George Michael: The biography

by Rob Jovanovic

  Their musical inspiration came from records and clubs rather than from seeing live bands. Going to see bands didn’t always appeal to the boys and anyway, they couldn’t afford it. ‘The only thing we really had to go on was the records we’d been collecting for years,’ explained George Michael. ‘In a way, we were quite untainted by any performing bands because we didn’t go to watch many. The fact that we were later on the dole for quite a time meant that we didn’t have the necessary cash to be able to finance any expensive equipment for ourselves either in the way of instruments or recording gear.’

  ‘We were also fortunate in having a few friends who had some better recording gear than us and we occasionally went there or borrowed it,’ adds Ridgeley. ‘Most of the day was spent writing and trying to rehearse our own compositions. We knew that if we were to stand any chance of landing a recording contract with one of the major companies then it would have to be on demos of our own compositions and not cover versions. You need to be able to show them that you are capable of sustaining some kind of creative output.’

  In February they took the plunge and paid the princely sum of £20 to hire a Portastudio (a small, portable recording set-up). The owner came included in the price, and that morning he arrived at the Ridgeley house and set up his equipment in the living room. The boys had planned to record demos of three songs during the day, using a Doctor Rhythm drum box as their electronic backing band. Paul Ridgeley joined them to sing backing vocals on the first track, ‘Wham Rap!’. Compared to the released version this demo was much harsher and included a fair amount of swearing. Singing into a microphone strapped to a broom handle, things took longer than anticipated and they’d barely finished ‘Wham Rap!’ when Jennifer Ridgeley arrived home from school. This brought a break in proceedings. No sooner had they started on the second song, ‘Careless Whisper’, than Albert Ridgeley came home from work and things ground to a halt once again. But by the end of the day the £20 had managed to buy them one complete song, even if it was just a rough demo, and about a minute of another.

  Copies of the tape were quickly run off so Georgios and Andrew could start shopping it around every record label they could think of. With no manager or agent they did all the leg work themselves, usually turning up at label offices unannounced. On their arrival the duo would act businesslike and professional, telling the receptionist that they had an appointment booked. She would invariably look at her notes; not seeing their names, she would say that they didn’t. The boys would slowly start to lose their patience, insisting that they did have an appointment and that it wasn’t their fault she had made a mistake. On most occasions the ruse worked and someone would come out and see them.

  They would then sit in a room while the label representative listened to the tape. Time after time the tape would play for less than 30 seconds before it was stopped and they were told, thanks but no thanks. ‘I had been trying to get a deal with either a publisher or a record company for roughly two years,’ George Michael told the Chancery High Court in 1993. ‘I went to many record companies, but the only ones I remember are the major ones. I went to Chrysalis, A&M, EMI, Virgin. I don’t actually recall all the names of the various companies I went to. Basically the A&R departments showed no interest and I played tapes of demos and they weren’t interested.’ Virgin’s response was, ‘Oh no, not another synthesiser band!’ Other labels were equally unimpressed. The hopefuls skulked back to Watford.

  In later years George Michael was asked why he hadn’t formed Wham! with David Mortimer. The simple answer was that they’d have killed each other if they were working together constantly. They would both have tried to take control. Andrew Ridgeley, on the other hand, was a perfect fit for Georgios. And Mortimer had less faith than Ridgeley in his friend’s writing ability. About to set off on a trip to Thailand, he told Georgios that if his songs were any good they would have been signed up already. Georgios ignored him and went back to work on two more new songs, ‘Club Tropicana’, which he wrote with Ridgeley, and ‘Come On!’. By the time Mortimer got back from his trip a record deal was in place.

  The duo had finally managed, through a slightly circuitous route, to catch the ear of Mark Dean with the new songs. A friend of Andrew Ridgeley’s was playing in The Quiffs, the same band which had earlier rejected Georgios as a drummer on account of his looks. The band knew Dean, and persuaded him to listen to the tape. It was a big improvement on the demo by The Executive that he’d previously rejected. Agreeing with Georgios that they needed to spend £200 on re-recording the two songs plus some new ones in a real studio, he offered to sign Wham! on the spot.

