When George Michael returned to the UK he was given an entire episode of the Parkinson show to himself. It was the first time he’d appeared on Michael Parkinson’s long-running talk show and as he was announced he received one of the loudest and longest ovations in the show’s history. George, who was in good spirits throughout, started by telling the host how his mother used to let him stay up and watch when he was a child. He humorously added that she might not have been so thrilled that he’d managed to get a show to himself because ‘I had to take my willy out in order to get on!’ He explained that he’d talked about the incident so much to ensure that he wouldn’t have to talk about it in the future. If he ever felt pressured into a position by individuals or history, then he would react against it so he didn’t have to hide inside a walled compound.
The interview was wide ranging and delved deep into Michael’s emotional past. He wasn’t a depressive, he said, but the 1990s had been a decade of loss: Feleppa, the court case, his mother and now his dignity. He said he’d never felt confused about his sexuality, but that a combination of there being so much sex available to a pop star and the fact that he felt underdeveloped emotionally and had never had a real crush or fallen in love at school meant it had taken longer for him to figure things out. ‘The day I knew I was gay was when I knew I was in love with a man,’ he revealed. ‘The confusion ended when I was about 26. I thought that, especially in England, most people had a good idea. The press knew I was gay, but until they could get something nasty they were playing the game.’
Finally he explained that even though in his early twenties he’d wanted to have children, as he got older he’d gone off the idea, thinking he’d feel the responsibility to the point of not being able to do what he wanted to. Basically he’d lost the desire to be a father and having the vocation of music had taken over his sense of purpose.
With that he was gone. Talk of a tour to coincide with the ‘best of’ was shelved and he resumed a more private life, at least for the time being.
The final reply from George Michael in the Will Rogers Park saga was a song he wrote for his ‘best of’, Ladies & Gentlemen. ‘Outside’ is essentially a disco-themed thumbs up to outdoor sex, but it was the video that made all the news. The film opens with a spoof porn movie. A middle-aged businessman washes his hands in a public toilet, watched by a buxom, blonde-haired young lady. As the scene plays, spoof credits in a made-up language appear over the top. The young girl is identified as Heidi Kockenblauer, while the imaginary director is Marchelo Uffenvanken. As the girl pouts her lips, about to kiss the man, she suddenly turns into a wrinkled old female cop and the man is arrested. Police helicopters fly overhead, sirens wail and the man is led away. The dance track kicks in, Philly-esque strings soaring as the clip shows various outdoor acts taking place, including two longshoremen kissing atop a high-rise crane and two men in the back of a pickup truck. Next the grimy toilets of the opening scenes are transformed into a shiny disco as the urinals become coated with mirrors like a glitter ball. A clutch of fake female police officers rip open their shirts to take part in a dance routine with George Michael, resplendent in a police uniform and mirrored shades, every bit the Village People extra.
‘Outside’ was just one of the non-album tracks included on Ladies & Gentlemen. Stevie Wonder’s ‘As’ with Mary J. Blige, ‘Desafinado’ with Astrud Gilberto and ‘Too Funky’ were just some of the extras that bulked the collection up to an impressive 29 tracks over two CDs. The first disc was designated ‘for the heart’, while the second disc, containing the more danceable songs, was titled ‘for the feet’.
To tie in with this greatest hits release, Michael agreed to do the media rounds. His appearances were also masterminded to continue the rehabilitation of his image. On 9 November he appeared on the long-running and highly rated Late Show with David Letterman, filmed at the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York City. Michael was the first guest of the night and his host was clearly not up to speed with the singer’s recent past. First he was confused as to whether Michael had been on the show before. ‘Well excuse me, you should know, shouldn’t you?’ asked Michael. ‘Is this your first time on the show?’ Then he thought the Los Angeles toilet incident had been a year ago, rather than seven months. Finally he asked Michael to sing, which wasn’t in the programme.
