George Michael: The biography

by Rob Jovanovic

  George Michael

  ‘[Honesty] is my problem. That in itself creates more PR these days because everyone for the past 20 years has been giving pat answers to pat questions. Because there’s this battle going on between left and right, the past and the future, and some people are trying to kick liberalism out of the door. Some of the ideas that I grew up with as being completely ordinary, and if you were an intelligent person it shouldn’t be a question, are now questioned again. The fact that I’m a gay man, and the fact that politically, I’m not afraid to risk my career in terms of speaking my mind, that makes me stand out like a sore thumb.’

  George Michael

  More than 15 years after its release the Faith album was still revered by music critics. In 2003 the album was listed as one of Rolling Stone’s ‘Greatest Albums of All Time’ and the song ‘Faith’ was included in VH1’s 100 Best Songs of the Past 25 Years. But the hip-swinging days of the late Eighties seemed long past when, in March 2003, George Michael made his first live appearance on Top of the Pops for 17 years. Last time, in 1986, he had performed Wham!’s ‘Edge Of Heaven’. Now, introduced by the comedian and writer Ben Elton with ‘He’s a true genius of rock and pop, he’s funky, he’s thought provoking’, he was performing Don McLean’s protest song ‘The Grave’, written by the American years before to highlight his stance against the Vietnam war.

  Michael was informed by the BBC that they wouldn’t allow him to wear a T-shirt printed with the slogan ‘No War Blair Out’. An official BBC statement read: ‘We are not giving George Michael a platform to air his political views, we are giving viewers the fantastic opportunity to see an international star perform on Top of the Pops for the first time in 17 years.’ Someone at the Beeb was missing the point – Michael was only appearing on the show so that he could make a political point. The backing singers also wore the T-shirts and because they didn’t have a change of clothes they were edited out of the broadcast. Despite the clothing snub Michael gave a powerful performance, wearing tinted glasses and perched on a stool. The acoustic and Spanish guitars sounded beautiful against the string section while the singer told the story of a young man’s terror at finding himself on a battlefield.

  Michael certainly didn’t need any more money. The BBC TV show Liquid Assets claimed he was worth £95 million in 2003, adding that his charitable donations had topped £5 million. In 2001 he’d bought a sixteenth-century country house. Located an hour from London, it had previously featured in a painting by Turner. The beamed ceilings, the Aga and the library filled with antique books were a long way from the urban chic of his recent videos. Outside there were extensive gardens and a large pool house where he could relax with Kenny and their two golden labradors; when asked what his most treasured possession was, Goss had replied, ‘My dogs, Meg and Abby, and, of course, George.’

  Michael spent much of 2003 at George Martin’s AIR Studios working on his next album, but progress was slow. Work had been advancing on and off since 1999 but he still had a long way to go. The first fruits of this labour were evident when the comeback single, ‘Amazing’, was released in March 2004. It showed that Michael still had the magic touch when it came to fusing dance beats with soft rock and a slice of white-boy soul. The single hit number four in the UK; in the US it topped the Billboard dance chart but made no impression on the main chart positions.

  The video was simple but effective. Michael is filmed sitting in a room of fresh-faced young people. Everyone wears white and the walls and seating are also white. Then someone puts on a holographic video of Michael dressed in jeans, jacket and shades and playing a guitar, reminiscent of the Faith look. Accompanied by a small band dressed in black, he plays the song via the life-sized 3D transmission while everyone has a good time.

  The long-awaited album finally arrived. Aptly named Patience, it went straight to number one in the UK, knocking Norah Jones from the top spot. In the 14 years between 1990 and 2004 Michael had only released one album of new material, partly because of the court case with Sony. Now, in a one-off deal, Patience appeared on Sony! After securing the payoff from Virgin enabling him to leave Sony, he had now agreed to release his next album with his original label after just one album, Older, had been issued on Virgin.

