The Sunday Telegraph

George Michael told me he felt frightened and trapped

When Chris Heath interviewe­d the Wham! singer in 1984, little did he realise how prescient the star’s fears were to be

- Closer”)

In the winter of 1984, I was 21, new in London and just beginning to find some work writing about pop music. George Michael was also 21 – one day younger than me, in fact – and his world was exploding. His first three singles that year (Wham!’s Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go and Freedom, and his solo Careless Whisper) had gone to number one. His fourth, Last

Christmas, had only been stopped by the Band Aid single, and he sang on that, too.

As I didn’t have a phone where I was living, I would periodical­ly drop into the offices of Smash Hits, in those days Britain’s biggest music magazine. One afternoon, I walked right into the middle of an argument. Wham! were to be on the next cover, but because the reporting, covering two dates on their December tour, was scheduled to take place over a weekend up north at short notice close to Christmas, none of the staff were volunteeri­ng to go.

As I appeared in the doorway, the editor Mark Ellen turned to me and said “Chris’ll do it, won’t you?” Almost by accident, I had my first big magazine cover story.

A couple of days later, I took the train to Leeds, and without fuss – the world of pop music was simpler back then – was welcomed backstage at the Queens Hall where Wham!, Michael and his childhood friend Andrew Ridgeley, were preparing to go on. Michael was busy worrying about the white shirt he wore during the first half of the show. “It’s shrunk,” he fretted. “It’s going to fall out.”

Their live show that night was shameless and often prepostero­us, with seemingly endless call-andrespons­e rituals, but it was also highly entertaini­ng, and no tomfoolery could completely distract from the magnificen­ce of some of the songs or how Michael could sing them.

But the next morning everything, as far as I was concerned, began to fall apart. The following evening’s concert was to be cancelled because Michael had put his back out. (He later told me that he thought he’d done the damage backstage, imitating how Madonna dances.) As my instructio­ns were to cover two shows, I assumed that my article, my big break, was ruined. I was told that the new plan was that I would travel back down to London with Michael in his minibus and talk with him, but I saw this as little more than damage limitation.

On the bus we talked about music (reading my notes, I’m surprised to find that he mentioned Joy Division: “I still really like the second side of and he chatted with his sister Melanie about the fake dreams peddled by women’s magazines. “Those adverts!” he protested. “There’s always a couple in them who look like they’ve just had the most perfect sex. It’s so unrealisti­c. The earth’s never moved for me!” A pause. “But I’m open to offers.” Along the way, he also cleaned his teeth. “Wham! always clean their teeth,” he helpfully commented. And we did our interview.

This week I found the cassette tape of that interview, and listened to it for the first time in 32 years. There are plenty of signs that I don’t know what I am doing – after about five minutes, I can be heard stopping to check that the tape recorder is working, and then doing the same again about 10 minutes later. “Is it OK?” Michael can be heard saying in the background, with concern and bafflement. But eventually I do at least give him enough cues to encourage him to tell me what it’s like to be George Michael at the end of 1984.

A lot of what would end up in the article were his sharp and hypercompe­titive views of the world of pop music in 1984, and how Wham! were doing it better than anyone else. But beyond the bluster, he was precocious­ly analytical and astute. Discussing exactly how their show was tailored to the audience they had, predominan­tly teenage girls who screamed throughout, he offered this observatio­n: “The whole thing about screaming is that everybody out there individual­ly wants to be heard.”

Still, listening back now, what is most striking is how many of the predicamen­ts that are usually taken to characteri­se his later career, particular­ly his ambivalenc­e about fame and its consequenc­es, and the contortion­s that resulted, are already there at 21. He explained how, the shows aside, he was hating this tour. Now that he was, as he rather sweetly put it, “almost a household name”, he was trapped in his room all day, just waiting around, and it was driving him mad.

He had a sense of where this might be heading that probably sounded conceited at the time, but now sounds weirdly clear-eyed: “I’ve realised now that the situation on tour is probably approximat­ely how things would be everyday were my songwritin­g to progress in the same way, and we kept selling the way we do. It’d become the norm. And that’s what I’m frightened of.

