Boy George is desperate to start his music comeback - insisting he wants to remind people he's an "entertainer" following his stint in jail.

The British singer, real name George O'Dowd, was forced to carry out community service with New York's Department of Sanitation in 2006 stemming from his arrest for cocaine possession and falsely reporting a burglary the year before (05). He went on to be jailed in London in January 2009 for the false imprisonment and assault of a male escort in 2007. Due to his conviction, O'Dowd was forced to turn down lucrative work on a U.K. reality show earlier this year (10) after a judge denied him permission to appear due to the terms of his probation.

Now the former Culture Club singer is set to release his first single since 2002 - and hopes the new material will help put his controversial past behind him. He tells Britain's The Sun, "I haven't put anything out properly for a long time. I've not done the professional thing for a while. It just was about time really. I've done a lot of procrastinating in the last few years. I had my drug addiction, which got in the way of everything to do with work. Since getting clean, it seems the natural thing to do. Probably over the last few years, if you'd have asked people exactly what I do, they probably would have said, 'Oh, he gets arrested a lot.' So I wanted to remind people that I'm a musician and an entertainer." (MJ/WNTSU/KD)

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