The story of George Michael

A shy boy called Yog

George Michael was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou on the twenty fifth of June 1963 in East Finchley, north London. He was the youngest of three children and the only son. His father, Kyriacos, known to everyone as Jack, was a Greek Cypriot who had come to England from the village of Patriki in the 1950s and became a restaurateur. His mother, Lesley, was an English dancer. George grew up in Kingsbury with two older sisters, Yioda and Melanie, who stayed close to him all his life. Years later he told Desert Island Discs that his obsession with music began after a bang on the head when he was about eight years old.[1] [2] [3]

In his early teens the family moved out to Radlett in Hertfordshire, and George started at Bushey Meads School, where he picked up the nickname Yog. On his first day, a teacher asked for someone to look after the new boy, and twelve year old Andrew Ridgeley was the only one to put up his hand. George was shy and self conscious, with glasses, frizzy hair and worries about his weight. Andrew was stylish and utterly sure of himself. They bonded over Queen, David Bowie and Elton John, and over a very juvenile sense of humour, recording pretend radio shows and jingles in George's bedroom. Soon they shared one ambition, to be pop stars.[1] [2] [3] [4]

George learned his trade the hard way. He busked on the London Underground, playing songs such as Queen's 39, and worked as a DJ at the Bel Air restaurant in Northwood and at school discos around Bushey, Stanmore and Watford. Around 1979 he and Andrew formed a ska band called the Executive, with Andrew's brother Paul and school friends including David Mortimer, who later became the songwriter David Austin. The Executive opened their shows with a ska version of Beethoven's Für Elise and got as far as a demo tape, but the publisher who heard it passed. At home, his father issued an ultimatum about getting a proper job, and that row later found its way into Wham!'s first single.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

One day, at seventeen, George was on the bus to his DJ job when a melody came to him as he handed over his fare. He went to the back seat and started fitting words to it. Andrew had found a chord sequence on the Fender Telecaster he got for his eighteenth birthday, and together they finished the song. It was Careless Whisper. George said it grew out of two timing a girlfriend and imagining her finding out, which in real life she never did. On the eighteenth of January 1982 they made a rough demo at Andrew's family home for a fee of twenty pounds, with George singing into a microphone fixed to a broom handle. When he was sacked from the restaurant for lateness and playing music the owner disliked, he played that demo on his last night, and the dance floor filled.[1] [2] [3]

Wham! takes off

The duo called themselves Wham!, a name Andrew said captured their energy and friendship, and the design studio Stylorouge added the exclamation mark. Andrew kept pressing their tape on Mark Dean of the new label Innervision whenever he ran into him at a pub in Bushey Heath, and in early 1982 Dean offered them a deal. The contract, signed by two teenagers in a cafe, was far from generous. Their debut single, Wham Rap! Enjoy What You Do, came out in June 1982. It was a cheeky blend of rap and soul about life on the dole, and it flopped, stalling at number one hundred and five.[1] [2] [3]

Their second single, Young Guns Go for It, was also stuck outside the top forty when luck stepped in. Another act pulled out of Top of the Pops, and the show's executive producer, who had seen the boys on the children's programme Saturday Superstore, booked Wham! as a last minute replacement in November 1982. George and Andrew turned up in rolled up jeans and sockless espadrilles, flanked by backing singers Shirlie Holliman and Dee C. Lee, and acted out the song as a little comedy about a friend throwing his youth away on marriage. The single shot up to number three, and that one appearance is credited with saving them from being dropped by their label.[1] [2] [3] [4]

By 1983 Wham! were among the biggest pop acts in Britain, battling Duran Duran and Culture Club. Their debut album Fantastic went to number one that summer, with hits including Bad Boys and Club Tropicana, whose video was shot at Pikes Hotel in Ibiza. During that trip George had his first sexual experience with a man. He confided first in Shirlie, then in Andrew, who took it calmly and simply said it was a bit of a surprise. George was nineteen, and he was especially conscious of how his father might react. He would keep it from the public for another fifteen years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Behind the hits, the boys discovered how bad their Innervision contract was. They had records in the charts but almost no money. They brought in two new managers, the veteran Simon Napier-Bell and Jazz Summers, and went to war with the label. For about four months they could not record, and Innervision released a Club Fantastic Megamix of album tracks that Wham! publicly denounced. The dispute was settled out of court, and in 1984 CBS took over their contract, putting them on Epic around the world and Columbia in America. One part of that compromise would come back to haunt George, because it bound Wham! to as many as eight albums for the label.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Making it big in 1984