“It’s definitely something that I’m thinking seriously about – about whether it’s worth it. I mean, I have huge ambition. But it’s just getting to the point where I’m trying to decide whether my ambition is likely to make me very unhappy and, if it is going to make me very unhappy, whether I should curb it... It’s frightenin­g to think that what you’re doing might be irreversib­le in terms of your actual public life, your social life.”

Listening to him then, and now, I didn’t and don’t think he was ever likely to really stop pushing forward, even if over the years he would often simultaneo­usly make a public show of pulling back. (In a way, this interview was an early rehearsal of that, too.) But I think what you can hear is the sound of a 21-year-old star beginning to try to work out celebrity, and what he wanted from it, and how he could fit into it. Puzzling how to solve a series of conundrums that perhaps could never be fully solved.

We had also spoken a little about his childhood, and how it fed into his work ethic. “I came from a family that had moved out of a working-class background and into a middle-class background,” he had explained. “My dad’s business…” – his Greek Cypriot father was a restaurate­ur – “…took off from when I was about 10.”

Unexpected­ly, I was given a firsthand snapshot of the world he came from when our route into London took us past the outer suburbs around Bushey and he decided that we should stop off to see his parents. We pulled up outside what would have looked like a fairly regular largish suburban house, if not for the white pseudo-classical pillars at the front and the blue Rolls-Royce outside.

It turned out that melodramat­ic and exaggerate­d reports of his injury had been on the radio, suggesting he might never play live again, and so upon our arrival his father berated him for not getting in touch sooner.

Inside, we all sat in the open-plan living room with Wham! photos and gold discs on the walls – his parents, his sister, the pop star, the would-be journalist. I had coffee; he had tea with honey for his throat. He mentioned to his parents, presumably not for the first time, how fed up he was with the public attention.

“It’s what you’ve got to expect, George,” his mother scolded. Afterwards, he pointed out where he used to take violin lessons and I was dropped somewhere near the centre of town while he disappeare­d to get a second opinion on his back.

I still assumed that my article was a disaster because I had covered only one show and not two. I somehow assumed that all the other stuff, like stopping off at his parents’, probably always happened when you interviewe­d someone. But I wrote up what I had, and discovered otherwise. From that moment on, things went pretty well for me. And for a long time after that, it seemed as though George Michael was able to achieve anything and everything that he wanted to achieve. The luckiest of us are perhaps those whose desires and talents dovetail to create for us a life we want to live; for all his misgivings, it was hard to imagine the ways in which he might not be one of the luckiest of all. On the way into London, George Michael and I had talked about when he was first old enough to work, and explained how he used to get jobs so that he could pay his mother some housekeepi­ng and still have enough money “to go out and get pissed two or three times a week”. But he said that even though his parents hoped that these jobs would lead him towards sensible career plans – “the usual: they wanted me to do anything else” – he never made any. He knew what he wanted, and he expected to get it. “I was never thinking of the future,” he said, “because I was always thinking that the future was, I was going to be a pop star.” As improbable as it should have seemed, to him – at least in the beginning – it was simple. “I had this stupid idea,” he told me, “that it would all come together.”

‘I’m trying to decide whether my ambition is likely to make me very unhappy’ ‘He never made any career plans. He knew what he wanted and expected to get it’

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 ??  ?? Wham! on stage around the time of Chris Heath’s interview, left. Their concerts were full of teenage girls screaming, right. The troubled singer in recent years, below
Wham! on stage around the time of Chris Heath’s interview, left. Their concerts were full of teenage girls screaming, right. The troubled singer in recent years, below
 ??  ?? George Michael with his Wham! partner Andrew Ridgeley. Above, the pair on the cover of Smash
Hits in 1983
George Michael with his Wham! partner Andrew Ridgeley. Above, the pair on the cover of Smash Hits in 1983
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