Boy George: Thought For The Day

"The Who did a massive concert at Charlton football ground with 73,000 people in 1974, and Lou Reed was on the bill. I was 12 and was told emphatically [by my parents]: "You must not go." I went, obviously, and arrived as Lou Reed was about to come on stage. I was just amazed. After hearing Transformer, I went back to listen to the Velvet Underground and became a fan of everything Lou Reed had done. 
But Transformer was a great record. If you think about the music of the time, it was completely out of sync with everything else. It was vaudevillian, with songs like New York Telephone Conversation and Make Up – very much later on I discovered Tom Waits and all of that sound – but it was a sort of weird, druggy, theatrical, marching-bands-on-valium sound. I've also chosen it because of the lyrics – particularly Walk on the Wild Side, it has such a great narrative. 
When you're a kid and you know you're gay, and you hear Bowie singing "a cop knelt and kissed the feet of a priest, and a queer threw up at the sight of that", and then you hear Walk on the Wild Side, you know there's hope – you know you're not the only one that has these weird thoughts."

The Observer - Soundtrack of my life

Wonderful!