The first single under the new deal was Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go. The title came from a note Andrew had left for his parents. He had meant to ask them to wake him before they went out, but he accidentally wrote the word up twice, so he jokingly doubled the word go as well. George turned it into a bouncy tribute to fifties and sixties pop and recorded it in two days at Sarm West in London, keeping a drum machine track because the drummer was late. In the video the boys wore giant Katharine Hamnett T shirts reading Choose Life. In May 1984 it became their first British number one, and it later spent three weeks at the top in America.[1] [2]

George was fiercely particular about Careless Whisper. He first recorded it in 1983 at Muscle Shoals in Alabama with the legendary producer Jerry Wexler, but found the result too middle of the road. Back in London with engineer Chris Porter, he re cut it with a live band and auditioned saxophone players one after another until Steve Gregory played the famous phrase the way George heard it in his head. Released in July 1984, it was billed as a George Michael solo single in Britain and as Wham! featuring George Michael in America. It went to number one in Britain, America and around two dozen other countries, and Billboard named it the number one song of 1985.[1] [2] [3]

That summer they recorded the second album, Make It Big, over six weeks at Studio Miraval in the south of France, partly to escape the press. Freedom became another British number one, and the album topped the charts in both Britain and America. According to Chris Porter, Andrew's musical role had by now almost vanished, and he was an emotional pillar more than a musician. George was writing, arranging and producing. On Everything She Wants, finished in Paris and London after the session players had gone home, he played every part himself. That song, about a young husband trapped by money and a baby on the way, later became George's own favourite Wham! track.[1] [2] [3]

George wrote Last Christmas in his childhood bedroom in February 1984, while he and Andrew were visiting his parents. He recorded it that August at Advision Studios in London, with the room hung with Christmas decorations to set the mood, and he played every part himself, picking out the keyboards with two or three fingers and even hogging the sleigh bells. The video was filmed in the Swiss ski resort of Saas Fee with friends and the backing singers. Straight after the shoot George went to record Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas?, singing the third line. Band Aid took the Christmas number one, Last Christmas sat at number two for five weeks, and George gave its royalties to the Ethiopian famine appeal.[1] [2] [3]

Wham! looked like the soundtrack of eighties excess, and critics often cast them as Margaret Thatcher's favourite pop group. The truth was more complicated. George's father was a communist, and at fifteen George had joined the Young Communist League under his Greek name. He voted Labour through the Thatcher years, and in September 1984, at the height of their fame, Wham! played a benefit concert at London's Royal Festival Hall for the striking miners. The music press sneered, with Melody Maker describing everyone but a few rows of young girls as stone faced and baffled. George found the Thatcherite label lazy, saying a suntan and a bit of money did not make you a Thatcherite.[1] [2]

China, Live Aid and the Final

The boys told their managers they wanted to be the biggest group in the world within two years. Jazz Summers suggested making them the first Western pop group to play in communist China, and George told them to fix it. Simon Napier-Bell spent about eighteen months on the project, phoning ministries from a Beijing hotel and inviting anyone who would listen to lunch. His first taker was a minister for energy who thought he was meeting a coal buyer. Napier-Bell later joked that he fed the whole government, one hundred and forty three people, three times each. His winning argument was that a Wham! concert would show the world China was open to foreign investment.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the seventh of April 1985 Wham! played the Workers' Gymnasium in Beijing, followed by a show in Guangzhou, then known in the West as Canton. Many tickets went to officials, and each came with a cassette of Wham! songs on one side and Chinese cover versions by the singer Cheng Fangyuan on the other. The audience had never seen anything like it. When George urged them to clap along to Club Tropicana, they thought he wanted applause and politely gave it. Police discouraged dancing, and a British embassy report concluded that neither the Chinese nor Wham! knew quite how to behave. The band were not paid, but the headlines went around the world.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the thirteenth of July 1985, a bearded George walked onto the Wembley stage at Live Aid, not as part of Wham! but beside his teenage hero Elton John, to sing Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me. Andrew stood in the row of backing singers with Kiki Dee, watching his friend with obvious pride. George also sang on Elton's hits Nikita and Wrap Her Up that year. In November, I'm Your Man became Wham!'s third British number one. Its first verse and chorus had come to George in five minutes on an internal flight during their American tour. But he was tired of being a teen idol, and he wanted to write for adults.[1] [2] [3]

On the first of March 1986, George announced on the chat show Aspel and Company that Wham! would split, promising the most amicable break up in pop history. Weeks later his solo single A Different Corner, which he called the most honest song he had written, made him the first solo act to reach number one in Britain with his first two releases. The farewell single, The Edge of Heaven, with Elton John on piano, gave Wham! their fourth British number one. On the twenty eighth of June 1986, seventy two thousand fans filled Wembley Stadium for the Final. I'm Your Man was the last song George and Andrew ever performed together as Wham!.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Faith