  After such a long absence the singer knew that he had a lot of ground to make up. He agreed to promote the album through interviews again. ‘I really thought I would never be able to do this again,’ he said. ‘I have gone through so much to get to this album. I have worked through so much depression, fear and anxiety. My life has been like a really bad soap opera for the past 10 years. Everything was going my way. And I was happily marching into the history books, but then it all just fell apart.’ He explained that he’d gone to work at the studios every day but the music just wouldn’t come out. He’d invariably return home no further forward. He just couldn’t create like he could before, and this situation had lasted for the best part of three years. The turning point was reached when he moved back into a house he’d lived in some time before. His mother used to visit the house to clean it and he’d previously written a lot of music there. It was the place that he most closely associated with her during his adulthood. This simple change of scenery did the trick and the songs started flowing again.

  ‘There is something about the vocals on this album that’s a lot more confident, more certain,’ he said. ‘Even though I love Songs From The Last Century and Older, there’s an energy level to this record that I haven’t had since before all this shit started, before I met and lost Anselmo and my mother died. If you think about the energy of “Freedom” on Listen Without Prejudice, I don’t think I had that energy to give again until last year. Which is why “Amazing” reminds me of Wham! more than anything I’ve done. The work I’ve done over the last 12 years might have a certain intensity or depth, but nothing has had the energy of the earlier work. I think it’s come with the relief of feeling good again.’

  To push the album as much as possible Michael went back to the rounds of promotional duties that he’d walked away from almost 15 years earlier. He appeared on TV shows, gave radio interviews and even made personal appearances and shop signings. He hated doing it, but it worked. The album topped the charts and he was in the news again for the right reasons. As part of the promo work, he returned to the Parkinson show for the first time since the one-hour special in 1998, appearing alongside actor Bill Nighy and impressionist Jon Culshaw. The singer, heavily bearded, quickly found himself talking about his sexuality, explaining what a positive experience his coming out had been. Of the eight-year gap between albums of new material he said that even though he’d been ‘on form’ during his last appearance in 1998, the Los Angeles toilet incident had been a subconscious distraction from the grief he was still going through; once the fuss over his arrest had subsided, he had found himself on a downward spiral. While he didn’t have trust in organised religion he did have beliefs, and his spirituality had been damaged to such an extent that writer’s block had taken over. Moving on, he talked about his support for the idea of higher taxation for the rich, and said that he would like to set up a website where people could download his music for free. After all, he said, I don’t need any more money.

  In 2004 Michael agreed to let a camera crew follow him around while he carried out some of his promotional duties for Patience. Part way through the filming Michael became unhappy with the way things were going. In a move characteristic of the control-freak side of his nature, he bought the unfinished film from the production company and completed the job himself, the way he wanted.

  If any other megastar had made such a move you’d expect the finished product to be a fawning portrait of a tortured artist. With George Michael, however, the film became an intimate look at his life, his childhood and the much publicised ups and downs of recent years. The final cut, titled A Different Story, was sold to fans at Michael’s 2006 concerts. He gave plenty of airtime to his detractors; for example, Noel Gallagher is seen saying ‘This
is the guy who hid who he actually was from the public for 20 years, and now all of a sudden he’s got something to say about the way of the world. I find it fucking laughable!’ We also see him meeting up with a follicly challenged Andrew Ridgeley to discuss the Wham! days. In a poignant moment, Michael is asked whose life he would have preferred. He indicates that it would have been Ridgeley’s.

  Much of Patience, including the title track, had been written on the ‘John Lennon piano’, an instrument which was a constant source of inspiration for Michael. The album covered a lot of ground, some said too much – sexual excesses with ‘Freeek’, family matters, boyfriends, the war in Iraq and much more. Trimming it down by a song or two might have been a good idea. At 70 minutes you need a lot of time to take it all in. And some of it isn’t easy listening at first; some of the writing is supremely personal. ‘My Mother Had A Brother’ tackles his uncle’s suicide. ‘When I was 17 my mum sat me down and told me about her brother who killed himself on the day I was born,’ he explained. ‘She told me she thought he was probably gay and couldn’t cope with the family’s situation. So I feel this song is a nice message for my uncle to know that life is so much better now, and if in some way I am his reincarnation to tell him how happy I am and that I share my life openly with a man.’

