George Michael: The biography

by Rob Jovanovic

  Michael did grant an interview to the South Bank Show, ITV’s long-running cultural documentary programme, which typically aired late on Sunday night. The show’s presenter, novelist and intellectual heavyweight Melvyn Bragg, talked to the singer on a whole range of topics during the one-hour special. Along with Michael Parkinson, Bragg was to become Michael’s most trusted TV interviewer.

  With no more interviews scheduled, it was time to let the music do the talking. ‘Praying For Time’, selected as the lead-off single from the album, scored yet another Top 10 hit in the UK and another number one in the US. The single, which would also open the album, showed that Michael had been listening to John Lennon’s early solo recordings. The vocal effects, the understated acoustic strumming and the big ideas all harked back to the early 1970s, which was no bad thing. The lyrics dealt with the subject of people going hungry while the rich cover their eyes to the problems of the world. Given his favourable record of contributing to charities, he was one millionaire who could just about get away with singing such lines.

  The album was released soon afterwards and again spawned numerous hit singles, despite limited promotion by either Michael or his label. With its simple piano arrangement, a cover of Stevie Wonder’s 1974 song, ‘They Won’t Go When I Go’, sounded like Michael could have been singing at a Memphis church on a Sunday morning, especially when the impressive backing choir harmonised. It was a live recording too. ‘Something To Save’ was more acoustic guitar pop with a powerful vocal performance, while ‘Mother’s Pride’ hinted at Michael’s later much publicised anti-war stance. The timing was uncanny – just as the album was released, Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army rolled over the border into Kuwait, sparking what would become the first Gulf War. The chugging ‘Soul Free’ sounded a little too indulgent, but the closing ‘Waiting (Reprise)’ ended the album perfectly. Gentle but intensely autobiographical, this final song told of his career to date, the problems he’d faced and why he wanted to change direction. Essentially it was a road map from Wham! to the end of this album: ‘Is it too late to try again? Here I am.’

  ‘With other albums I have been exhausted and by the end, glad they were over. With this one, I felt like carrying on and on,’ he explained. ‘It was a slightly more adult album, but I didn’t feel that Faith was a very young album, I felt that Faith captured a middle ground. And also remembering that most of the people who bought Faith would be three years older, I don’t think that the market I was appealing to was particularly different. I think that the market that I had attracted in Faith, in the United States maybe more than in other territories, a lot of that market was attracted on a visual basis. But musically I didn’t think there was a huge disparity between the two albums.’

  Despite Sony’s initial reservations about the album, critics on both sides of the Atlantic loved it. Awarding a five-star review, Mat Snow reported in Q magazine that ‘George Michael is completely at ease in the studio, detailing the songs with brushwork that is fine without ever distracting from the big picture. Pop LP of the year? Probably. Now roll on Vol 2.’ Rolling Stone’s James Hunter focused in his review on Michael’s shift to a more adult stance:

  For the most part the album succeeds in its effort to establish Michael’s seriousness and deliver him from caricature … This time around, George Michael has begun to think that he should provide something to his fans beyond fun and games. Fun and games at Michael’s level needn’t be underrated, as he sings on ‘Freedom 90’, such stratagems happened to yield a captivating sound for millions of people who like to listen to the radio. On this anxiously titled album, though, he’s operating from the proposition that a damn good sound is only the starting point for how much pop music can achieve.

  Reviews like these helped propel the album to the top of the UK chart, even though it was up against Prince’s new effort, Music From Graffiti Bridge. The album came in a sleeve showing a photo of an insanely crowded beach, and nothing else. No picture of George Michael. No album title. No indication of whose album it was. Nothing.

  For listeners who hadn’t been paying close attention to his growing rift with Sony, the next single, ‘Freedom 90’, with its accompanying video, showed exactly what he was trying to achieve. Whereas Wham!’s ‘Freedom’ had been about not wanting to be set free, ‘Freedom 90’ was just the opposite, trashing industry ideas that a pretty face and an MTV-friendly video were all that was needed to be successful. Michael wanted freedom from his label, freedom to record what he wanted and freedom to promote it or not, however he saw fit.