George had long dreamed of singing with Aretha Franklin. In May 1986, between A Different Corner and the Wembley farewell, he went to Detroit and recorded I Knew You Were Waiting For Me with her in two days. He said he was freaking out behind the microphone while the Queen of Soul treated him as an equal. Released in January 1987, it went to number one in both Britain and America. It was the only British number one of Aretha's whole career, and it won the two of them a Grammy. It was also the first single of George's solo career that he had not written himself.[1] [2]

The first taste of his debut album, in mid 1987, was a deliberate provocation. I Want Your Sex was born by accident, when a technical glitch made the studio drum machine trigger strange, pulsing bass sounds, and George built a new song around the noise. The BBC kept it off daytime radio, many American stations banned it, MTV played the video only late at night, and the countdown host Casey Kasem refused to say the title on air. George insisted it was a song about monogamy at the height of the AIDS scare, and in the video he wrote explore monogamy in lipstick on his girlfriend, the make up artist Kathy Jeung. It still reached number two in America.[1] [2] [3]

Much of the album Faith was made at Puk Studios in rural Denmark, where George could work without the press on his doorstep. He wrote songs piece by piece in the studio, often starting from a drum machine pattern, and played many of the instruments himself. The title track opens with a church organ playing the tune of Wham!'s Freedom, a wink at his past, before a Bo Diddley beat kicks in. It was only meant to be a short album track. Father Figure began life as a dance record, until George muted the snare drum on the mixing desk and suddenly heard a gospel song. Faith came out at the end of October 1987.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Faith became one of the biggest albums of the decade. It spent twelve weeks at number one in America and fifty one weeks in the top ten, and four singles, Faith, Father Figure, One More Try and Monkey, went to number one. Faith was the best selling single in America in 1988, and George became the first white solo artist to top Billboard's black albums chart, which he said meant more to him than the pop chart. In February 1989 the album won the Grammy for Album of the Year. That year he also won two soul and R and B awards at the American Music Awards, categories that had long been a showcase for black artists, and Gladys Knight was among those who pointed out that black singers did not get the same chances in the pop categories. Faith went on to sell more than twenty five million copies.[1] [2] [3]

In February 1988 George opened the Faith Tour at the Budokan in Tokyo, with choreography by Paula Abdul. Over the year he played more than a hundred shows in sixteen countries, and in Michigan Aretha Franklin joined him on stage. But a painful throat, eventually diagnosed as a cyst, forced cancellations, and the loneliness of solo fame hit him hard. Without Andrew beside him to laugh at the madness, he said, ten months of hysteria was enough to push him to the edge. By the end of the tour, he later admitted, he was miserable, because he knew for certain that he was gay.[1] [2] [3]

Stepping out of the frame

George decided he would no longer be the pin up. His second album, Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1, came out in September 1990 without his face on the cover, and he refused to do promotion or appear in its videos. The music was quieter and more acoustic, full of social comment. The first single, Praying for Time, had a video that showed nothing but the lyrics, and it still went to number one in America, his last solo number one there. George later said the title was partly a reply to being frozen out of black radio after Faith, a plea to be heard as both things at once.[1] [2] [3] [4]

For Freedom! '90, directed by David Fincher, George hired five of the world's top models, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Tatjana Patitz and Cindy Crawford, to lip sync his vocal while he stayed off screen. The idea came from a famous British Vogue cover of the five, photographed by Peter Lindbergh. In the video, the leather jacket, jukebox and guitar from the Faith era go up in flames. George later explained that he needed to start taking the old image apart so he could eventually come out with some dignity. Each model was paid fifteen thousand dollars a day, and the video went into heavy rotation on MTV.[1] [2] [3]

In Britain the album outsold Faith, spent eighty eight weeks on the chart and won the Brit Award for British album of the year. In America it peaked at number two and sold far less. The retreat from fame even drew a public scolding, in the form of an open letter from Frank Sinatra telling him to loosen up. George toured anyway in 1991 with the Cover to Cover shows, singing his favourite songs by other people. At Wembley Arena in March, Elton John walked on as a surprise guest for Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me, and the live recording went to number one in Britain and America, with the proceeds shared among ten charities.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In January 1991, at the Rock in Rio festival in Brazil, George met a Brazilian dress designer named Anselmo Feleppa. It was, he later said, the first time he had really loved someone selflessly, and falling in love with a man ended his long confusion about being bisexual. Andrew joined him on stage at the Maracanã for the encore at that same festival. But about six months into the relationship, Anselmo learned he was HIV positive. George was terrified he might have the virus too, and he felt he could not share any of it with his family, who did not even know he was gay.[1] [2] [3]