But there was only one topic that Letterman really wanted to talk about – Will Rogers Park. When he asked directly what had happened, Michael replied, ‘This is the nicest way I can put it. I will put it this way and I don’t want to be graphic and nasty. He played a game called I show you mine and you show me yours, then I will take you down to the police station. Actually the police report says that he was trying to simulate urination. Now excuse me, how do you simulate urination and make no noise? If you tried to simulate urination doing that with your hands you would get wee all over the shop! Don’t try it at home, folks. Actually, try it at home. You are safe there!’
Through the first half of 1999 George Michael kept his own counsel. In October he made a brief appearance at the Net Aid concert, organised to raise money for refugees, but he spent most of his time working on an album of cover versions with producer Phil Ramone, who had produced everyone from Bob Dylan to Rod Stewart, Frank Sinatra to Madonna. The album, Songs From The Last Century, was released in December. A mix of old and new standards, it drew lukewarm reviews but went to number two in the UK chart, backing up Michael’s assertion that reviews never affected his sales figures. The lead-off track, ‘Brother Can You Spare A Dime’, had originated in the 1932 musical New Americana, though Bing Crosby had been famous for singing it. The George Michael version was cool and jazzy, which suited his voice, and a similar style was employed on the Police’s ‘Roxanne’, which was all brushed drums and upright bass. This track had a video prepared for it. Opening with the message, ‘This video was filmed in the red light district of Amsterdam. None of the people featured are actors. We thank them for their spirit and goodwill’, the clip shows a group of prostitutes walking around in their underwear outside a townhouse on a city street. At the end of the film we’re told that the black prostitute identified as ‘Roxanne’ has since retired from the business.
‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’ was presented as a big band swing number, but it didn’t quite work and his vocal style didn’t fit. On the other hand, Roberta Flack’s ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ could have been written specifically for Michael. ‘I Remember You’ was recently done better by Björk, but the big band ‘Secret Love’ was a success. Overall the album was a mixed bag that didn’t test Michael’s abilities enough to satisfy.
As the twenty-first century dawned, George Michael hadn’t written an album of new material for four years. He was in a happy relationship, Ladies & Gentlemen was still selling well and Songs From The Last Century hadn’t been out for long. There was no real pressure yet, but he was having trouble writing new songs.
Publicly 2000 was a quiet year for Michael. In April he performed alongside Garth Brooks and Melissa Etheridge at Equality Rocks, a gay and lesbian rights fundraiser in Washington DC.
One way in which he did make the news headlines was at an auction. In October the piano on which John Lennon had written ‘Imagine’ was being sold. This wasn’t the white grand piano made famous by the video clip of the song set at Lennon’s home in Tittenhurst Park, but the upright which could be seen during the sessions in the film Gimme Some Truth. The bidding opened at £500,000 and George Michael, via phone, was not the only celebrity bidder; Noel Gallagher and Robbie Williams were also in the running. After they dropped out at the £1 million mark, Michael eventually placed the final bid of £1.45 million, making it the most expensive musical instrument in history. But Michael didn’t hide it away. As well as later using it to compose songs, he shipped it to the USA in 2006 as part of an anti-war exhibition being staged by Kenny Goss, the first time the piano had been taken outside the UK. ‘We decided to do it in Dallas, because what better place is there to rei
terate how important peace is?’ said Goss. ‘Dallas is George Bush’s home. It’s a great place to remind people how important it is to find peace.’
