{"id":611446,"date":"2026-09-25T14:32:15","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T14:32:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/611446\/"},"modified":"2026-09-25T14:32:15","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T14:32:15","slug":"george-michaels-faith-tour-remembering-his-greatest-live-moment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/611446\/","title":{"rendered":"George Michael’s Faith Tour: Remembering His Greatest Live Moment"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tGeorge Michael<\/a> was on top of the world in the late Eighties<\/a>. He\u2019d made it big as the creative half of Wham!, his U.K. pop duo with his school friend Andrew Ridgeley. But for his solo flight, he wanted to prove himself as an adult. That meant sex. It meant sin. It meant stubble. George came back strong with his 1987 solo classic Faith, reborn as a black-leather stud, shocking the music industry that had always seen him as a disposable joke. Instead of burning out, he seduced the planet with the innovative hitcraft of \u201cFaith,\u201d \u201cFather Figure,\u201d and \u201cI Want Your Sex.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHe also stepped out as a live performer, for his one and only solo mega-pop tour, the Faith tour in 1988. It\u2019s a weirdly forgotten moment in his story \u2014 but it\u2019s the one time in his life George Michael reveled in the role of a solo pop idol onstage, parading his sexual bravado, the ultimate larger-than-life dream lover.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe upcoming concert film George Michael: The Faith Tour, arriving in theaters Dec. 11, captures two nights in Paris, in the spring of 1988, from recently rediscovered footage. (He\u2019ll also be honored this weekend at the VMAs, with a special all-star tribute performance<\/a> marking 10 years since his death.)<\/p>\n

\n\tAs you can see in the new trailer for The Faith Tour, his confidence was raging \u2014 night after night, he faced a crowd of strangers and sang the line, \u201cIf you ever hunger, hunger for me,\u201d making everyone in the room hear it as a personal demand. For once, and only once, he was willing to live up to every crazed fantasy the world had about George Michael \u2014 and that includes his own secret fantasies about himself.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut he closed that door. He never tried this kind of spectacle again, and never preserved it in a proper concert film or album. So it\u2019s been easy to overlook, even though his story has been told and retold so many times over the years. Pop fans know Faith inside out, but almost nobody has seen the way he brought it to life every night onstage.<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tFaith still holds up as one of the Eighties\u2019 perfect pop statements, yet George made it only once. At the time, everyone expected him to keep knocking out a Faith every couple of years for the rest of his life. But his meteoric rise<\/a> to the top just convinced him it wasn\u2019t where he wanted to be.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tHe was the world\u2019s most glamorous pin-up boy, but he was also a closeted, tormented, lonely gay man in a brutally homophobic era. As George says in footage from the 2023 Netflix doc<\/a> Wham!, \u201cI suddenly thought, \u2018Oh my God, I\u2019m a massive star and I\u2019m gay.\u2019 The depression was about that. It was about the way I boxed myself in. You know, be careful what you wish for.\u201d Faith sounded like a new beginning \u2014 but it turned out to be his kiss goodbye.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Faith Tour aims to document his brief fling with arena stardom. It\u2019s directed by two of his longtime collaborators, Andy Morahan (he did the \u201cFather Figure\u201d and \u201cCareless Whisper\u201d videos) and David Austin (who made the Freedom Uncut doc). There will also be a live album of previously unreleased performances, similarly called The Faith Tour.<\/p>\n

