George Michael

George Michael: The Craftsman Who Stepped Out of Frame

In September 1990, at the exact moment he was the most photographed man in pop, George Michael released *Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1* and refused to appear in the videos, sit for the interviews, or promote it at all. The point was in the title: he wanted the songs judged without his face attached. The album went to number one in Britain and spent eighty-eight weeks on the chart. It also started a war with his record company that consumed four years of his working life and that he lost.

Yog, from Bushey Meads

Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou was born in East Finchley on 25 June 1963, the youngest of three and the only son of Kyriacos "Jack" Panayiotou, a Greek Cypriot restaurateur who had come to England from Patriki in the 1950s, and Lesley Angold Harrison, an English dancer. He grew up in Kingsbury, went to Roe Green Junior and Kingsbury High, and moved with the family to Radlett as a teenager, where at Bushey Meads School he acquired the nickname Yog and a friend named Andrew Ridgeley.

He busked on the London Underground, playing Queen's "'39," and DJ'd at a restaurant in Northwood. His father was a communist; at fifteen, under his Greek name, he joined the Young Communist League. It is worth remembering when the tabloids later filed Wham! under Thatcherite. Michael's own answer was withering: "To call us Thatcherite was so simplistic, basically saying that if you've got a deep enough tan and made a bit of money then you've got to be a Thatcherite."

Wham!

The duo formed in 1981. *Fantastic* topped the UK chart in 1983; *Make It Big* topped the American one, carrying "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go," "Freedom," "Everything She Wants" and "Careless Whisper." That last song he had written at seventeen. It went to number one in close to twenty-five countries and sold 1.3 million copies in Britain alone, and he gave the royalties to Band Aid.

His ambition was never accidental. Of "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" he said: "I just wanted to make a really energetic pop record that had all the best elements of Fifties and Sixties records, combined with our attitude and our approach." In 1985 he sang "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" with Elton John at Live Aid, took Wham! to China as the first Western pop act to play there, and collected the first of three Ivor Novello awards for Songwriter of the Year. The duo split in 1986 while still at the top.

Faith

*Faith*, released on 30 October 1987, is where the argument for him actually lives. It spent twelve weeks at number one in America and fifty-one non-consecutive weeks in the top ten, sold more than twenty-five million copies, and won the Grammy for Album of the Year in February 1989. Two of his four American Music Awards came in the Soul and R&B categories, which for a white British pop singer was close to unprecedented. AllMusic's Steve Huey called it a "superbly crafted mainstream pop/rock masterpiece" and "one of the finest pop albums of the '80s." *Rolling Stone*'s Mark Coleman wrote that it "displays Michael's intuitive understanding of pop music and his increasingly intelligent use of his power to communicate to an ever-growing audience." He had creative control of the production, and it shows in how little of the record sounds like 1987.

Then he walked away from the machine. *Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1* produced "Praying for Time" and "Freedom! '90" and won Best British Album, and he promoted none of it. Sony refused to accept an artist who would not sell himself; he sued, in *Panayiotou v Sony Music Entertainment (UK) Ltd*, and lost. *Vol. 2* was scrapped and never appeared.

Grief, and Coming Out

He met Anselmo Feleppa at Rock in Rio in January 1991. Six months in, Feleppa learned he was HIV-positive; he died of an AIDS-related brain haemorrhage in March 1993. "Jesus to a Child," Michael's tribute, went to number one in 1996 and at nearly seven minutes remains his longest UK top-forty single. His mother died of cancer the following year. *Older* (1996), the album built around that grief, produced six top-three British singles and a third Ivor Novello for Songwriter of the Year.

On 7 April 1998 he was arrested by an undercover officer for a lewd act in a public lavatory in Beverly Hills, pleaded no contest, and took an $810 fine and eighty hours of community service. Rather than apologise, he came out publicly on *Parkinson* and released "Outside," a single whose video featured kissing policemen. He later said that hiding his sexuality had made him feel "fraudulent," and that being outed this way was "a subconsciously deliberate act."

Why George Is Called a Genius

The claim is about songcraft, and it is unusually well documented. Michael wrote "Careless Whisper" at seventeen — a song that has since worn out several generations without losing its shape — and went on to write across registers most pop writers never attempt: dance records, gospel-shaped ballads, blue-eyed soul, and, in "Praying for Time," something closer to a sermon. He produced himself. Six Ivor Novello Awards, three of them for Songwriter of the Year, matter more than the Grammys here, because the Ivors are voted by other songwriters on the writing alone.

The vocabulary critics reached for was consistently about construction rather than charisma: Huey's "superbly crafted," Coleman's "intuitive understanding of pop music." His obituary in *NME* called him "the backbone and blueprint of British pop music" across thirty-five years and "one of the greatest singles artists of all time" — a precise compliment, and note the word "singles." Elton John's tribute was simply: "What a singer, what a songwriter."

The counter-case is a matter of arithmetic. In the twenty-nine years between *Faith* and his death he released four studio albums, one of which was covers and one of which was a live orchestral record. *Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 2* was abandoned. The Sony litigation ate the early nineties; substance abuse, a prison sentence in 2010 and a near-fatal coma in 2011 ate much of what remained. His compilations comfortably outsold his new work. For a writer of that calibre, the finished catalogue is thin, and the reason is not mysterious — he found the industry that made him unbearable and spent decades demonstrating it. He was a genius of the individual song who could not, or would not, build the body of work the talent implied.

Legacy

He sold more than a hundred million records, put ten singles at number one in America and thirteen in Britain, and was the most-played artist on British radio between 1984 and 2004. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2023. "Last Christmas," released in 1984, finally reached number one in the UK on 1 January 2021.

The philanthropy only became public after he died in bed at Goring-on-Thames on Christmas Day 2016, aged fifty-three, of dilated cardiomyopathy with myocarditis. He had given millions to Childline, funded a stranger's IVF, tipped a student nurse £5,000 to clear her debts, and paid anonymously for the Highgate Christmas tree for a decade as "a local resident." He is buried at Highgate Cemetery beside his mother, with his sister Melanie on the other side. Elton John's line covers it: "more than anything as a human being he was one of the kindest, sweetest, most generous people I've ever met."

Achievements

• BRIT Awards — 1991
• Grammy Awards — 1988
• Notable work: Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go
• Notable work: Faith
• Notable work: Careless Whisper
• Notable work: Last Christmas
• Instruments: voice
• Genres: pop music, dance music and soul