Through 2001 Michael continued trying to write. He’d go to the studio, work a little, then go home, usually without having made much progress. He was following this routine in September when, on the 11th, he watched on a TV at the studio as the World Trade Center came crashing down. ‘[My producer] ran in and said, “You’re not going to believe what you’re about to see”. When I saw it, it was just after the first plane had hit, so it just looked like a tragic accident. Then the second plane hit and everybody in the studio realised it was deliberate and started to freak out. Within an hour, apart from being as terrified as everybody else, I was just totally freaked out that what I had been writing about was happening in front of my eyes.’ He was moved to tears as the TV images grew worse and worse. He’d been working on a new song that addressed the mess that the world found itself in in the new century, called ‘Shoot The Dog’. ‘I cried simply because it was such a shocking, sickening attack on humanity, you know, beyond any callous acts that you could ever remember. It was just the worst thing to even conceive of doing something as evil as that. But I felt confused because I’d written this song for a reason, but now the reason was very puzzling. I certainly didn’t want to look opportunistic, so I sat on the song and didn’t know what to do with it.’
It would be a further six months, in March 2002, before he showed his fans he’d started to break through his writer’s block with the release of ‘Freeek!’ Concerning futuristic sex, in a blend of dirty urban beats, this heavy bump ’n’ grind single was nothing like Michael had ever written before. Was this going to be the new direction on his next album or merely an experiment? If it was the latter, it was an expensive one. He reportedly wrote a cheque for £1 million for the video, half of that being spent on the computerised visual effects. This price tag outdid even the costs of the videos for ‘Fastlove’ (£250,000) and ‘Outside’ (£500,000). In a Blade Runner-esque cityscape employing effects similar to those featured in the Spice Girls’ 1997 ‘Spice Up Your Life’ video, Michael wears a number of giant rubber outfits while a host of weird sexual encounters take place in front of the viewer. The fetish outfits in ‘Freeek!’ were Michael’s take on the commercialisation of extreme sexual imagery. This made him angry, he said, hence the full-on song.
The Sunday Express 2002 Rich List revealed that Sir Paul McCartney was Britain’s first ‘pop billionaire’, supposedly worth £1.1 billion, with George Michael ranked in the top ten and said to be worth a whopping £210 million. With that kind of money in the bank he could be forgiven for not worrying too much about future earnings; he might feel that he had the financial freedom to do and, importantly, say what he thought. Though in the past he’d supported causes such as the families of striking miners, famine in Africa and gay rights, he’d never spoken to the press directly. Instead he’d let his music do the talking, quietly making financial contributions where he saw fit. Now for the first time Michael started speaking out on political issues.
By the end of 2002, more than a decade after the first Gulf War, the situation in Iraq was becoming a cause for concern to the USA, the world’s last remaining superpower. United Nations inspectors had been playing a game of cat and mouse with Saddam Hussein while they looked for his weapons of mass destruction. It was becoming clear that Tony Blair and George W. Bush were set on a course of war, and in March 2003 the second Gulf War began with the invasion of Iraq by a western coalition. George Michael had spent the months leading up to the war talking to as many press outlets as he could about the situation, taking part in heavyweight political discussions like the BBC’s Hardtalk with Tim Sebastian, as well as speaking to Sir David Frost and appearing on everybody’s favourite teatime television show, Richard & Judy. And in May 2002 he’d finally released the song he’d been working on about 9/11, ‘Shoot The Dog’. But he had reckoned without the backlash that he would experience for speaking out on the war, both for his views and for the fact that he’d dared to air them.
The ‘Shoot The Dog’ video seemed to cause offence to some. A cartoon produced by the people behind 2DTV, the clip lampoons both the US government and Tony Blair’s sycophancy towards it. The opening scene shows George W. in the Oval Office being lectured by one of his generals using a sock puppet, while Blair himself is the ‘dog’ in question; to the refrain of ‘good puppy, good puppy’, Bush throws a ball for Blair to fetch on the White House lawn. The cartoon isn’t without a dose of self-deprecating humour. Michael enters the scene from a gents’ toilet with a shuttlecock down his trousers before joining Bush and his general in a cheesy dance routine. He also appears as a Homer Simpson clone – in fact he appears as the whole Simpson family, complete at one point with towering Marge Simpson hair. He later rides a missile into the Blairs’ bedroom where he encounters Cherie in bed, while Tony attaches an outboard motor to a map of the British Isles and floats it across to America.
