Out of all those demons came brilliant records that can still fill a dance floor, start a party and reduce people to tears
A very British pop genius.. he was complicated, compassionate and anti-establishment
MILLENNIALS of the Tinder and Instagram era might be wondering exactly why their mums (and dads) are so shocked, tearful and nostalgic.
George Michael had not had an impactful hit or indeed been very visible at all this century.
But he was one of the UK’s most triumphant and titanic pop talents, a global superstar of gigantic scale and reach, 100million albums sold around the world – yet genuinely, often uncomfortably, anti-establishment.
He supported the striking miners, denounced Thatcher, Blair and Bush and their foreign adventures.
With Wham! he was the first Western pop act to tour China, causing near-riotous scenes.
Demand for his records was one of the reasons – along with Levi 501s and the other sweeteners of 1980s capitalism – that people behind the Iron Curtain yearned for the simple freedoms the West took for granted.
This, as much as any political zeal, was why the Berlin Wall came down. And while doing all this, George made imperishable, brilliant pop records that can still fill a dance floor, start a party and reduce people to tears.
To the bafflement of some rock bores I knew, I adored Wham!. Yes, the perms and tight white shorts look silly today, but so does Morrissey’s gladioli and Phil Oakey’s fringe.
UK pop has always had a gloriously silly streak, untroubled by notions of credibility. Wham! were part of that fine tradition. But there was first-rate pop craftsmanship there too, fired by George’s teenage love of Stevie Wonder, Elton John and Aretha Franklin.
Wham!’s records were a delicious blend of white and black, masculine and feminine, British and American. Freedom is a terrific record, a white British motown pastiche that relocates
Detroit to a Finchley tanning salon. There was something brilliantly engaging, smart and unaffected in their suburban English take on classic US soul and funk.
Everything about them reeked of Aramis, Ambre Solaire and Midori. They even satirised this themselves in the wonderful Club Tropicana, where “you can suntan”. But underpinning it was songwriting of real brilliance and crack musicianship.
They were superb chroniclers of their time, too; Wham Rap, with its “you got soul on the dole” message of defiance of the Thatcherite norm, said as much as many an earnest alternative rock anthem but was far catchier, and much better to dance to. This was hedonism as revolution, just as important as delivering vacuous speeches about “breaking down walls” or raging against the machine.
Also, George understood black American music down to his Hertfordshire soul boy shoes. A lot of white British boys were making ersatz black music back in the mid 1980s. No one did it as well as George (and Wham! co-star Andrew Ridgeley).
If you don’t get that Young Guns, Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go and Last Christmas are era-defining pop artefacts, you don’t really get pop.
After Wham!’s farewell gig, Ridgeley went on to enjoy a life of surfing and eco-activism in Cornwall, funded significantly by his co-writing credit on Careless Whisper. That gives you some idea how huge that record was.
If George just recorded this song, he’d still have his place in the pantheon of pop. As it is, he followed up with the album Faith, which sold 25million and stayed in the US Top 10 for a year.
But he never looked entirely happy in his role as smiling teen hearthrob.
A gruelling world tour of 1988 left him wrung out and miserable. The demands of success, conflictedness over his sexuality and his pop star role plus exhaustion and drug use pushed him into darker, lonelier places.
Frank Sinatra wrote to him, basically telling him to shut up and enjoy the fruits of his talent. He meant well but didn’t know what he was talking about.
George was a teen pop obsessive who found a diet of flashbulbs and champagne wasn’t as nourishing as he’d imagined. In the 1990s his records became more solemn. Events like his arrest for “a lewd act” in an LA public toilet and the death of his lover cast a pall over his life. The album title Older says it all.
Shoot The Dog and The Grave were grim indictments of the Iraq war, neither worthy of his name. But at a time most of the pop world was gladhanding it at Downing Street, his misgivings predated most of pop’s belated moralism. He never toadied to the establishment or cosied up to corrupt businessmen.
He was a complicated, compassionate man with demons inherited from a loving but undemonstrative childhood, personal tragedies and long battles with addiction.
Out of all this came records that made people happy and broke hearts. Choruses forged in the clubs of Bushey and Watford were sung from Beijing to Warsaw. He was a very British pop genius.
Sinatra wrote to him.. he meant well but didn’t know what he was talking about