Georgios also sang at boy scouts’ gang shows but his father was less than supportive, always telling his son that he couldn’t sing and had no talent for music. Being a quiet boy, Georgios just took his father’s words in, though he didn’t believe a word of it.
Georgios was a little too young to be fully immersed in the make-up and transvestite look of the glam rock explosion but he watched the movement from afar. The artist that he really latched on to was Elton John (a snippet of his home recording of John’s ‘Crocodile Rock’ was used in a documentary about the singer years later). In 1974 Georgios was to see his biggest musical hero live for the first time, when Elton played at Vicarage Road, the home of Watford Football Club, to raise funds for the ailing side.
The autumn of 1974 saw Georgios step up to Kingsbury High School on Princes Avenue. The school has a reputation for producing talented and successful musicians and singers: Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts, jazz saxophonist Courtney Pine and Sugababes Keisha and Mutya all attended Kingsbury at one time or another. But Georgios’ brief tenure at Kingsbury didn’t allow much time for the shaping of his musical future. Friends recall that he would often be asked to leave class for being ‘smart mouthed’ to the teachers. He also managed to get himself thrown out of the school choir for talking too much. And at the end of the academic year his father, who was about to open a second restaurant, decided that the family should move house again.
Georgios needed to register for a new school before the 1975–76 academic year. Perhaps mindful of his son’s minor misdemeanours at Kingsbury, Jack wanted to send him to a private school. But Georgios was dead against the idea. Worried that his friends would call him a sissy and that the other pupils would intimidate him, he steadfastly refused even to sit the entrance exam. Jack tried to change his son’s mind, but knew he was fighting a losing battle.
He did, however, manage to convince his son, and his daughters, to take Greek lessons. A scruffy minibus would collect the students via a circuitous route and drop them off at the Saturday morning classes. No Greek was spoken in the Panos household, so Georgios and his sisters were already at a disadvantage when they started the lessons. Most of the other students had a grounding in the language already, but the Panos children were left bemused; the teacher refused to speak any English, so they sat scratching their heads for most of the morning. Once again Georgios did not exactly embrace his father’s culture; at best he seemed indifferent to it. After two years of Greek lessons Jack finally gave up, sparing Georgios and his sisters further Saturday tedium.
With the threat of private school averted, Georgios had six weeks of summer holidays ahead of him before starting at a new state school. The family also moved to Radlett – at least, they bought a house there. The large detached property required a complete facelift, and so they briefly moved into the flat above Jack’s restaurant while the work was carried out. During this time they mainly ate the same food served at the restaurant and Georgios soon found himself piling on the pounds with a diet of steak and chips. He would continue to be self-conscious about his weight all through his adolescence and into adulthood. But the transformation of Kyriacos Panayiotou into Jack Panos was now almost complete; the penniless city-dwelling immigrant was now a relatively affluent inhabitant of middle England’s leafy Hertfordshire suburbs. Mr Jacks restaurant, as it is now called, on Station Road, Edgware, was to become a local institution.
On 9 September 1975 Georgios Panos donned his green blazer and set off for his first day at Bushey Meads comprehensive school in Bushey, Hertfordshire. As a new second-year student, he arrived at the tree-lined front lawn in its pretty suburban setting knowing no one. Wandering down the halls clutching a scrap of paper that told him where to go, he eventually found his new class. His new form teacher asked the sea of pre-pubescent indifference in front of him if anyone would volunteer to take the new boy under their wing and show him around until he became acquainted with his new surroundings. Most of the pupils avoided eye contact with the teacher. But one boy’s face lit up and his hand shot into the air. ‘I will, Miss!’ said the eager pupil. His name was Andrew Ridgeley.
Georgios took his seat next to Ridgeley, afterwards following his new friend religiously from class to class. At the first break, the pair headed to a corner of the playground where a game of ‘King of the Wall’ was taking place. This entailed one child standing atop the brick wall, whereupon everyone else had to try and knock the current ‘king’ from his perch and claim his place for themselves. Ridgeley ran enthusiastically into the heart of the melee and soon found himself as the ‘king’. Georgios, who had never been one for physical sports or games, stood to one side while Ridgeley taunted those at the bottom of the wall, including his new companion. Eventually the new boy had had enough of the jibes and joined in. He was big for his age and managed to battle his way through the crowd and topple his new friend. It was the birth of a lasting friendship.
