Several times Boy George begins a sentence with the words, “As I’ve got older...”. And before you ask, he’s one year short of his half century.

Age would seem to dictate a name change, but Man George doesn’t have the same ring. Besides, despite the passing years, he’s still the same George Alan O’Dowd, the top draw at tomorrow’s 80s Rewind show at the Scarborough Open Air Theatre.

There have been ups and downs. Indeed, his life may be described as exceptionally colourful in an area – the music business – that thrives on outrageous behaviour. George has truly lived the sex, drugs and rock’n’roll lifestyle but, in the words of the song, he’s always picked himself up, brushed himself down and started all over again.

The message before the interview was George didn’t want to talk about tying up prostitutes. Well, you wouldn’t, would you? It was for the assault and false imprisonment of a gentleman friend that he was jailed in 2008, the latest in a series of brushes with the law. Drugs got him into trouble previously.

So George saying to me “I’ve had quite a lot of problems over the past few years” is something of an understatement. And yet the public have never rejected Boy George as they have others in the entertainment business who have deviated from the legal path.

Perhaps his problem has been being too open about his life, but you get the impression the Boy can’t help it. He doesn’t try to project an image.

“I think I am just myself,” he says. “At the moment it’s almost like I’m going around the world putting myself back on the map. I couldn’t travel for two years because I was in prison.

“People have these different ideas about what I’m like based on assumptions that they’ve read and sometimes it’s the opposite of what I am. People expect the worse and are quite relieved.

“If you are basically a decent person, that will shine through. I’ve always been pretty much what you see is what you get. I don’t have any hidden agenda. I’ve never tried to be anything I am not. I think that’s why people like me.”

And they do. The public even voted him number 46 in the BBC’s Great Britons list, sandwiched between politician Aneurin Bevin and wartime flying hero Douglas Bader.

In the wake of the BBC film about his early years, Worried About The Boy, George is busy this summer combining DJ sets with live shows that relive his Eighties’ chart peak.

Work keeps him going.

“My career has been my salvation,” he says. “The fact that I’ve been able to go back to it has been a blessing. I think I can finally say this time I’m going to stick to what I’m good at and stay out of trouble.”

He has been DJing for some two decades, on top of his singing and recording career before and after Culture Club.

“I’m lucky to have two good careers and DJing has been great for me. I could work every night if I wanted to,” he says.

“I work every weekend and all over the country. In the next few months, I’m off to Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong. The thing about dance music is it’s international. Everywhere in the world everyone is dancing.”

Of course, being a DJ has changed as much as the music since he first turned a table in the late 1970s. It was a very different style, more primitive and with no mixers.

“I was playing things from the Seventies; then I had a band and got into dance sound when acid house thing happened in London. It was more exciting than what was going on in the pop scene,” he says.

“With music you have to be on your toes about what’s happening… obviously it’s part of my job. I am always online. If you want to be individual you do some research. There are lots of sites you can go on and get stuff. It’s a constant thing.

“Dance music is very different to pop music. It’s a world that exists within its own little world. Things you play in the club that people will only probably hear there. I don’t play things I don’t like. That’s the great thing about DJing: you’re 100 per cent in control. Someone can give me record in Venezuela or Newcastle and I can play it. That’s real freedom.”

So which gives him the biggest buzz, performing or DJing?

“I did Glastonbury with my band a few weeks ago, 8,000 people, and that’s a major high,” he says. “When you’re DJing it’s getting people on the same level of emotion. It’s a perpetual high. When you have a dance crowd in your hands and they’re loving it, there’s nothing quite like it.”

Sometimes his past catches up with him.

“Wherever I am, people come up and say, ‘My mum loves you’. There’s a generation of people who only know me as a DJ,” he says.

Not that he lets that bother him.

“I enjoy what I do. As I get older, I realise how great it is to do what you love and get paid for it. This is as good as it gets.”

And he has renewed ambition.

“Once I got really successful, I may have lost my ambition a bit, but I’d probably say I’m quite ambitious now,” says George. “What I know now is once you’re willing to work, there’s a lot of work out there – and a lot of love.”

Where: Newly renovated and reopened Scarborough Open Air Theatre, Burniston Road, Scarborough.

When: Tomorrow, 7.30pm, concluding with firework display.

Who: Boy George; Rick Astley; Paul Young; Heaven 17; Midge Ure; Kid Creole And The Coconuts; Nik Kershaw; T’Pau; Hazel O’Connor; Toyah. More than 70 Top 20 hits between them.

Tickets update: Sold out.

Boy George: Culture Club front man; biggest hit, Karma Chameleon, sold 1.4 million copies, making it best-selling single of 1983; former prisoner, now DJs around UK.

Rick Astley: Lancashire soul singer; biggest hit, Never Gonna Give You Up in 1987; accompanied Peter Kay on spring tour; now a DJ for London’s Magic FM.

Paul Young: Luton crooner; biggest hit, Wherever I Lay My Hat (That’s My Home), 1983; tours UK either solo or with Tex-Mex band Los Pacaminos.

Heaven 17: Electronic Sheffield band; offshoot from original Human League, took their name from pop group mentioned in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange; biggest hit, Temptation, 1983; played 2010 Glastonbury with La Roux.

Midge Ure: Lanarkshire-born front man of The Rich Kids and Ultravox; co-writer of Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas?; biggest solo hit, If I was, 1985; planning Ultravox reunion for late 2010.

Kid Creole: Real name August Darnell, from New York; biggest hit, Annie I’m Not Your Daddy, 1982; regularly stars in hit musical Oh What A Night!.

Nik Kershaw: Born in Bristol, raised in Ipswich; biggest hit, I Won’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me, 1984; played Live Aid at Wembley; has written songs for Lula, Cliff Richard, Bonnie Tyler, Ronan Keating.

T’Pau: Band formed by Carol Decker in Shropshire, taking name from Vulcan priestess in Star Trek; biggest hit, China In Your Hand, 1987; Decker sings on 2010 charity re-recording of Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Wanna Have Fun for Race For Life.

Hazel O’Connor: Actress and singer, best known for 1981 film Breaking Glass and single Will You; awarded star on Coventry’s Walk of Fame in 2009; divides time between Ireland, France and Beyond Breaking Glass autobiographical show.

Toyah Willcox: Birmingham actress, singer and TV presenter; biggest hit, It’s A Mystery, 1981; married to musician Robert Fripp; recording material this summer for second album by new band The Humans.