It turns out that the writer Sathnam Sanghera, \u2018The Boy with the Topknot\u2019, has been a besotted George Michael fan since the age of eight, when he started listening to his older sisters\u2019 Wham! records. This was an unusual thing to be as a Sikh growing up in Wolverhampton and it got him teased at school. But he stuck with it. So when a friend suggested that he write something fun to compensate for the years of heavy historical research he\u2019d put into his excellent book Empireland, he decided to set off on a sort of pilgrimage in search of his dead hero.<\/p>\n
First stop was Mondial Cars, a showroom in Northwood, north London, which used to be the Bel Air restaurant, where the teenage Michael worked as a DJ. Sanghera takes the bus there, because it was on this bus route that Michael wrote his first great hit, \u2018Careless Whisper\u2019, aged 17, in 1981. When the car salesman asks Sanghera what he is looking for \u2013 presumably hoping it\u2019s a new car \u2013 Sanghera launches into his own pitch about the wonders of George Michael and the origins of \u2018Careless Whisper\u2019. He goes on so long that the salesman starts glancing at his watch, remembering he has to ring another customer.<\/p>\n
Sanghera never met Michael, though there were a couple of occasions when he might have. He also chickened out of meeting the singer\u2019s father. But he talked at length to Andrew Ridgeley. In Wham! days, Ridgeley was always the extrovert, the party animal; now, according to Sanghera, \u2018you\u2019ll struggle to find a more cautious, circumspect, carefully dressed, fitness-obsessed middle-aged man\u2019. The one record he released after Wham! was a flop and he then pretty much disappeared from public view. He could live on his Wham! royalties and that was enough.<\/p>\n
Sanghera also interviewed Michael\u2019s early manager, Simon Napier-Bell, who told him about the control freakery:<\/p>\n
George had a way of making anyone who worked for him feel permanently, underlyingly apprehensive. You didn\u2019t have to be at the same dinner table or in the same office or even on the same continent. Everyone who worked for him felt the same thing \u2013 a permanent frisson of tension in the air.<\/p>\n
One of his backing band recalled that, at rehearsals,<\/p>\n
he would keep the band on the stage for eight, nine hours while he went through stuff that didn\u2019t necessarily involve us\u2026 what the lights should be doing and how the backdrop should work. If something didn\u2019t work, he\u2019d be slamming into people: get it right or get off.<\/p>\n
He was so notorious for his perfectionism that \u2018Never work with children, animals or George Michael\u2019 became a mantra in the industry.<\/p>\n
Michael once said that he went straight from school to being a pop star, \u2018which isn\u2019t real\u2019. He tried to keep things real by employing a childhood friend, David Austin, as his assistant and never hiring bodyguards or domestic staff. He opened his own front door and parked his car on the street. But he confessed that he spent an entire year wearing sunglasses because he couldn\u2019t bear to make eye contact with strangers. And he also admitted that one of the reasons he liked cruising was that it gave him a chance to meet ordinary people, which he never normally did.<\/p>\n
Michael was officially outed when he was arrested by an undercover cop on 7 April 1998 for performing a \u2018lewd act\u2019 in a public toilet in Will Rogers Memorial Park, Los Angeles. He was charged under his real name, Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, which meant the press didn\u2019t twig immediately, so he had time to tell his father (who was supportive) and prepare for the coming media storm. Then it was headlines such as \u2018Zip Me Up Before You Go Go\u2019 and a ton of homophobic abuse.<\/p>\n
He refused to be apologetic. He admitted his behaviour had been stupid, but \u2018I won\u2019t even say it was the first time it ever happened.\u2019 He even joked about it, writing on his 35th birthday invitations: \u2018Go to the bathroom before you come as all conveniences will be locked to protect the host.\u2019 Eighteen months later he released his brilliant album Outside, which Pete Paphides described as \u2018a dazzling disco screw-you to every homophobe who suggested that George Michael needed to beg forgiveness for anything\u2019. It was a hit in the UK and Europe, but got little air play in the US, where he was effectively cancelled.<\/p>\n
Years later he said he wished he\u2019d come out much earlier, and thinks he\u2019d have been a happier man if he had. In fact he was already going to gay clubs when he was in Wham!, but for many years he was confused about his sexuality and only fell for men who were married or otherwise unavailable. His first great love was Anselmo Feleppa, a Brazilian fashion designer whom he met while performing at Rock in Rio in 1991: \u2018I was happier than I\u2019ve ever been in my life.\u2019 But Feleppa developed Aids \u2013 and Michael nursed him till his death. His longest relationship was with the art dealer Kenny Goss, but he had already finished with Goss by the time he died. He was found dead in bed on Christmas Day 2016 by his then partner Fadi Fawaz. The initial inquest was inconclusive, but a later one found that he had died of natural causes \u2013 \u2018dilated cardiomyopathy with myocarditis and fatty liver\u2019, probably intensified by substance abuse.<\/p>\n
\u2018If something didn\u2019t work, he\u2019d be slamming into people: get it right or get off\u2019<\/p>\n
Sanghera leaves discussion of Michael\u2019s drug addiction to the penultimate chapter. But surely it explains a great swathe of his career. He always admitted to using marijuana, and even smoked it on camera, though he told the Guardian in 2009 that he\u2019d \u2018cut down from 25 spliffs a day to just seven or eight\u2019. But in the last decade of his life he was repeatedly found in possession of a much stronger drug, GHB, which could explain the many occasions that he was found asleep at the wheel of his car. He was involved in countless traffic accidents and was given a five-year ban from driving, and jailed for eight weeks, in 2010. (My house is just down the hill from his in Highgate and when we found a line of parked cars all smashed up, someone immediately said: \u2018Oh George Michael\u2019s been down again.\u2019) He was always in denial about his drug use, and was furious when Elton John tried to help him, saying: \u2018Elton just needs to shut his mouth and get on with his own life.\u2019<\/p>\n
Sanghera refers to \u2018the intermittent crisis I\u2019ve been having about my George Michael fandom for a year and a half now. Not for the first time I wonder why I\u2019m taking so much time out of my professional life for this topic.\u2019 Quite. But then the singer attracted some unlikely fans. Our esteemed editor Michael Gove performed Wham Rap! on camera in 2015. I think what this book is really about is Sanghera finally getting over his crush and even coming to dislike Michael. He mentions that in the course of writing, he got engaged for the first time, in his forties, to a woman who had barely heard of George Michael. I wonder what his therapist had to say about that? Anyway, it all adds to the general delightful weirdness of this nerdy, passionate, extra-ordinary book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It turns out that the writer Sathnam Sanghera, \u2018The Boy with the Topknot\u2019, has been a besotted George…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":621371,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[22168,210918,9146,210919,210920,210921,2505,96,210922,210923,128,23402,56,54,55,210924],"class_list":["post-621370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-aids","tag-anselmo-feleppa","tag-biography","tag-car-accidents","tag-carless-whisper","tag-cruising","tag-drugs","tag-entertainment","tag-homosexuality","tag-kenny-goss","tag-music","tag-perfectionism","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wham-pop-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=621370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621370\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/621371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=621370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=621370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=621370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}