  The message couldn’t have been clearer. The video cost £300,000 and Michael didn’t even appear in it, instead hiring a bevy of supermodels to lip-synch to his words. In a parody of the opening of the ‘Faith’ video, a CD player is shown in close up as a laser starts to read the spinning disc. On top of the stereo is a CD case for the album. The song begins, and the models, both male and female, walk around a derelict high-ceilinged apartment singing along to a jaunty piano that predates Primal Scream’s ‘Loaded’ by a year. Elsewhere in the film the messages are even more obvious: a Wurlitzer jukebox explodes and the famous BSA leather jacket, suspended on a coat hanger, spontaneously bursts into flame.

  The models used to illustrate his point – including Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington and Tatiana Patit – became the stars of the clip, which received oodles of MTV play. ‘I really enjoyed making the film with George,’ said Cindy Crawford. ‘I don’t pose naked often, but I was quite happy to do it for this video because George made it almost a work of art.’ In September 1991 Michael’s decision to use models in the video was vindicated when it was nominated in five categories at the MTV Video Music Awards.

  The release schedules for the UK and the US crossed over, so that when ‘Freedom 90’ was released in one territory, ‘Waiting for the Day’ was released in the other and vice versa. The latter, a tender, mellow track, faded out with Michael quoting from the Rolling Stones’ ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’, which earned Jagger/Richards a co-writing credit. Michael had discussed the writing of this track with Melvyn Bragg on the South Bank Show, telling the interviewer that he’d sampled James Brown’s ‘Funky Drummer’, slowed down the beat then layered acoustic guitars on top.

  Michael ended the year as the 128th richest man in UK, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, with an estimated fortune of £65 million. Among musicians only Paul McCartney, Elton John and Mick Jagger were ranked higher. But these weren’t his direct competitors, and Michael was struggling to find who he should be benchmarking himself against. ‘I’ve got a real feeling of growth now,’ he explained. ‘Although I’m really proud of this album and I feel it really represents me, I have this completely secure feeling inside me that the next one will be much better. I’ve really learned to relax when I’m making music now. The pressure’s off me. I don’t have to worry about getting to number one, I can just concentrate and enjoy the music. At the moment I’m not in competition with anybody because I have different objectives. In a way I wish that there was someone in the same area that I’m in now so I’d have a sparring partner. But I don’t really feel threatened by anyone. In the first part of my career I was threatened by all the other big pop bands like the Frankies and Duran and in the last period it was Madonna and Jackson and Prince. Now that I’ve made a transition in my head and have moved away from that territory I don’t know who there is to compete with.’

  At the start of 1991 war was looming in the Middle East and on 17 January Operation Desert Storm began. One hundred hours later the Iraqis surrendered and Kuwait was cleared of their presence, although Saddam Hussein was allowed to stay in power, sowing the seeds for further conflict a decade later. George Michael flatly refused to tour the songs of his new album; instead, almost to rub Sony’s nose in it, he decided to set out on the Cover to Cover tour, during which he would sing only cover versions. He explained that he was attracted to the idea of paying homage to songwriters, adding
that ‘As a singer it should be a real joy for me, and playing live has never been a joy for me. I don’t particularly enjoy singing my own songs.’ His choice of covers was quite diverse, oldies from the Doobie Brothers and Gladys Knight rubbing shoulders with Seal and David Bowie. And he sometimes departed from the brief, slipping in ‘Careless Whisper’, ‘Freedom’ and ‘Everything She Wants’ while allowing even ‘Mother’s Pride’ and ‘Freedom 90’ from the new album to get an airing in the encores.

