Which one is your favorite? - XXV -

I guess songs from the 80s bring back good memories since I was a teenager in that era. This one is coming from 1982 from a British new wave band. It reached Number 1 in UK lists and Number 2 in USA.  At first, the band leader didn't want this released as a single because it was such a personal song for him (he later admitted that he wrote the lyrics about his relationship with their drummer Jon Moss).

Here is the song for this week;

"Do You Really Want To Hurt Me"

Culture Club wrote this song for their first album "Kissing To Be Clever". The song rose rapidly in the UK charts after the group's first appearance on Top of the Pops, which resulted in George's androgynous style of dress and sexual ambiguity making newspaper headlines. The group were only asked to appear on Top of the Pops the night before the show, after Shakin' Stevens pulled out.

The band came up with the soft reggae beat and put the song together when they found they had some spare studio time during a recording session for the Peter Powell show on BBC Radio One. Their bass player Mikey Craig brought a Caribbean influence to the band's sound.

The concept of the video was Boy George as an outsider, getting kicked out of different places in various historical settings. It was directed by Julien Temple, who came up with the idea of jurors dressed in blackface. This was a shocking image for American audiences, who long associated blackface with racism, but in England it was far more accepted as part of their music hall tradition.

Here are the versions I picked for you;

• Rita Coolidge - "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me"

• Violent Femmes - "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me"

• Akira Mitake - "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me"

Now the floor is yours, go ahead and make your comments (here, Instagram, Facebook wherever you feel like...).

nb. Please note that I intentionally do not include the original versions of the songs as it would be a little unfair to the artists covering the songs, and I am sure that sometimes you will be surprised to see that the songs you thought were the originals are just covers.