  Dean’s stock in the record industry was on the rise. He’d signed Soft Cell and ABC, achieving great success with both. Soft Cell’s ‘Tainted Love’ had reached number one in August 1981 and was followed up with a number four hit, ‘Bedsitter’. Along with the Human League, ABC led the New Romantics coming out of Sheffield and had chart success of their own, culminating with three top ten hits in 1982, ‘The Look Of Love’, ‘Poison Arrow’ and ‘All Of My Heart’. On the back of these successes Dean had a growing reputation and with it some bargaining power. He managed to broker a deal with American giants CBS to launch his own label, called Innervision. Wham! would be his opening gambit.

  Dean had held his initial meetings with Wham! in borrowed offices on South Molton Street, and the band were unaware of the tightrope he was walking in order to start his own company. To facilitate a speedy launch Dean had borrowed £150,000 from CBS to use as artist advances. CBS would handle the new label’s distribution and put up another £75,000 to enable Innervision to pay for professional studio time. But all this would have to be paid back to the corporation from any future earnings that the label might make. The small print on the contract between the labels showed that CBS would certainly be protecting its investment. Innervision would be paid a royalty of 15 per cent, based on sales, but out of this figure Dean would have to pay royalties to the artists, usually in the region of 8 per cent. CBS also said that if they advertised any Innervision product on TV they would only pay half the agreed fees to help cover the cost of the commercials.

  By March 1982, with his father’s words of ultimatum – ‘Get a label, get a job or get out’ – echoing in his head, Georgios was willing to sign with almost anyone who showed an interest in the band. Innervision’s offer was the only one on the table, even if it did say they’d get 0 per cent royalties on sales of 12-inch singles. On 24 March Wham! were at the Halligan Band Centre in Holloway recording professional demos of their best songs with a backing band. Georgios was blown away by the version of ‘Careless Whisper’, with a full band and saxophone, that was played back to him along with ‘Club Tropicana’ and the brand new ‘Young Guns (Go For It!)’. He felt that they had the makings of something big. But later that day he effectively signed it all away.

  Mark Dean met them at the studio and, obviously aware of how good these songs were, insisted that they sign the contracts right away. They went to a café round the corner where Dean explained that due to upcoming CBS release schedules they had to sign that very afternoon, there was no time to get the contracts checked out properly. He offered them £500 each, set against future earnings, and they signed on the dotted line.

  ‘Mark Dean was just as green as we were,’ George Michael said later. ‘I think he got turned over by CBS to a certain extent. Obviously he wanted to get his company off the ground via us, and he had a good track record.’ The contract tied them in for a series of five albums in five years, or if they split, a further ten solo albums each. But Georgios didn’t care about the money or the details, he just wanted to be famous. There was no big party or celebration after signing the deal. Georgios celebrated his £500 windfall by going out and getting his ear pierced.

  Back in 1982 there was no internet to get a buzz going about a new band. No MySpace. No YouTube. So CBS came up with the idea that Wham! should make a series of club appearances to try and establish an underground follow
ing. Each Friday and Saturday evening a female CBS rep would pick the boys up and they’d be spirited around four or five nightclubs. To boost their numbers Andrew Ridgeley asked Shirlie Holliman to join them as a dancer, and 16-year-old Mandy Washburn made it a foursome. The quartet would arrive at a club, perform energetic dance routines while miming to a couple of Wham! tracks and then give out some free records.