From day one of their meeting Ridgeley made it clear that he had two aims in life. He was determined to be a professional footballer, and if he didn’t succeed he was going to be a pop star. With Georgios’ vague ambition to be a singer they were an ideal fit. Ridgeley was the perfect friend at the perfect time: Georgios was starting to feel a little inhibited about his looks and size, while Ridgeley was supremely confident and outgoing. ‘I saw him and the way that he was talking about things and I felt that here was someone I wanted to know and be friends with,’ says George Michael. ‘From the moment we met we really hit it off and all we seemed to talk about was music.’ Little did they know it, but this meeting would be the turning point in both their lives. The effect that each would have on the other, in vastly different ways, would set them both up for life.
TWO
AMBITION
1975–1981
am•bi•tion
an earnest desire for some type of achievement or distinction, as power, honour, fame, or wealth, and the willingness to strive for its attainment: too much ambition caused him to be disliked by his colleagues.
the object, state, or result desired or sought after: the crown was his ambition.
desire for work or activity; energy: I awoke feeling tired and utterly lacking in ambition.
‘As a boy my biggest fear was that my huge ambitions would stay just out of reach of the child I saw in the mirror.’
George Michael
Georgios Panos never wanted to be rich and famous. He just wanted to be famous. The money side of fame wasn’t what appealed to him, it was just a by-product of his major goal. Fame would make him the centre of attention, which wasn’t always the case at home, especially as far as his father was concerned. Fame would banish his low self-esteem and his growing self-consciousness about his looks. Fame would give him everything he craved and solve his adolescent problems. All he had to do was become famous and he’d be happy. Or so he thought. He was still an average student and often melted away into a crowd, so the attainment of fame wasn’t going to be easy. But it was made easier by co-opting Andrew Ridgeley into the scheme. Ridgeley was outgoing and confident to the point of cockiness. No new situation seemed to faze him and he seemed super-cool to the relatively shy Georgios.
Even though the Panos family was doing well financially, Georgios was never just given pocket money, he had to earn it by doing chores around the house. Jack Panos was still cautious even though his business was prospering, and never forgot his humble beginnings. He was equally cautious about his son’s education. Having accepted defeat in the bid for a private education, he kept a close eye on how Georgios was adapting to his new school in Bushey. Jack and Lesley were especially wary when Georgios introduced his new friend Andrew Ridgeley.
The Ridgeley and Panos families had quite a lot in common. Albert Mario Ridgeley, Andrew’s father, was raised in Cairo by an Egyptian father and an Italian mother. When his mother died in 1953, at the time of the Suez crisis, Albert jumped on a ship bound for England, just as Jack Panos was doing across the Mediterr
anean. Like Jack, Albert arrived in England penniless. What he did possess was an aptitude for languages. He left Egypt already fluent in Egyptian, English, French and Italian and managed to secure a place at St Andrews University, where he studied German and Russian. On graduation he signed up with the Royal Air Force, serving time in Berlin before returning to a job with Canon cameras in the UK, which is when he met Andrew’s mother Jennifer. They married and had their first son, Andrew, in Windlesham, Surrey on 26 January 1963, six months before Georgios Panos was born. A second son, Paul, followed soon afterwards. When Andrew was five years old the family relocated to Egham in Surrey, not far from Heathrow Airport, and later they moved the 20 or so miles to Bushey where Jennifer worked as a teacher at Bushey Meads school.