  ‘Round Here’ deals with both his family’s past and his own childhood, name-checking early musical heroes like the Specials, The Jam and The Beat, whose ‘music fell like rain from the streets’. The CD booklet carried a picture for each song on the disc, and for ‘Round Here’ there is an image of George and his sisters playing as children. ‘Amazing’ shows two gold rings with ‘amore’ etched into them, while ‘American Angel’ unsurprisingly has a picture of Kenny Goss. He also finds room for a song about Anselmo Feleppa, ‘Please Send Me Someone’. The production work is sparklingly clean, perhaps too much so. A rough edge here and there might have given the music a more natural feel.

  George Michael continued his dancefloor and club mix success with the June release of the infectious ‘Flawless (Go To The City)’. The single came out in a host of different mixes including the ‘Shapeshifters Remix’, ‘Hot Fridge Vocal Mix’, ‘Jack ’n Rory Vocal Mix’ and the ‘Boxer Mix’. The video of a hotel room populated by numerous people who had stayed there at various times and were all going about their business at once, unaware of the others’ presence, was nominated for a Grammy in February 2005. ‘Round Here’ completed the single releases for 2004.

  In June 2005 Michael tested the internet market by issuing a download-only single. ‘John And Elvis Are Dead’, a contemplative song about someone waking from a 30-year coma, touches on religion and the fragility of life. The video was soaked in pop culture images, from the 1969 Moon landings and images of the Vietnam war to Phil Daniels in Quadrophenia and clips of The Jam, Blondie and Nelson Mandela – not to mention Lennon and Presley, as mentioned in the title.

  In February 2006 Michael hit the news for all the wrong reasons again. Bumping into parked cars, falling asleep at the wheel, being photographed late at night on Hampstead Heath – he did it all.

  ‘If I’ve had any type of traffic altercation, if I’ve hit their car in any way, people see me and they start to grin because they think, well, I can bump this up a bit!’ he said. ‘The poor people whose parked cars kind of slammed into each other this week, they’ve all been told that they’re welcome to use a hire car and I don’t suppose they’re getting Nissan Micras.’ Michael explained that he was leaving a friend’s house early one morning. Having parked on a steep hill he accidentally bumped into a car which ran into a second one. He drove off and asked someone else to return and get the owners’ details. The press reported that he’d ‘done a runner’; in fact he just wanted to avoid a situation on a public street where newspaper photographers would have been alerted, and what in reality was a very minor incident would have been spread all over the news. ‘By the time I’d sent somebody to get details of what I thought was one incident, the Daily Mail were already there and from that point on it just escalated and escalated. I had people calling my house, people frantically trying to find out whether I was in hospital or not. And I’d literally had a parking accident.’

  He poured more fuel on the press fire when he was arrested by the police after being found asleep at the wheel of his car while waiting at a set of traffic lights. ‘I was at the lights at Hyde Park Corner,’ he laughingly told Michael Parkinson. ‘I don’t know if you’ve ever been at the lights at Hyde Park Corner but it’s quite easy to fall asleep. I don’t know how long it happened for, I guess it was momentary. But I was at the lights, foot on the brake and I must have nodded off like that. I was woken up by a policeman banging on the window, and of course they had to check out whether I was fit to drive. I might not have been out of control but I was asleep! They breathalysed me, I was fine. The ambulance driver who checked me out there and then said I was fine but one of the arresting officers wanted to make sure. So you know they’re doing their job, but the fact that it’s then going to turn into an international incident doesn’t really bother the policeman concerned. So they took me … it was nothing really but again it became a massive drama.’