‘I simply wanted to write a song that said to everybody, “People, let’s be aware of this situation and understand that there’s some very pissed-off people out there and that America – and us, for that matter – need to start to listen to them a little”,’ he said. ‘I see politics in very human terms. In other words, even though there is a lot of complication and complexity to politics, what it really boils down to is human reaction between different factions, at least when you’re talking about the possibility of war.
‘I just hope that this record helps in a tiny way to consolidate the idea that we don’t automatically do as we’re told in terms of our relationship with America. This is the most political thing I’ve ever done and it’s a massive and totally unnecessary risk for me. I don’t know how it will go down, particularly in America. But it’s important to me that I should be free to express myself. This is the first time I’ve really had the guts to go for something knowing I might get critically savaged for it. There’s always been this nagging worry of people saying, “Look, mate, you’re a rich pampered pop star – what the fuck do you know about it?” But now I feel confident enough to just go for it. And I should have a right to say these things without being ripped to pieces.’
He was correct on all counts. He obviously did have the right to air these views, and millions of people agreed with him. But he was also battered by the press and criticised for speaking out as a pop star, even by other pop stars. Noel Gallagher was one of those to question Michael’s outspoken attitude. He was also right about the US reaction. The final nail had been hammered into the coffin of his American career, even though he always maintained a hard core of about a million US fans. ‘I was perfectly aware of the repercussions, but I have had a non-career in the US for so long it didn’t matter. I think they see me as a communist fag over there,’ he said.
As ‘Shoot The Dog’ was released, Michael gave an interview to Piers Morgan at the Mirror. ‘I know this is dangerous territory,’ he said. He admitted that he’d spent years discussing such issues over dinner tables but only now could he give his ideas more public expression. ‘I really feel this is such a serious time for us all that being silent is not an option. I was moping around the house, smoking spliffs, drinking too much and watching a load of serious late-night television like Question Time and Newsnight because I couldn’t sleep. And I noticed a lot of stuff about the growing fear of a war between the secular world and the fundamentalist world. It was something I’d never really thought about but the more I learned, the more fearful I became that it might happen, and that Britain might be caught right in the middle of it. Tony Blair was being seen as America’s strongest ally at a point when the Middle East was feeling increasingly bullied by the West, and America in particular, and when many developing countries were getting their hands on some serious weapons of destruction. I very rarely agree with anything I read in the tabloids but I did agree with a lot of your stuff. If we just storm in there now there’ll be a disaster that wi
ll destroy any chance of stability in that region for a very, very long time.’
Elsewhere he was given an hour on MTV and took part in a debate with Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith on BBC Radio Five Live. Ultimately, as the war went ahead, Michael stopped watching the news programmes and reading the papers. In 2006 he said, ‘As the years go by Mr Blair is making [‘Shoot the Dog’] a word perfect protest song.’
The battering Michael took over his anti-war stance pushed him close to the edge. Even his closest advisors feared that he might have brought his commercial career to an end. ‘It was so stupid not to expect what I got, not just on a political level but on the level of “listen, these people don’t like you, they find it hard enough taking it coming from a pop star let alone one they think is too snotty to talk to them in general”. I knew that a lot of these papers were centre-left and actually agreed with me but they were still jumping up and down on me. So I did start to take that personally.’ Suffering from a media backlash and without a new album for the last seven years, he was going to have to make one heck of a comeback.
TEN
SURVIVOR
2003–present
sur•vi•vor
a person or thing that survives.
Law. the one of two or more designated persons, as joint tenants or others having a joint interest, who outlives the other or others.
a person who continues to function or prosper in spite of opposition, hardship, or setbacks.
‘I’ve suffered this kind of wishful thinking from the press, the subtext to it is, “Well, he was all right before he came out and now he lives this depraved gay life and he’s miserable and fat, right?”’
George Michael: The biography Page 17