George was convinced Sony had punished him for refusing to play the sex symbol by under promoting the album. He handed back a one million pound advance, and on the thirtieth of October 1992 he sued, arguing that his contract was an unreasonable restraint of trade and calling his position professional slavery. On the first of June 1994, Mr Justice Jonathan Parker rejected every one of his claims, ruling that the contracts were fair and reasonable. George vowed never to record for Sony again, and in July 1995 his contract was sold to Virgin and DreamWorks. He later said Anselmo gave him the strength to fight, but called the case a complete waste of time that he regretted.[1] [2] [3]

Grief and Older

Instead of a second volume of Listen Without Prejudice, George gave three songs to the AIDS charity album Red Hot and Dance, including the hit Too Funky, and donated its royalties. In April 1992 he joined Queen at Wembley Stadium for the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, wearing a red ribbon. His Somebody to Love was hailed as the highlight of the night. He called it the proudest moment of his career, a childhood fantasy lived out in front of eighty thousand people, mixed with real sadness. Privately, Anselmo was ill. He died in March 1993 of an AIDS related brain haemorrhage, and for about eighteen months afterwards George could barely write.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

George broke his silence on the twenty fourth of November 1994 at the first MTV Europe Music Awards, singing a new song in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. It was Jesus to a Child, a slow, bossa nova tinged lament for Anselmo that he said he wrote in a couple of hours. Released in January 1996, it went straight in at number one in Britain, and at almost seven minutes it was his longest top forty single. Few listeners knew who it was about, because George had still not said publicly that he was gay, but he dedicated it to Anselmo every time he sang it live.[1] [2]

Older, released in May 1996, was George's first album of new songs in almost six years, and in America it was the very first album released by DreamWorks Records. It was jazzier and darker, inspired by the Brazilian composer Antônio Carlos Jobim, and dedicated to Jobim and to Anselmo. George cut his hair short and changed his whole look, later saying he was trying to come out to the fans who were really listening. Fastlove, a slinky song about no strings encounters, spent three weeks at number one, and in its video a dancer wore headphones branded FONY, a dig at his old label. Older produced six British top three hits, a record for one album, and George called it his greatest moment.[1] [2] [3]

In 1996 George began a relationship with Kenny Goss, a former flight attendant and sportswear executive from Dallas whom he had first met in Los Angeles in 1988. They would be together for thirteen years. But more loss was coming. His mother Lesley was in the audience at his MTV Unplugged show in London in October 1996, and she died of cancer on the twenty sixth of February 1997. Within days George was in the studio with the young Irish singer Toby Bourke, recording Waltz Away Dreaming as a tribute to her. Losing his lover and then his mother, he said, left him feeling almost cursed, and he sank into deep depression.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Outside, and the troubled years

On the seventh of April 1998, George was arrested in a public restroom at Will Rogers Memorial Park in Beverly Hills by an undercover police officer, Marcelo Rodríguez, part of a unit patrolling the park after complaints about lewd behaviour. He was charged with engaging in a lewd act, released on five hundred dollars bail, and later pleaded no contest. He was fined eight hundred and ten dollars and given eighty hours of community service. Soon afterwards he went on CNN and told the world he was gay. He later said that hiding it had made him feel like a fraud, and that being caught was, subconsciously, a deliberate act.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Rather than hide, George turned the humiliation into a joke at his own expense. In October 1998 he released Outside, a disco song in praise of sex in the open air. In the video, directed by Vaughan Arnell, a men's toilet becomes a glittering disco, George dances in a Los Angeles police uniform, and two policemen end up kissing. It went to number two in Britain. George said he hoped it would lift some of the shame around cruising for young men like his teenage self. Officer Rodríguez sued for ten million dollars, saying the video mocked him, but the courts eventually ruled that as a public official he could not recover damages for emotional distress.[1] [2] [3]

Outside led Ladies and Gentlemen, a greatest hits album Sony released as a condition of finally cutting ties with him. It spent eight weeks at number one in Britain and more than two hundred weeks on the chart, becoming his biggest seller at home. Its second single was As, a duet with Mary J. Blige on the Stevie Wonder song. In 1999 came Songs from the Last Century, an album of standards and covers, and in 2000 he recorded If I Told You That with Whitney Houston. Then, in November 2003, he signed again with Sony, the company he had fought in court.[1] [2] [3] [4]