  While making sure his side of the story was told loud and clear on the chat shows, Michael was quizzed about his relationship with Kenny Goss. As one of the UK’s most famous gay men, with a known long-term partner, it was inevitable that he would be asked whether he was planning to get married. ‘I think we’ll formalise it for sure, because I think from a legal point of view it’s essential to have the same safeguards that straight couples have,’ he said. ‘We’ve been together for ten years, I think we’re entitled to that. I must admit I want a slightly better than 50 per cent chance of success! So I don’t think I’m going to emulate [Elton John’s] marriage in that sense. I don’t think there’ll be a ceremony, we’ll probably do it on our tenth anniversary. I think we’ll just do the formal legal thing and then we’ll have a party. But no one’s going to be getting into a dress. Neither of us have the body for it!’

  George Michael certainly seems to have something of a self-destructive streak. Why else would he constantly tempt a sometimes vicious press pack with the kind of stories that would have ended the careers of lesser men? Hiding his sexuality for years; coming out, literally, in a public toilet; speaking out against the Iraq war; scraping his car and falling asleep at the wheel; they all mounted up in the minds of the press. Then, in July 2006, he was snapped cruising by the ever-reliable News of the World.

  As usual the press were quick to twist the knife. The headline in the News of the World proclaimed ‘GEORGE’S SEX SHAME’, the paper explaining that its ‘investigators’ had ‘caught the singer red-handed and red-faced as he emerged from the bushes after cavorting with a pot-bellied, 58-year-old, jobless van driver’. Why the paper thought it was in the public interest for its reporters to be lurking around Hampstead Heath in the early hours waiting for a possible scoop is anyone’s guess. But this time they got ‘lucky’, going so far as to track down Michael’s alleged partner for the evening in Brighton and pay for his side of the story, which was reproduced in graphic detail.

  When confronted at the scene Michael had been understandably upset, supposedly shouting at the photographer, ‘Are you gay? No? Then fuck off! This is my culture! I’m not doing anything illegal. The police don’t even come up here any more. I’m a free man, I can do whatever I want. I’m not harming anyone.’ A so-called friend was also quoted (anonymously) as saying, ‘We’re really concerned. It’s long been known he’s a heavy cannabis user but we’re beginning to fear the pot may have affected his mind. He’s lost his judgment. He must seek professional help or things could end very badly for him.’ This unconfirmed quote was probably included simply to justify the newspaper’s angle that he was losing his mind because of drugs. ‘Ultimately they’re not life-changing events and the press would like them to be career changing events,’ he said. ‘I’m not the only one that’s being tr
eated like this. You know everyone is being treated like this, they just seem to like playing this game with me.’

  Michael spoke to ITN’s Nina Hussein about his ‘cruising’, but he was upset by her line of questioning and lost his temper. As she wasn’t a member of the gay community, he asked, what did she know about the risks? ‘Even with my therapist, who I’d started seeing when I found out Anselmo was positive in 1991 and I still see today, I talked about everything with him. But I couldn’t talk about the cruising because it was so stupid,’ Michael admitted. ‘He’s an amazing man and he’s helped to change my life. But one of the best things about LA [the park incident in 1998] happening is that I talked to him about that and it stopped it being so covert and compulsive. And fun, if I’m being honest. The compulsion to do something stupid was what kept me doing it. I would tend to do it when I was feeling bad about something. I would tend to do it as a form of self-punishment. I don’t do that any more. I wish to God I could get that excited about it! Don’t knock a bit of guilt. Catholics have the best sex on earth, I’m told.’

  The fallout from these reports was that Kenny had called off their wedding, at least according to ‘a source’ at the Daily Mail. ‘Gay Lover Tells George: The Wedding’s Off’, read the headline on 25 July. As ever George was quick to put the record straight. This time he called Richard & Judy so that he could talk about it live on air. ‘The truth is, the News of the World knows I’ve got no issue with cruising, I’ve talked about it many times,’ he said. ‘So they have to make me look like the gay Wayne Rooney! Much as I don’t want be ageist or fattist, it’s dark up there, but it’s not that dark!’ By this point he had husband-and-wife hosts Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan in fits of laughter. This didn’t sound like a man on the verge of some kind of breakdown.