  Midway through these dates he jetted to South America for the massive Rock in Rio festival. This was the second such event, the first in 1985 having featured Queen and AC/DC. Other acts on the 1991 bill at the Maracana Stadium were Guns N’ Roses, Happy Mondays, INXS and Santana. Various bands took turns headlining over the nine nights, A-Ha making the Guinness Book of Records when 195,000 people crammed in on the night they headlined. On the second night, in front of the crowd of 170,000, the largest Michael had played before in his career, Andrew Ridgeley made a guest appearance.

  The most earth-shattering event on the trip, though, was yet to come. Michael was sporting his new short-cropped hairstyle with goatee beard, wearing a leather waistcoat. Brazilian Anselmo Feleppa, a designer at his father’s clothing factory, had front row tickets for each of the shows and managed to catch Michael’s eye, putting the singer off with his attention to the extent that, he later said, he spent more of the show at the other side of the stage. After the show Feleppa managed to get an introduction to Michael at a party on a private island. Meeting Feleppa, Michael said, changed his life.

  For the next six months, explained Michael, he’d never felt better in his life. Feleppa was soon introduced to all of Michael’s friends, though not to his immediate family. Michael said that Feleppa ‘broke down my Victorian restraint, and really showed me how to live, how to relax, how to enjoy life’. The singer had been sleeping with men for several years but this was to be his first lasting relationship. The pair fell in love, and Michael knew that he was on a path that he could never retrace. ‘It’s very hard to be proud of your own sexuality when it hasn’t brought you any joy. Once it’s associated with joy and love it’s easy to be proud of who you are.’

  With no tour to promote, Sony continued to hype the album by issuing as many singles as they could. ‘Heal The Pain’, ‘Cowboys And Angels’ and ‘Soul Free’ were all lifted from the album (‘Soul Free’ was only issued in Australia), none of them making the Top 20. ‘Cowboys and Angels’ was probably too long, at over seven minutes, to make much chart impact.

  On his return from Brazil, Michael continued with his Cover to Cover dates. Once the shows were over CBS still wanted him to tour the US to promote Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1, and still he refused. This time he flew off to spend time with Feleppa on a private yacht off the Brazilian coast. The couple then travelled to George’s Santa Barbara house, as the singer was to be best man at cousin Andros’ wedding in Los Angeles.

  ‘In pursuing stardom, I’ve wasted a lot of time,’ Michael had told The Times in 1990. ‘I don’t think I’d realised how meaningless chasing the celebrity circuit was until I’d taken it as far as I could. In the Eighties you didn’t have to do much more than keep repeating what you had done and, as long as your youth was holding up and you’re not letting anybody down agewise, you don’t have to worry about much more than that. I just wanted the attention of thousands of women, I suppose. I was a very insecure child. Most huge stars are driven by these insecurities. I wasn’t that attractive and I just had this feeling that if I could become a pop star I could make up for my shortcomings. What happened was that at some point I realised I could do a lot more than that – you could take yourself to a level where you are almost untouchable, which, I suppose, is where I am.’ Over the summer he stayed in the States and demoed some material for a possible Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 2, which was eventually scrapped. Instead he turned his attention to the charity project Red Hot & Dance.

  Just five months into their relationship, Anselmo Feleppa confronted Michael with potentially devastating news. It was a terrifying wait and the outcome was not good. The Brazilian was infected with HIV, and Michael might be infected too. Feleppa insisted on being treated in Brazil and Michael spent some time back in the UK.

  Then, on 24 November, the world was shocked when Queen’s Freddie Mercury died at his home in Holland Park, London, officially due to pneumonia-related complications from AIDS. The whole country mourned, not just the millions of Queen fans. The band put out an official statement:

  We have lost the greatest and most beloved member of our family. We feel overwhelming grief that he has gone, sadness that he should be cut down at the height of his creativity, but above all great pride in the courageous way he lived and died. It is a privilege for us to have shared such magical times. As soon as we are able we would like to celebrate his life in the style to which he was accustomed.