His politics grew louder. In 2002 his single Shoot the Dog came with an animated video by the makers of the satirical show 2DTV, showing Tony Blair as George Bush's lapdog in the run up to the Iraq war. It was not released in America, and George was attacked for it, but he argued that the British public had never been asked. In 2003 he sang Don McLean's anti war song The Grave on Top of the Pops. His fifth and final studio album, Patience, arrived in March 2004 and went straight to number one in Britain. He said it would be his last album sold in the usual way, because he had been well paid and would rather share music online for charity.[1] [2] [3]

The years that followed brought headlines George would rather have avoided. In 2006 he was cautioned for possessing class C drugs. In 2007 he admitted driving while unfit through drugs, which he later blamed on a year and a half of trouble with sleeping pills, and he lost his licence for two years. In 2008 he was cautioned again, this time for class A and class C drugs. Then, early on the fourth of July 2010, he crashed his Range Rover into a Snappy Snaps shop in Hampstead. He admitted driving under the influence of drugs and possessing cannabis, and in September he was jailed for eight weeks, serving four. Someone wrote the word Wham! in the dent on the shop wall.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The last encores

In September 2006 George went back on the road for the first time in fifteen years. The 25 Live tour, marking a quarter of a century in music, opened in Barcelona and kept growing, eventually playing one hundred and six shows in forty one countries to one point three million people. In June 2007 he became the first artist to play the rebuilt Wembley Stadium. He also gave a free concert for NHS nurses at the Roundhouse to thank those who had cared for his mother. In 2008 he sang Praying for Time on the American Idol finale and played himself, and once God, on the American series Eli Stone, whose first season episodes were all named after his songs.[1] [2] [3]

In August 2011 he launched Symphonica, an orchestral tour that opened at the State Opera House in Prague. On the first night he announced that he and Kenny Goss had split two years earlier. Then, in November, he complained of chest pains at a hotel in Vienna before a show. It was pneumonia. His condition worsened, he spent time in intensive care, at one point in a coma, and doctors performed a tracheotomy. He left hospital just before Christmas and told reporters outside his London home, close to tears, that it had been touch and go. When he first woke from the coma, he had briefly picked up a West Country accent.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Two months later he walked out at the 2012 Brit Awards to a standing ovation and presented Adele with the award for British album of the year. That summer he released White Light, a song inspired by his brush with death, timed for thirty years since Wham! first reached the charts, and he performed it with Freedom! '90 at the closing ceremony of the London Olympics. The postponed Symphonica dates followed, and on the seventeenth of October 2012 at Earls Court in London he played what turned out to be the last concert of his life. The album Symphonica, released in 2014, became his seventh solo number one album in Britain and the final production credit of Phil Ramone.[1] [2] [3]

His last years were quieter and often troubled. In May 2013 he fell from a moving car on the M1 motorway near St Albans and was airlifted to hospital with a head injury, though he recovered. In 2014 he said he had stayed off cannabis for a year and a half, but in June 2015 he checked into a rehab clinic in Switzerland. He was rarely seen in public, dividing his time between Highgate and a riverside house in Goring on Thames in Oxfordshire, with a new partner, the hairstylist Fadi Fawaz. He spent 2016 working with David Austin on a documentary about his life called Freedom, and was talking about new music with the producer Naughty Boy.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In the early hours of Christmas Day 2016, George Michael died in bed at his home in Goring. He was fifty three. Fadi Fawaz found him when he came to wake him for Christmas lunch. Police called the death unexplained but not suspicious, and the first post mortem was inconclusive, which left room for months of speculation. In March 2017 the Oxfordshire coroner ruled that he died of natural causes, dilated cardiomyopathy with myocarditis, and fatty liver disease, so no inquest was needed. On the twenty ninth of March 2017 he was buried privately at Highgate Cemetery in north London, beside his mother.[1] [2] [3] [4]

After George

Tributes poured in. Andrew Ridgeley said he was heartbroken at the loss of his beloved friend Yog, and Elton John called him one of the kindest, most generous people he had ever met. Then the untold stories came out. George had given millions to Childline, including every penny of the royalties from Jesus to a Child, and had supported the Terrence Higgins Trust and Macmillan for years. He had secretly paid for a stranger's IVF treatment after hearing her story on Deal or No Deal, and tipped a student nurse working in a bar five thousand pounds. For a decade he had also anonymously paid for Highgate's Christmas tree and lights.[1] [2] [3] [4]

