OBITUARY George Michael

OBITUARY

George Michael

Hugely successful singer-songwriter whose demons almost eclipsed his musical talents

George Michael’s turbulent career embraced pop exuberance as teenage pin-up in Wham! and a major reinvention as serious solo artist. He made some memorable music, sold an estimated 100 million records and was one of the biggest stars of the past four decades. In later years, however, he became disenchanted with his celebrity. A high-profile and disastrous lawsuit against his record company cost him millions and a conviction for lewd behaviour in a public lavatory forced him into the belated admission that he was gay.

He attempted to rebuild his career after these events but struggled to replicate his earlier commercial success. In 2005 he went as far as to announce his farewell to the world of pop music, declaring that the genre was “dead”.

He was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou in Finchley, north London, to a Greek-Cypriot father and English mother and met Andrew Ridgeley in 1975 on his first day at Bushey Meads comprehensive school. Initially Michael was the less confident figure, an odd-looking, overweight youth with an ungainly and self-conscious demeanour. The two became firm friends and in 1979 a shared love of pop music led them to form their first group, The Executive, inspired by the ska revival led by the Specials and Madness. The group lasted 18 months, during which Michael shedded his awkwardness and honed his songwriting skills.

By 1981 he and Ridgeley had already written several of the songs that were to define their career, including Club Tropicana and Careless Whisper. They had also written a number called Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do), which exploited the name the pair decided to give their new group, taken — or so it was claimed subsequently — from a Roy Liechtenstein painting. They hired equipment to record the songs in the front room of Ridgeley’s parents’ house and hawked the tape around all of the major record companies, receiving countless rejections until Innervision, a tiny dance-based label, showed an interest in early 1982.

By the end of that year their second single, Young Guns (Go For It), had risen to number three in the British charts, helped by a sensational dance routine on Top Of The Pops and the smouldering good looks of Michael, now transformed into a perma-tanned adonis.

The following year brought them further top ten singles, with Wham Rap! and Bad Boys. As Michael assumed full control of the band’s music and teen-oriented lyrics Ridgeley concentrated on style, image and visuals and the combination helped Wham!’s debut album Fantastic enter the British charts at number one in 1983.

After a legal battle with Innervision, the duo signed to the Sony-owned Epic Records and hit gold immediately when the first single for the new label, Wake Me Up Before You Go Go topped the charts in both Britain and America, helped by a video of the pair cavorting in their sportswear. It was followed to the number one spot by Careless Whisper. A smooching ballad quite different from Wham!’s up-tempo style, it was released as a solo effort by Michael, who dedicated it to his parents and declared that it was “five minutes in return for 21 years”.

With Michael increasingly the dominant character, Wham!’s second album, Make It Big, topped charts on both sides of the Atlantic in 1984, confirming them as the world’s leading teen-pop sensation of the 1980s and paving the way for the plethora of boy bands which would follow in the 1990s (the duo’s manager, Simon Napier-Bell, went on to steer the career of Take That).

By now it seemed that commercially Wham! — and Michael in particular — could do no wrong. The singer was featured on Band Aid’s all-star charity release Do They Know It’s Christmas?, which kept Wham!’s own seasonal offering, Last Christmas, from the number one spot in December 1984.

The duo’s annus mirabilis came in 1985, when they swept the Brit awards, became the first group to tour China and released the chart-topping singles Everything She Wants and I’m Your Man. Michael also won an Ivor Novello for his songwriting. Yet by the end of the year he and Ridgeley had decided that they would go their own separate ways.

The final Wham! single, The Edge Of Heaven/Where Did Your Heart Go topped the charts in June 1986 in the same week as the group’s farewell concert in front of 72,000 fans at Wembley.

By then Michael had already released his second solo single, the stark and introspective A Different Corner, which again went to number one in Britain and America. It made him one of the hottest properties in the market as he embarked on a solo career and, in a move that would later have serious repercussions, Sony/Epic extended his contract for five further albums.

Although still only 23, Michael was anxious to shed the teenage heartthrob image and to establish himself as a grown-up singer and songwriter. His desire for critical acclaim was evident when his first post-Wham! release was a duet with Aretha Franklin, the much-revered “queen of soul”, on I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me). The single topped the charts in Britain and America and won a Grammy. Less happily, it was followed by the facile solo single, I Want Your Sex, which peaked at number two in America and three in Britain. Michael believed that the song was kept from the top spot because a number of radio stations banned it. The more honest explanation was that it wasn’t very good.

Nevertheless its parent album, Faith, which he wrote, arranged and produced, restored him to the number one spot in Britain and America in late 1987. Packed with power ballads and sleek pop-soul numbers, it won him another Grammy award and eventually sold more than ten million copies. The title track and Father Figure topped the singles charts.

Michael was feeling increasingly trapped by the pressures of stardom, a fact that was reflected on his second solo album, Listen Without Prejudice, in 1990. Full of soul-searching songs that reflected his disenchantment, its release was accompanied by the publication of his autobiography, Bare, and a declaration that he was rejecting the rock star lifestyle and eschewing pop videos and stadium tours to concentrate on his songwriting.