  Some clubs were instantly forgettable, others were more famous. At the Level One club in Neasden the group found that there was no stage and everyone in the venue crowded round to watch the dance routine. At another club Georgios’ microphone came unplugged and he was jumping around with the wire dangling behind him, making it obvious even to an inebriated audience that he wasn’t singing live. During an event at Stringfellow’s he performed a high kick and his slip-on shoe shot out over the heads of the crowd; to make it look as if he meant it, he had to kick the other into the audience too. He spent the rest of the performance trying not to slip over in his bare feet.

  Trying your hardest to garner some enthusiasm when a bunch of drunken clubgoers just wanted to fondle the women and drink lager didn’t always work. Yet, despite the often lukewarm responses they received, this was a valuable learning experience for them all. Much more demanding than merely bopping around in their bedrooms to a cassette tape, it was important preparation for a possible TV appearance in the future.

  The first Wham! single, ‘Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do?)’, was released in June 1982. It had been recorded with Bob Carter, whose stock was high after working on Junior’s hit single ‘Mama Used To Say’. Carter brought in members of the band who played on that single. Along with David Austin, Paul Ridgeley again added backing vocals. The song depicted the world as they saw it. It was hardly a rap as we know it today, more of a spoken word introduction before a heavily synthesised backing track kicked in. Stuttering Haircut 100-esque guitars washed over a funky beat while Georgios – expressing Andrew Ridgeley’s attitude more than his own – sang of choosing to be on the dole rather than get a job. Hand claps, a brass section, chanted vocals – the track had it all.

  The video was almost a narrative take of the song lyric. Georgios is seen getting dressed in a white T-shirt and black leather jacket before walking round to the Ridgeley house, where Andrew’s parents are telling him to get out and get a job. Then there is footage of the band and girls on a white stage, with the name ‘Wham’ on a large screen behind them. The foursome perform a choreographed dance, just as they had in the clubs.

  It had been the group’s humorous take on rap, but the news in spring 1982 cast everything in a more serious light. Argentina had laid claim to the Falkland Islands in March and many lives were lost before the Argentines’ surrender on 14 June. The song’s mention of the dole and the DHSS, a major social problem, took away any humour as far as the majority of the press was concerned and most writers looking for an angle picked up on the topic of unemployment. Future Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant, writing in Smash Hits, cut right to the core of the record when he said it was a ‘hard, hot and witty rap … real excitement, hundreds of ideas, built in participation and maximum humour’. ‘Wham Rap!’ was even chosen as single of the week in Sounds.

  The group, though less than a year old, was already starting to make changes. Mandy Washburn decided she was better off pursuing a career as a hairdresser but was soon replaced by 20-year-old Diane ‘Dee’ Sealey (aka Dee C. Lee). And Georgios Panayiotou decided to adopt the name George Michael. The first part – an anglicisation of Georgios – was easy, while the surname came from a favourite uncle called Michael. But the change came too late for the initial pressing of ‘Wham Rap!’. The credit on the record read ‘Panos/Ridgeley’.

  Peter Powell was the first DJ to play a Wham! record on BBC Radio 1, but ‘Wham Rap!’ didn’t sell well and stalled at number 105 in the UK chart. Mark Dean knew someone who was going to Corfu later in the summer to take photos of holiday villas for a brochure and managed to get Ridgeley and Michael tagged along on the trip. Once on the island they had some promotional photos taken which would mould their image for the next few years: fit and healthy, well-tanned, good-looking teenagers up for a good time. George Michael was looking especially well, having lost weight due to the energetic dance routines they’d been performing several times a night for months.

  Next up was another semi-rap tune, ‘Young Guns (Go For It!)’. Recorded with ABC producer Steve Brown, one of Mark Dean’s connections, the song opens with a dramatic keyboard part, building to another spoken-word intro by George Michael. The lyric then bounces back and forth in a conversational style between two friends as they disagree about settling down young, a fate referred to as ‘death by matrimony’. Again the song was written from experience, this time that of seeing old school friends settling down while the pair were out having fun.