At the Grammys in February 2017, Adele sang a slow, mournful Fastlove in his honour, stopping and starting again because she wanted to get it right for him. His will left most of his estate, put at around ninety seven million pounds, to his sisters, his father and friends, with nothing for Kenny Goss or Fadi Fawaz. Goss later made a claim as a former dependant, and in 2021 the estate agreed a settlement with him. In March 2019 George's collection of contemporary art, including works by Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, sold at Christie's for eleven point three million pounds, with the money going to causes he had supported.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Grief returned on Christmas Day 2019, when his sister Melanie, who used to cut his hair on tour, was found dead at her home, three years to the day after her brother. She was fifty five, and she was buried beside their mother, on the other side from George. Meanwhile Last Christmas refused to fade. It re entered the British chart every year from 2007, and on New Year's Day 2021 it finally reached number one, more than thirty six years after release, a record at the time. In December 2023 it became the Christmas number one at last, and Andrew said George had written it with exactly that goal.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Last Christmas was Christmas number one again in 2024, the first song ever to top the festive chart in consecutive years. In December 2025 Kylie Minogue took the British Christmas crown, but that same week Last Christmas reached number one on Billboard's Global 200 for the first time, making it the biggest song in the world. Other honours had followed. George was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in November 2023, with Andrew presenting and Miguel, Adam Levine and Carrie Underwood singing his songs, and in 2024 the Royal Mint issued a coin showing him in his famous sunglasses.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The screen kept returning to him. Freedom, the documentary he was finishing when he died, was shown in 2017, and its uncut version reached cinemas in 2022. Emma Thompson built the 2019 romantic comedy Last Christmas around his songs, and the 2023 Netflix documentary Wham! told the story through the fifty or so scrapbooks Andrew's mother had kept. In March 2026 his estate announced George Michael: The Faith Tour, a restored film of his 1988 shows in Paris, shot on thirty five millimetre film with fourteen cameras, along with a live album of eighteen previously unreleased recordings. The estate said it would reach cinemas worldwide later that year.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around George Michael

George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley. They met at Bushey Meads School when Andrew volunteered to look after the new boy, and they formed Wham! together. Andrew gave up songwriting because George was so much better at it, and was mocked as a hanger on, but he says it never damaged their friendship. George said Andrew's confidence carried him in the early days. They stayed close after the split, and the last time they met, months before George died, they played Scrabble and Andrew won. In 2023 Andrew inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.[1] [2] [3] [4]

George Michael and Anselmo Feleppa. George met the Brazilian dress designer at Rock in Rio in January 1991 and called him the first person he loved selflessly. Months later Anselmo was diagnosed with HIV, and he died in March 1993. George kept the relationship secret, but grieved through his music, writing Jesus to a Child for him and dedicating the album Older to him. He later said Anselmo gave him the strength to take on Sony, and that there was not one track on Older that was not about him or the risk of AIDS.[1] [2] [3] [4]

George Michael and Kenny Goss. George met the Texan former flight attendant and sportswear executive in 1988, and they were a couple from 1996. They shared homes in Dallas, Highgate and Goring, bought John Lennon's Imagine piano together, and appeared as a family with their dogs on Oprah. They planned a civil partnership in 2005 but postponed it. George revealed in 2011 that they had split two years earlier. Goss was left nothing in the will, and in 2021 reached a settlement with the estate.[1] [2] [3] [4]

George Michael and Fadi Fawaz. The Lebanese Australian celebrity hairstylist and photographer was George's partner in his final years, from around 2011 or 2012. It was Fawaz who found George dead in bed on Christmas morning 2016, when he came to take him to Christmas lunch. He told reporters that things had been complicated recently but that George had been looking forward to Christmas. Like Kenny Goss, he received nothing under George's will.[1] [2] [3] [4]

George Michael and Elton John. Elton was George's teenage hero, and they sang together at Live Aid in 1985, on Elton's Nikita and Wrap Her Up, and on a live Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me that topped the charts in 1991. In 2004 Elton said George had a deep rooted unhappiness, and George hit back in an open letter saying Elton knew nothing about him. They made peace over dinner, though George was still mocking Elton's worries in 2009. After George died, Elton called him one of the kindest people he had ever met.[1] [2] [3] [4]

George Michael and Aretha Franklin. George idolised Aretha and at first felt unworthy to write for her. Their 1986 duet, I Knew You Were Waiting For Me, recorded in Detroit in two days, went to number one in Britain and America and won a Grammy. She joined him on stage during the Faith Tour in 1988. After his death she remembered first hearing him with Wham! and loving his unique sound, and said the song had never grown old.[1] [2]

George Michael and Simon Napier-Bell. The veteran manager, with his partner Jazz Summers, freed Wham! from their Innervision contract, set up the CBS deal and spent eighteen months making the China concerts happen. He was also a skilled spinner of stories for the press. The partnership ended at the close of 1985, as George prepared to go solo. In 2023 Napier-Bell directed the documentary George Michael: Portrait of an Artist.[1] [2] [3]