He could certainly afford to do so, for by then he had made The Sunday Times Rich List as the 128th wealthiest person in Britain. His bulging bank balance was swelled further when the album topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic and produced the hit singles Praying For Time and Freedom!, the latter, despite his earlier protestations, accompanied by a video featuring a gaggle of supermodels including Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford.

Listen Without Prejudice was to be his last album for six years, during which his attention was engaged elsewhere. A duet version with Elton John of Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me gave him a number one in Britain and America in 1992 and he donated $500,000 from his royalties to Aids charities, a subject that, for reasons not apparent at the time, was becoming of increasing concern to him.

He was equally exercised by what he regarded as the rapaciousness of his record company and its failure to market him properly and in October 1992 he launched an unprecedented restraint of trade action against Sony Music, seeking to nullify his contract with them.

After a lengthy High Court hearing, judgment was eventually delivered in June 1994 in a 273-page ruling in favour of Sony, which declared that his deal with them was “reasonable and fair”. Michael was ordered to pay £3 million in costs. The acrimony meant that he could never work for the company again and in 1995 Sony announced that he was free to leave.

It was at a price. Signing to Dreamworks in America and Virgin for the rest of the world, his two new record companies had to pay Sony £25 million plus a percentage of the sale of his next two albums. To his chagrin, his former label got to keep the rights to his back catalogue.

Older, his first album under his new deal, appeared in 1997 to lukewarm reviews. It was a melancholy and at times po-faced collection but it still topped charts all over the world and yielded such hit singles as Jesus To A Child and Fastlove.

Yet if the court case against Sony had been traumatic, worse was to follow. In 1998 he was arrested and charged with lewd behaviour in a public lavatory in Beverly Hills. Four days later he gave an interview admitting for the first time that he was gay and had not slept with a woman in ten years. It also emerged that he had lost his Brazilian boyfriend Anselmo Feleppa to an Aids-related illness in 1993, at the height of his battle with Sony.

He was sentenced to community service and ordered to undergo sexual counselling. He also had to endure the criticisms of those who felt that he should have owned up to his sexuality sooner. “I find him very frustrating,” his friend Elton John said. “To be busted in the toilet is not the best way to come out of the closet, is it?”

The revelations about his private life did little to diminish his popularity in Britain, where the single Outside, supported by a video that hinted at the events surrounding his arrest, made number two in late 1998 and the album Ladies and Gentleman — The Best Of George Michael topped the charts. Yet in America the backlash was considerable and the “best of” collection struggled to number 24, a bitterly disappointing showing for an artist whose previous album had contained a record-breaking six American top five singles.

A covers album, Songs From The Last Century, was a safe bet and a steady seller in 1999 but he excited further controversy in 2002 with the satirical anti-Iraq war single Shoot the Dog, which was accompanied by a cartoon video depicting George W Bush in bed with Tony Blair and his wife.

The album Patience appeared in 2004. Only his fourth solo album of new material since Wham! had split up 18 years earlier, the title was apt but Patience was savaged by most critics, a reaction that surely influenced his decision in early 2005 to announce the end of his pop career in a candid film documentary called George Michael: A Different Story.

He returned to live performance the following year, embarking on a mammoth tour that began in Barcelona in September 2006 and finished in Copenhagen in August 2008. Called the 25 Live Tour — to mark a quarter of a century in the music business — the tour took in 27 countries and included his first US shows for 17 years. He was also the first artist to appear at the reopened Wembley Stadium.

The milestone was marked with a double compilation CD, called Twenty Five, which included three new songs and a duet with Sir Paul McCartney. There was also a second edition of the South Bank Show dedicated to his work.

He toured Australia in 2010 but the year was dominated by his conviction and subsequent prison sentence for driving under the influence of cannabis. He was arrested in July for crashing his car into a shop in Hampstead and in September was sentenced to eight weeks in prison and banned from driving for five years. He served half of the sentence and said later: “I know people must think it was a really horrific experience — it’s so much easier to take any form of punishment if you believe you actually deserve it, and I did.”

In May 2011 Michael announced another long tour, this time with a 41-piece orchestra and playing some venues more usually associated with classical music. He appeared at the Albert Hall for four nights in October and the set included a number of cover versions as well as many of his best-known songs. The shows took an autobiographical tone and The Times reported that he gave “a polished if rather earnest account of himself”. It was during an opening-night performance in Prague that he revealed that he had split up from his long-term partner Kenny Goss two years earlier, although their relationship had been the subject of considerable debate before this confirmation.

The tour came to an abrupt end in Vienna when Michael was admitted to hospital suffering from pneumonia. The rest of the dates, including his return to the stage in the UK, were cancelled. After treatment in hospital he made a tearful appearance outside his London home and said that it had been “touch and go” whether he would live.

Earlier this month it was announced that Naughty Boy, the producer and songwriter, was working with Michael on a new album.

George Michael, pop singer, was born on June 25, 1963. He died on December 25, 2016, aged 53