don’t wish them any harm. I just think it’s a really bad idea.

“I did a couple of tours with them a few years ago, and it was OK, but I don’t make music purely to make money. For me it just stank of a money-making venture. Certainly that wasn’t why we started the band.

“When I saw Sam, I said, ‘Well, he’s a drag queen’. I kept reading these reports, ‘It’s not a karaoke Boy George’, and then I saw him, and he was a bloody bloke in makeup!”

So is George seeing anyone romantically; does he have the time? Would he like to be hooked up? “Yeah, a fair few people,” he says, laughing again. “I’m not in a relationship, but I’m not interested in getting married.

“Why would I want to be embraced by an organisation that’s clearly homophobic? The church is homophobic! Fred Nile! He’s been my nemesis!”

* The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras festival is launched on Friday February 2. Mardi Gras websiteBoy George plays fhe Hordern at the Mardi Gras party on March 3.