\n\tLive, George did almost all of Faith, but also more Wham! oldies than fans were expecting. After opening with the gritty one-two punch of \u201cI Want Your Sex\u201d and \u201cHard Day,\u201d it was a bit of a head-snap to swerve right into Wham! bangers like \u201cEverything She Wants\u201d and \u201cI\u2019m Your Man.\u201d But tellingly, he refused to sing \u201cWake Me Up Before You Go-Go\u201d even once all tour. This was a No Jitterbug Zone.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe also sang some of his beloved Seventies soul covers \u2014 Stevie Wonder\u2019s \u201cLove\u2019s In Need of Love Today,\u201d LaBelle\u2019s \u201cLady Marmalade,\u201d and Wild Cherry\u2019s \u201cPlay That Funky Music,\u201d as well as the Aretha Franklin duet \u201cI Knew You Were Waiting for Me.\u201d By the time the tour wrapped in America that fall, he was occasionally mixing in more Stevie deep cuts.<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tNobody attending these shows in 1988 would have imagined they were seeing George Michael for the last time. But he was resolute never to repeat the experience. His tortured sexuality made the pose unbearable. At a couple of summer shows, he sang Gladys Knight\u2019s poignant \u201cIf I Were Your Woman,\u201d changing the gender pronouns. It\u2019s a song about a secret, forbidden, guilty desire, but he was clearly singing from the heart. He performed it at the June 1988 Nelson Mandela tribute concert at Wembley Stadium, televised around the world, making it sound like a pained cry from the closet. No wonder he couldn\u2019t keep this pace going. \u201cLife is so crazy and love is unkind,\u201d indeed.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen George first showed up with Wham!, he was more than willing to play the role of a public fantasy. As he put it, he was \u201cevery little hungry schoolgirl\u2019s pride and joy.\u201d But since he was George Michael, he was already deeply conflicted about it. The opening line of his first hit, \u201cWham Rap,\u201d was George declaring, \u201cHey, everybody, take a look at me! I\u2019ve got street credibility!\u201d But he burned out fast on both halves of that promise \u2014 not just the \u201cstreet credibility\u201d part, but the \u201ctake a look at me.\u201d Few performers have ever been so naturally gifted at the pop-star pose, yet few have abdicated the gig so fast. Every night on the Faith tour, George sang his most famous solo hit<\/a>, telling the audience, \u201cIt takes a strong man, baby, but I\u2019m showing you the door!\u201d Yet as it turned out, that\u2019s exactly what he was doing.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat inner turmoil is all over Faith, which is why the album remains an eternal worldwide pop obsession. \u201cFaith\u201d is three minutes of paranoid lust, all breathy gasps and careless whispers. But it\u2019s pure paradox: George\u2019s sexiest hit is about refusing sexual temptations, just as \u201cI Want Your Sex\u201d is an abstract debate on theology and morality without any carnal contact anywhere in the song. \u201cFather Figure,\u201d damn \u2014 no matter how many thousands of times you hear it, it refuses to fade into the background. When George caresses the line \u201cBeautiful darling, don\u2019t think of meeeee,\u201d he couldn\u2019t sound more absolutely confident that you\u2019ll think of him.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd those were just the hits. The best song on Faith wasn\u2019t even a single: \u201cHard Day,\u201d a filthy beatbox groove where George overdubs his voice so he can sing a duet with himself. He plays the double role of\u00a0 a bickering couple, fighting over money, fighting over sex, chanting \u201cDon\u2019t let me down,\u201d until the final knockout when one George asks \u201cDo you trust me?\u201d and the other whispers \u201cYeah.\u201d If any moment captures the genius of George Michael, it\u2019s that one.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor his next album, Listen Without Prejudice Vol.1, he refused to allow his face or name on the cover. He wouldn\u2019t make a video for the lead single \u201cPraying for Time,\u201d forcing the label to do a pompous crawl of the lyrics, making the song seem duller than it actually was. The album was designed to be impenetrable to pop blandishments beyond \u201cFreedom \u201990,\u201d<\/a> which ironically became his definitive star statement even though he spent it complaining about stardom. Funny how the pop audience gets drastically more interested in your personal problems when you get a crew of supermodels to lip-sync them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tHe didn\u2019t attempt anything even close to the scale of the Faith live shows. His 1991 Cover to Cover Tour was a subdued affair, just 29 shows. Instead of promoting the new album, George mostly ignored his own catalog, devoting two-thirds of the set to oldies by his heroes, including David Bowie, Chaka Khan, Culture Club, and Elton John. He didn\u2019t tour again for 15 years.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBut even when George was kissing off the pop audience, people craved more and more of him. He fluked into a Number One hit with his live 1991 version of Elton\u2019s \u201cDon\u2019t Let The Sun Go Down On Me,\u201d a duet where Captain Fantastic enters halfway through. (\u201cLadies and gentlemen\u2026Mr. Elton John!\u201d) Basically zero effort or thought or creativity went into this remake \u2014 but we all loved it anyway, because we were so grateful to hear the sound of George Michael having fun, a sound he was already holding back. We\u2019d take anything he offered.<\/p>\n

\n\tAccording to industry gossip at the time, the only reason George even released this single was his pure fanboy devotion. Elton had a historic record-setting run of consecutive years with at least one hit single on the Hot 100 charts, but since he didn\u2019t have a hit in 1991, the streak was about to end. And since George was a stats-crunching charts geek as well as a lifelong Elton superfan, he couldn\u2019t bear to see his hero\u2019s winning streak die. So, they say, he took matters into his own hands and rushed out a karaoke duet quickie juuuuust in time. It made the chart in December.<\/p>\n

\n\tThanks to George, Elton was able to keep the streak going all the way until 2000, for 31 consecutive years. (Yes, that\u2019s still the record, with Rod Stewart in second place, and no, nobody\u2019s even close to catching up.)<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tBut while Elton still had many hit-making years to go, George was already saying \u201cGoodbye, yellow brick road.\u201d He scored a delightful one-off comeback disco hit in 1992 with \u201cToo Funky,\u201d but he was totally finished with the pop hustle by the time his great successor Harry Styles was born in 1994. Harry, of course, has George\u2019s \u201cCareless Whisper\u201d lyrics tattooed on his feet \u2014 \u201cnever gonna\u201d on his left foot, \u201cdance again\u201d on his right. Who could ask for a better summary of George\u2019s impact on history?<\/p>\n

\n\tSomehow, George didn\u2019t dare reveal the not-so-well-kept secret of his sexuality until 1998, ten years after the Faith tour, when he got busted by a cop in a public park and brilliantly chose to make that his grand coming-out party. But he lived his final years on his own terms, making music on a deliberately smaller scale. On his Faith tour, he\u2019d already lived out his moment of reigning onstage each night, embodying all the audience\u2019s dreams. It\u2019s a tribute to George Michael that he was capable of doing this; it\u2019s also a tribute to George Michael that he was capable of walking away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"George Michael was on top of the world in the late Eighties. He\u2019d made it big as the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":611447,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[239793,156,47709,1063,157,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-611446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-eighties","tag-entertainment","tag-george-michael","tag-live-music","tag-music","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=611446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611446\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/611447"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=611446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=611446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=611446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}