George Michael and David Austin. Born David Mortimer, he was George's friend from early childhood, recording songs with him on a tape machine as small boys and later playing in the Executive. George sang on Austin's 1984 single Turn to Gold and called him his best friend. They wrote Look at Your Hands, You Have Been Loved and December Song together, and Austin later co directed the Freedom documentaries and, in 2026, the Faith Tour concert film.[1] [2] [3]

George Michael and Shirlie Holliman. Shirlie was Andrew's girlfriend when she started dancing at their gigs, and she became a Wham! backing singer alongside Dee C. Lee and later Pepsi DeMacque. She was the first person George confided in about his sexuality, in Ibiza in 1983. After she and Andrew broke up, George encouraged her to call Spandau Ballet's Martin Kemp, whom she went on to marry. She later worked for George's company Aegean.[1] [2] [3]

George Michael and Lesley Panayiotou. George was exceptionally close to his mother, partly because his father was always working. He kept his sexuality hidden largely for her sake, fearing she would worry every day about AIDS. Her death from cancer in 1997 plunged him into depression. He recorded Waltz Away Dreaming in her memory within days, later gave free concerts for the NHS nurses who had cared for her, and was buried beside her at Highgate.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

George Michael and Chris Porter. The engineer met George and Andrew on their very first single in 1982 and worked with George until Jesus to a Child in the mid nineties. He watched George learn that he could make records alone, starting with Everything She Wants, and helped him record Careless Whisper, Last Christmas and Faith. Porter said George had whole songs and their sounds in his head before he walked into the studio.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about George Michael

