Tim Lawrence

 The first of two Love Is the Message episodes on Boy George, the Supernova music festival and genocide denial

10 September 2026

The new episode of Love Is the Message, uploaded today, is the first of two shows about Boy George. The cue was George’s recently released genocide-denial song, “We Will Dance Again”. George says he was inspired to write the song—sorry, prompt AI to write the song—during his visit to the Nova Exhibition, which commemorates the civilians who were caught up in the massacre that took place at the Supernova Music Festival of 7/10. George is being duplicitous.

All civilian deaths should be mourned. There’s also no way to understand 7/10 without recognising Israel had already killed 100,000 Palestinians since 1948, or Israel’s transformation of Gaza into the largest open-air concentration camp on the planet in 2007, or the pivotal “Hannibal Directive” role played by the IDF in the massacre of 7/10, or what is increasingly believed to have been Netanyahu’s desire for a preventable massacre to happen, or the overriding point that whatever happened on 7/10 in no way justifies a genocide.

Sadly but predictably, the Nova Exhibition operates as propagandistic horror porn rather than an authentic tribute. For instance, it displays one of the 280 cars that were incinerated that day alongside raver outfits and memorabilia. It attributes the carnage to “Hamas terrorism” while ignoring that only the IDF possessed weaponry—Apache helicopters and Hellfire missiles—that was capable of turning vehicles into charred molten metal.

Right after George released what could be the most propagandistic pop song ever recorded I started to write a long piece that I’ve yet to complete. In the middle of it all I exchanged emails with my friend and party collaborator Ced Woo about an All Our Friends mix. I mentioned I was writing a piece about George and said no more. Ced replied “Damn!” and told me that he’d selected “Generations of Love” by Jesus Loves You, a Boy George post-Culture Club outfit, at the previous weekend’s Beauty and the Beat party. A couple of days later he found out that “Boy George wasn’t so much about universal love after all!” Ced added: “That was well disappointing, though apparently the signs had been there for a while (unbeknownst to me).”

It was the same for me. I had no idea that George had been shamelessly advocating for Israel, trashing BDS and rubbishing the idea that Israel could be an apartheid state since at least 2011. He was also at the forefront of opposing the boycott of the Eurovision Song Contest in order to protest against Israel’s participation. He even participated in this year’s Eurovision. Then there was his feverish relationship with the Star of David, which was visible from the start of Culture Club, but back then looked like an innocuous expression of multicultural bonhomie.

So the first episode explores the background to “We Will Dance Again”—George’s rise to fame with Culture Club, his swerve to Jesus Loves You, and his increasingly brazen embrace of Israel. In line with BDS, the episode doesn’t include any clips from Boy George/Culture Club songs. Instead I bring in some of the awesome music that inspired me and many others during the heyday of the new romantic movement, and also Kofia’s rousing “Leve Palestina”—a record I recently managed to track down on vinyl and play at a party—wow, wow, wow. I write “I” because Jem was away for this recording. The next second episode will tell the story of “We Will Dance Again”—the worst song in the history of recorded music.

I should say this is an episode for patrons—info is on our Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/LoveMessagePod Our website is at: If anyone can’t afford that write to me at tlawrence1@mac.com. Thanks as always to producer/editor Matt Huxley.

Tune in, turn on, get down, and free Palestine!