  After a lull following the original publicity explosion in the 1980s, AIDS was now front page news once again. Once Mercury’s ashes had been scattered on the shores of Lake Geneva, the music industry went into AIDS charity overdrive. A Concert for Life was organised in which a host of stars paid tribute to Mercury. George Michael joined forces with Elton John to record ‘Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’, with proceeds going to AIDS charities. After Christmas it went to number one on both sides of the Atlantic and raised a bucketload of money, Michael’s donated royalties alone topping $500,000. Queen’s own classic ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was reissued, again to raise money for AIDS charities, and it too went to number one. Michael broke down in tears while being interviewed about Mercury’s death. The interviewer assumed that the tears were for Mercury, and to an extent they were – but they were more for Feleppa and what he was going through.

  Michael travelled to London to spend Christmas 1991 with his family, while Feleppa returned to Brazil. Keeping his innermost feelings and fears to himself yet again, Michael spent the time worrying that the man he loved, the man whose existence was unknown to his family, might be dying. He didn’t even know if he was dying himself. Although he was surrounded by his family it was a lonely time. Even close friends who knew about his relationship with Feleppa didn’t know about the HIV result; the Brazilian had forbidden Michael from telling anyone. His family weren’t even aware that he was gay, though his mother had always privately suspected as much.

  George Michael’s frontline involvement with AIDS charities and fundraising events caused more questions to be raised about his sexuality. No one in the press officially knew about Anselmo but newspapers and magazines prodded and poked for a scoop. Rumours were coming out of America, where a publication was supposedly about to spill the beans. The pressure was growing to such an extent that Michael felt he had to put out a statement of his own: ‘George wishes it to be known that a report emanating in America suggesting he is considering giving an interview about his private life is wholly without foundation and, as in the past, he will not be giving interviews on the subject.’ At least, not for the moment.

  The next, and most memorable, tribute to Freddie Mercury took place at Wembley Stadium on 20 April 1992. Queen played, with a series of vocalists taking the lead. Focused as it was on a single person rather than a cause, the whole event was intensely emotional. George Michael gave a powerful and impassioned performance, not just because of Mercury but because of his hidden feelings for Anselmo Feleppa. ‘It was probably the proudest moment of my career,’ he said. ‘It was me living out a childhood fantasy to sing one of Freddie’s songs in front of 80,000 people.’ It was a bitter irony that while Michael was paying tribute to his childhood hero, the love of his life was secretly going through the same pain.

  George Michael’s next AIDS-related project was the Red Hot & Dance album. This was a follow-up to Red Hot & Blue, released in 1990, on which the likes of U2, Iggy Pop and Erasure had performed covers of Cole Porter songs. The album was filled with remixes of tracks by Madonna, Seal and Lisa Stansfield am
ong others, while Michael donated three new tracks – ‘Too Funky’, ‘Happy’ and ‘Do You Really Want To Know’ – from the shelved Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 2 album.

  Released as a single, ‘Too Funky’ almost was too funky, but not quite. Opening with a sample, ‘I’m not trying to seduce you. Would you like me to seduce you?’ this was Michael’s most danceable track for quite a while. The track drifts close to house music, with samples popping up throughout and Michael taking on various vocal styles. The video, for which he again utilised a gang of supermodels – this time they included Tyra Banks, Nadja Auermann, Estelle Halliday and Linda Evangelista – was set at a fashion show, Michael himself playing the part of a cameraman seated behind a television camera and watching the action from afar. The supermodels were depicted mixing with drag queens backstage and taking it in turns to strut down the catwalk in ever more weird and wonderful creations, including feathery lion manes, a ‘motorbike’ outfit complete with handlebars and rearview mirrors, and a Metropolis-inspired metal robot costume. The video was co-directed by Michael and shot in Paris during early 1992. The single did well, going to number ten in the States and number four in the UK.