Andrew’s exotic good looks came from his father. He seemed to be permanently suntanned, to the point where he was sometimes bullied and called a ‘Paki’. ‘Andy didn’t spend time looking in mirrors because he was absolutely convinced he was gorgeous,’ said George Michael years later. And it was true, Ridgeley walked around as if he was God’s gift. The impressionable Georgios rode on his coat-tails. Though they were only six months apart in age the gap often seemed much wider. The correct pronunciation of ‘Georgios’ is ‘Your-gos’, so Ridgeley called his friend ‘Yog’. Much to Georgios’ dismay, this mutated into ‘Yoghurt’ around the school yard. Georgios was equally dismayed by the teachers’ attempts at his name, which usually got no further than ‘Georg-ee-os’.
Despite having (or perhaps because he had) a teacher for a mother, Andrew was never very interested in school. He was an idle student and could be disruptive in class. Once he realised he wouldn’t make it as a professional footballer he set his sights on being a pop star, and what good was school to a pop star? Aside from the occasional dark-skin jibe, his sartorial elegance and outgoing demeanour made him very popular among his classmates and he displayed a juvenile sense of humour that meshed perfectly with that of Georgios. ‘Neither of us was interested in school beyond the social sense, as a meeting place,’ said Ridgeley. ‘A forum, that’s what school was. That’s when it was really good.’ This attitude endeared him neither to his teachers nor to Jack and Lesley Panos. Georgios’ parents took an instant dislike to Ridgeley when he swanned into their house exuding his most confident aura. Lesley forbade Georgios to be in the house with Ridgeley when she wasn’t home.
The pair spent much of their spare time in the park. ‘I know that one of the places I always went to was the park,’ says Ridgeley. ‘It was a kind of central meeting area for me and all of my friends, and all the girls would go there too. I’d play football there as well at every opportunity that I could. It’s funny to walk around there now and enjoy those memories. I liked the people in the town too, because they weren’t – and still aren’t – pretentious at all. In a way, I’m pleased that I grew up there and not in a huge city.’
For his twelfth birthday in June 1975 Georgios had been given a set of drums by his parents. At the end of his first year at Bushey Meads, he spent the summer holidays with Ridgeley in one or other of their bedrooms, banging away on the drum kit, composing simple ditties and recording them on his little cassette deck. Though at first they were just messing about, Georgios was fast coming around to Ridgeley’s idea of really wanting to be a pop star. David Mortimer was learning how to play guitar and he sometimes joined in. They shared a love of the music of Elton John and Queen. Georgios had long been a fan of Elton John, but Queen were fast becoming his favourites. He was especially taken with the dramatic showmanship of Queen’s front man Freddie Mercury. In 1974 Queen had released their classic album Sheer Heart Attack, which included ‘Killer Queen’ and ‘Stone Cold Crazy’. The following year they toured the world in the costumes of Zandra Rhodes, taking the rock concert spectacle to new highs. The vocal gymnastics of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ cemented the band’s position as one of the most innovative and exciting of the 1970s and secured Georgios Panos as a lifelong fan. Ridgeley and Panos would go into Watford on a Saturday and spend time perusing the record shops for the latest additions to their collections.
Compared with some schools in the suburbs between north London and Watford, Bushey Meads was quite liberal. Though some of their classmates later joined the marines, Andrew Ridgeley described it as ‘a bit of a poof’s school’, which explained why his sometimes over-loud dress sense – years before the New Romantics made dressing up the hip thing to do – didn’t get him a kicking once in a while. On one occasion Ridgeley went out wearing a blue shirt, pink tie and cerise satin trousers, creating quite a stir among his peers. Another time he arrived unannounced at a Panos family New Year’s party dressed in a kilt. But Jack and Lesley had eventually grown to accept Ridgeley. They knew that they had to let their son choose his own friends.
Ridgeley had grown up with a brother and loved hanging around with girls. School discos were his forte. Georgios, on the other hand, felt intimidated by them. With his mother and sisters constantly around him he’d grown comfortable with being around women in a very non-sexual way. The thought of encountering females in any other scenario scared him half to death. By the age of 13 or 14 Georgios would see all his friends making out with each other at house parties and disappearing into bedrooms and bathrooms, while he was left alone feeling depressed and ugly.