  The video, directed by Tim Pope, perfectly captures the conversations. It’s set in a nightclub (where else?), the exchanges between George and Andrew taking place on the dance floor and at the bar. Then Shirlie Holliman arrives to disrupt the beautiful friendship before the band hit the dance floor for the usual choreographed moves. George wears his regular uniform of black leather jacket and white T-shirt, updating the James Dean/Marlon Brando image for the 1980s. ‘When we began working on it and putting the whole thing down on tape,’ said Michael, ‘we could see from the way that it was working out that it was much more than just a straightforward song. The lyrics and the entire structure of the thing presented its way to us more in the format of a small playlet. There was a kind of conversation that was going on and so Andy, Shirlie and I put it across that way and did the video that accompanied it in the same way.’

  This second single breached the Top 100 in October. Airplay snowballed and it continued to rise but CBS, not expecting such interest after the relative failure of ‘Wham Rap!’, literally ran out of records and it stalled while more were pressed. In the meantime Wham! were given their first TV exposure with a slot on Noel Edmonds’ Saturday morning kids’ TV vehicle, Multi-coloured Swap Shop, getting their break because the show’s producer had seen one of their earlier appearances at Stringfellows.

  The importance of appearing on Swap Shop shouldn’t be underestimated. But the biggest break came when one of the acts due to appear on Top of the Pops made a late withdrawal. The spot had to be filled quickly and Wham! got the call, even though ‘Young Guns’ was not yet a big hit and was nestled at number 42.

  With no MTV in the UK and only four TV channels to watch – BBC1, BBC2, ITV and the newly launched Channel 4 – any exposure on a music programme was guaranteed to give an artist a massive new audience. This was doubly true when that programme was Top of the Pops. The show, presented by BBC Radio 1 DJs, was fast approaching its 1,000th episode and its traditional Thursday night slot on BBC1 had become a British institution. Having closely studied the show all his life, George Michael knew what went to make a successful appearance.

  The show was filmed on a Wednesday before being aired at prime time on Thursday evening. Innervision decided that they should book the band into a hotel near the studio so that there was no chance they would be late for the recording. So Michael and Ridgeley spent the night before their debut Top of the Pops appearance in a crummy little hotel just off Charing Cross Road where rooms cost less than £1 per night. To make matters worse, Michael had to sleep on a child-size bed with polythene sheets, his legs sticking out of the bottom.

  Though it was far and away the most important British pop music programme, as it had been since the 1960s, Top of the Pops had always courted controversy as to whether acts performed live in the studio or mimed. In the early days of the show, acts mimed to the recorded version of their song. Later a backing track was used, accompanied by a live in-the-studio orchestra and live vocals, before in 1980 performers again began miming to pre-recorded tracks. Wham! had no problem miming, which would simply be a recreation of their club routine.

  The 4 November show was also the Top
of the Pops debut for DJ presenter Mike Smith. He’d been fast-tracked from hospital radio to London radio station Capital, joining Radio 1 in 1982, and now he was to make his TV debut. Dressed in a knitted blue grandad-style jumper, he opened the show enthusiastically: ‘It’s the first chart of November, it’s my first Top of the Pops, it’s their first Top of the Pops …’

  The acting out of parts in ‘Young Guns (Go For It!)’ fit perfectly into the TV format. The conversational style, facial expressions and dance moves were all well honed. George Michael wore a sleeveless brown leather jacket with the collar turned up over his bare shaved chest, and with his tanned complexion and shin-length jeans he was the picture of young vitality. Andrew Ridgeley wore a more conservative combo, his patterned shirt tucked into his jeans. He danced with Shirlie Holliman, who had bleached blonde hair and wore an angular white dress cut to knee length at the back but barely crotch length at the front. Michael partnered D.C. Lee. The studio crowd was in full party gear – pork pie hats, belted dresses, big hair, flicks, rah-rah skirts, vests and braces. During the performance George turned to David Austin, who was on stage miming a guitar part, and said, ‘This is it. This is the rest of my life.’