There’s a lovely, apposite story about George Michael that surfaces from time
to time. When they were teenagers, he and Andrew Ridgeley (later his partner
in Wham!) used to frequent parties around Bushey, Hertfordshire. Michael,
then a chubby, hirsute young man, was often ushered home by the gawkily
handsome Ridgeley, mortified by his lack of luck with the opposite sex or,
indeed, his own. According to one of Michael’s old friends: “Andrew spent a
lot of time consoling him — he was not a catch.”
Michael, born Yorgos Kyriatou Panayioutou (which explains his nickname Yog) in
June 1963, is one of pop’s most fascinating and cussed characters and an
endearing collection of opposites. He is lusted after by women of all ages
(my 47-year-old sister is still desperately in love with him) but gay; a
writer of some of the best frothy pop music made, who yearns for serious
critical approval; he’s hugely wealthy but determinedly left-wing;
resolutely private yet capable of the recklessness that saw him nabbed for
“lewd behaviour” in a Los Angeles public lavatory.
The stakes are high for Michael’s long-awaited new album, Patience
(yes, he does possess a sense of humour). Slipping from superstardom, he has
become a peripheral figure in American pop thanks to a mediocre covers album
and an anti-war single that outraged Middle America.
But Michael has a knack of coping with adversity. There are few who cannot but
applaud the way he came out fighting once he was “outed” in 1998. The
episode inspired his best song for years, the viciously funny and funky Outside
(“I think I’m done with the sofa/ I think I’m done with the hall/ I think
I’m done with the kitchen table, baby/ Let’s go outside”). “Yes, I’m gay,”
he seemed to be telling the world, “So what?” But if “So what?” then why all
the previous obfuscation? The forthcoming album is the first set of new
songs since 1996’s Older (we’ll gloss over the appalling 1999
covers set, Songs from the Last Century).
But for a man who has sold more than 80 million records, you have to wonder
why he’s putting himself through the whole process again. It may just come
down to a need to be loved. The chubby lad who hated parties and being an
outsider still craves validation.
In the early days of Wham! Michael tried to subsume his inferiority complex,
and his hatred of being homosexual, by being a teenybop sex symbol, complete
with tight white outfits, shuttlecocks crammed down shorts.
Since Wham! disbanded, Michael’s desire to be taken seriously has led him to
renounce pop. So he has often buried his ability to write songs as
life-affirming as I’m Your Man, Club Tropicana, Everything She Wants
and Bad Boys, and settled for Sting-like mediocrity, with bilge such
as Praying for Time and Cowboys and Angels.
When Wham! was formed from the ashes of the ska band the Executive in 1981 it
all seemed so simple — and Michael has said that it was the happiest time of
his life. The band split in 1986, after Michael had already enjoyed a solo
No 1 with Careless Whisper. Wham!’s then manager, Simon Napier-Bell,
was ostensibly to blame for the break-up after he sold his management
company to an organisation with strong links to the whites-only Sun City
complex in South Africa, something the socialist Michael would not stand
for.
In truth, Michael was already yearning to shed his teenybopper following and
establish himself as a singer-songwriter. The immediate result, 1987’s
brilliant Faith, effortlessly bestrode pop, AOR, R&B and dance
music and went on to sell 16 million copies in America alone.
For his next project, however, the unbearably portentous Listen Without
Prejudice Vol 1 (1990), he refused to play the marketing game. He would
not appear on the cover or in any of the videos. He refused to do interviews
(to this day he rarely speaks to the media). Understandably his American
masters at Sony were not happy with an approach that saw Michael swiftly
shed half his fanbase (the album sold a “mere” eight million in the States).
The two parties fell out and Michael sought to extricate himself from the
contract. He failed, a defeat that cost him about $5 million, but his
contract was soon bought out by Dreamworks and he set to work on Older,
an album that would make Listen Without Prejudice sound like the
Cheeky Girls.
The first real signs of Michael’s true sexuality became evident on Older.
Jesus to a Child, a genuinely moving tribute to his first big love,
Anselmo Feleppa, who had died in 1993 of a brain haemorrhage, was a huge
hit.
The next eight years were not much kinder to the man his friends call Yog,
although he did find love again with a Texan, Kenny Goss. As well as the
arrest in LA, his beloved mother, Lesley, died, he released his poor covers
album, and upset Americans with his 2002 anti-war song, Shoot the Dog.
The tiff, though, could as easily have been sparked by the song being a
howler.
There are now signs of a Michael comeback. Amazing, the new album’s
lead single, has received heavy airplay. It’s a long-limbed and lightfooted
sliver of dance, replete with Kylie-like sighs and a lovelorn lyric.
Unfortunately, what I’ve heard of the rest of the album does not bode well for
those who pine for George Michael, master of pop. The songs are often bitter
and angry, sometimes a little self-pitying and — here comes the cussedness
again — in places downright provocative.
Having sold his LA home and abandoned the States after the media uproar
provoked by Shoot the Dog — one newspaper dismissed him as a “pervert
pop star” — Michael is clearly unafraid to upset conservative Americans once
more.
On John and Elvis (are Dead), Michael takes his first pop at
Christianity: “If Jesus is alive and well, how come John and Elvis are dead/
If Jesus Christ gonna save us from ourselves how come peace and love and
Elvis are dead?” Elsewhere, on Round Here, he pokes fun at
George Bush and Tony Blair calling them “Two little Hitlers in a church
hall” while on Through he appears to renounce the Divine: “Hey
God, you know what, I ’m through.”
And while the glossy sound and the soft cloudbanks of keyboards suggest
something of a white bread production, occasionally Michael does let himself
go. On Through, the standout that showcases Michael’s rich,
underrated voice, he sings: “All this hatred makes me strong enough to walk
away.”
What is perhaps remarkable is that enough people still care about Yog to
ensure that he won’t.
Patience is released by Columbia on March 15