After the almost unbearably long, hot, dry summer of 1976 the boys returned to school in September with thoughts of being pop stars etched indelibly into their brains. As usual school offered a stage on which they could have fun; for the most part, lessons passed them by. With the help of his sisters, Georgios was undergoing something of a makeover. His hair was growing into a kind of bushy perm, his sisters plucked and shaved away at his unibrow to give two distinct eyebrows for the first time and he managed to convince his parents to let him wear contact lenses instead of his clunky-looking glasses. He’d already had hopes of being an airline pilot dashed when it was found that he was colour blind. ‘I was fat and ugly and I had glasses,’ he told the Daily Mail in 1990. ‘I also had one big bushy eyebrow. I have now had it treated to make two eyebrows. For years I would try and grow my hair long to cover it.’
Having been a staple of men’s fashion throughout the decade, long hair was on the way out. The Queen’s Silver Jubilee year of 1977 arrived, and so did punk. But Georgios and Andrew had little to rebel against and so the movement passed them by, although Ridgeley did quite like The Jam. The other musical explosion of 1977, however, was disco. This was something that the boys latched on to in a big way, especially the phenomenon of Saturday Night Fever. After its New York debut late in 1977, the film would dominate music for the next year and beyond. Its soundtrack included 17 songs, 11 of which were released as singles and seven of which became number ones. Sales of the album eventually topped 40 million worldwide, keeping it at the top of the charts for 18 weeks while John Travolta was catapulted to superstardom. Most boys wanted to be able to dance like Travolta’s character Tony Manero, and Ridgeley and Panos were no different. They also saw depicted in the film other concerns that they could relate to in their everyday lives: unsupportive parents (at least as far as music went), racial tension, unemployment. No wonder the film and soundtrack were so well received in England.
As well as recording spoof songs and jingles in their bedrooms they would work on ever more elaborate dance routines that they would later try out at the school disco. Georgios was a less natural dancer than Andrew but Ridgeley took the time to teach Travolta’s moves to his friend step by step until he had them nailed down. Sometimes Georgios would babysit for a family across the road: inevitably Andrew would call round and they’d work on their dance routines. As well as the Bee Gees they’d put on records like Quincy Jones’ ‘Stuff Like That’, and as Georgios later admitted ‘we would walk rather stupidly across the room.’ Georgios also started to express his musical leanings at school, where at the end of the 1978 school year he performed a ‘Drum solo: own composition’ before his fellow students.
As Georgios gained in confidence the pair started expanding their horizons. As well as school discos they strayed as far as Bogart’s Club in Harrow where future BBC Radio 1 DJ Gary Crowley hosted disco nights. Around this time Georgios met his first girlfriend, Lesley Bywaters. She told him that she liked his eyes. But Georgios still had a great underlying insecurity and thought she was making fun of him, as he’d only recently given up his glasses. He kept his distance until he realised she really meant it and the two became an item for a while. Georgios would buy her disco records, including Chic’s ‘Dance, Dance, Dance’.
In the 1978–79 academic year Georgios would be sitting his O level exams. A battle of wills was already developing: his father wanted him to progress to A levels and then go to university. He knew how hard he’d had to work for everything and thought that if his son took a degree it would give him a head start up the ladder. Georgios was bright enough to follow this route but he didn’t see it as a way of becoming a star in the music business. In fact he saw another way of making a tentative step on the ladder to success. He started busking.
In what became a regular ritual, Georgios and David Mortimer would skip school on a Friday and head into London armed with a guitar and a small arsenal of songs. By now they’d written a couple of songs of their own and worked out their own versions of songs by Elton John, David Bowie and the Beatles. The best pitches were usually long gone by the time the pair arrived in the morning, but they would nevertheless set up in a tube station for the best part of a day, often Green Park station at the busy intersection of the Victoria, Jubilee and Piccadilly lines. By their own accounts the pair were actually quite good and even made a little money. Sometimes their hard-earned takings would be stolen before the day was over, but they enjoyed performing anyway. Georgios was especially taken with the way that his voice and the acoustic guitar reverberated through the station.
George Michael: The biography Page 3