• George said his obsession with music began after he hit his head at around the age of eight. On Desert Island Discs in 2007 he traced his love of music to a head injury at about eight years old. Before that, he suggested, music had not taken hold of him.[1] [2]
• At fifteen, George joined the Young Communist League under his Greek name. His father was a communist. George joined the Young Communist League as Georgios Panayiotou, and later voted Labour throughout the Thatcher years.[1]
• As a teenager George busked on the London Underground, playing Queen's song 39. Before Wham!, George earned money busking in the Tube and working as a DJ at a restaurant and local school discos. Queen's 39 was among his busking songs, and he later sang it with Queen at the 1992 Freddie Mercury tribute.[1] [2]
• The first Careless Whisper demo cost twenty pounds, with George singing into a microphone fixed to a broom handle. It was recorded on a four track machine at Andrew's family home in January 1982 by a local producer called Paul Mex. They did it in a single take, having spent most of the session on Wham Rap.[1]
• A design studio called Stylorouge added the exclamation mark to Wham!. Andrew said the name Wham! was meant to capture their energy and friendship. The British graphic design studio Stylorouge is credited with adding the exclamation mark.[1]
• In America, Wham!'s first album was released under the name Wham! U.K. Fantastic had to be credited to Wham! U.K. in the United States because an American group already used the name Wham!.[1]
• The female voice on the recording of Young Guns belongs to an American session singer, not the girls seen on TV. Shirlie Holliman and Dee C. Lee danced and sang beside the boys on Top of the Pops, but the original record features the American backing singer Lynda Hayes.[1]
• To get the Careless Whisper sax solo, the engineer slowed the tape down by a semitone. Steve Gregory's tenor saxophone could not hit the top note without fake fingering. At his suggestion, Chris Porter slowed the tape, Gregory played the part a semitone lower with proper fingering, and the tape was returned to normal speed.[1]
• George's sister Melanie was flown to Miami to cut his hair for the Careless Whisper video. Unhappy with how his hair looked in the first day's footage, George had Melanie flown out and the day was reshot. The video went seventeen thousand pounds over budget and made the British tabloids.[1]
• The original 1984 mix of Last Christmas has never been reissued. In 1985 the song was reissued as the Pudding Mix, with many parts re recorded including George's vocal. That version has been used on every release since.[1]
• George asked for the Last Christmas video to be a Christmas version of Club Tropicana. Director Andy Morahan was told to scout Europe for fresh snow and ended up in Saas Fee in Switzerland. Model Kathy Hill, who played the ex girlfriend, said George kept falling over in the snow and made her laugh constantly.[1] [2]
• Andrew missed singing on Band Aid, reportedly because of a cryptic fax. In his memoir Andrew explains that he did not appear on Do They Know It's Christmas? because he missed a cryptic fax. George sang the third line.[1] [2]
• Concertgoers in China got a free cassette with Wham! on one side and Chinese covers on the other. The Chinese versions were sung by Cheng Fangyuan, who opened the show. One fan in Guangzhou sold his cassette to a classmate for twenty yuan, a small fortune then.[1] [2]
• The Wham! China film premiered to seventy two thousand people at Wembley, a record for a film premiere. Foreign Skies was shown on giant screens before the Final concert on the twenty eighth of June 1986, setting a record for the largest audience at a film premiere.[1]
• A Different Corner was the first UK number one written, performed and produced by the same person. It also made George the first solo act to reach number one in Britain with his first two releases. Radio 1's Simon Bates liked it so much he played it twice in a row.[1]
• George sang uncredited lead vocals on a 1987 top ten cover of the Bee Gees' Jive Talkin'. The record came out under the name Boogie Box High, a project led by Andros Georgiou. It reached number seven in Britain without George's name on it.[1]
• I Want Your Sex began as a song called Johnny Sex, written for David Austin. A MIDI fault made the drum machine fire off random bass sounds. George loved the tribal noise, kept the track for himself and wrote a new song around it.[1]
• Faith opens with a church organ playing Wham!'s Freedom. The organ fanfare at the start of Faith is the tune of the 1984 Wham! hit Freedom, played as if in a cathedral, before the Bo Diddley rhythm begins.[1] [2]
• Faith was the first album by a white solo artist to top Billboard's black albums chart. George told Jet magazine he was happier about that than about topping the pop chart, because it felt like a greater achievement.[1]
• Each Freedom! '90 supermodel was paid fifteen thousand dollars a day. An early dispute over fees was settled when the agent for four of the models said all her clients would be paid equally. Linda Evangelista stayed up until three in the morning dyeing her hair platinum for the shoot.[1]
• Too Funky once set the record for the biggest jump into the top ten of the Australian chart. It leapt from number fifty to number eight, a record that stood until 2009. The video, co directed with Thierry Mugler, was a fake fashion show full of supermodels.[1]
• In the Fastlove video, a dancer wears headphones branded FONY, a jab at Sony. The joke referred to George's bitter contract battle with Sony Music, which had blocked new releases for years before Older.[1]
• An engineer said George was the only singer he worked with who refused to let his vocals be pitch corrected. Dave Clews, who worked on Fastlove, said George was a perfectionist who often scrapped work the team was happy with. Adding a nod to Patrice Rushen's Forget Me Nots took another two weeks.[1]
• George and Ronan Keating won thirty two thousand pounds for charity on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. They reached sixty four thousand pounds but got the next question wrong, halving the total. George had privately decided to repay any losses himself.[1] [2]
• George reportedly earned three million dollars for a seventy five minute private concert in Moscow. The show took place on New Year's Eve 2006, during the 25 Live tour, and was described as making him the highest paid entertainer in Russian history.[1]
• December Song was originally written with the Spice Girls in mind. David Austin said the song was later going to go to Michael Bublé before George kept it. It opens and closes with a sample of Frank Sinatra's The Christmas Waltz.[1]
• After his 2011 coma, George woke up briefly speaking with a West Country accent. There was concern he had foreign accent syndrome, but the accent faded. He had spent three weeks in a coma with pneumonia in Vienna.[1] [2]
• After George crashed into a Snappy Snaps shop in 2010, someone wrote Wham! in the dent. The graffito appeared in the dent his Range Rover left in the shop wall in Hampstead. He was later jailed for eight weeks for drug driving.[1] [2]
• George's 2011 Comic Relief car sketch with James Corden inspired Carpool Karaoke. The sketch ended with the pair singing Wham!'s I'm Your Man as Corden drove around London. Corden later built his hit Late Late Show segment on the idea.[1] [2]
• For a decade, George secretly paid for Highgate's Christmas tree and lights. The payments only came out after his death. He was also the biggest funder of the local Fair in the Square, donating as a local resident.[1]
• George's art sale included works referencing his own 1998 arrest. At Christie's in 2019, Michael Craig-Martin pieces titled Untitled SEX, Untitled GOD and Handcuffs sold for up to one hundred and twenty five thousand pounds. A Damien Hirst dove in formaldehyde fetched the top price of nine hundred and eleven thousand pounds.[1]
• A stalker once broke into George's house seven times, he said, and he later saw her wearing his clothes. He told the Guardian in 2009 that the police did nothing about her. Tabloid photographers were also permanently stationed outside his home.[1]
• A rare live Last Christmas from Wembley Arena in December 2006 stayed unreleased for almost eighteen years. The recording from the seventeenth of December 2006 was finally released in 2024, on the fortieth anniversary reissue of the single.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.