GEORGE MICHAEL

GEORGE MICHAEL

FEATURES

Trapped in the body of an adult.

by

Judy Wieder

George Michael—music biz veteran at 24, writer, arranger and lead vocalist on over 40 million Top 10 records, one-half of Wham! (once the impish monarchs of England’s rub-a-dub teen rock central nervous system) and "sex symbol to a million virgins”—strokes the dark stubble of his perfect five o’clock shadow and frowns.

It’s not easy to make people understand a story like his. Coming of age is weird enough, but to talk about it? How do you explain what it was like when...

Once you were a kinda goofy-looking kid from London with a long, complicated name (Georgios Panayiotou). Your father was a Greek Cypriot who ran a local restaurant. Even at the age of six you didn’t do all that well in school because already you couldn’t stop thinking about music. Then you met this other goofball named Andrew when you were 11 in North London and you both had the same musical tastes (Elton John and the black American music scene) and you formed a couple of different bands that didn’t work out, and then you formed Wham!, which did, and suddenly a dizzying avalanche of adolescent brouhaha hit your life and you were dragged off to superstarland where, to be perfectly honest, you had a monstrously good time until the whole bloated business had you paying more attention to your looks than your music and you started to lose your way and soon you were howling like a dog at the stunning predictability of absolutely everything until, at last, just when you were rocking your third hit album through the valley of the shadow of teen hormones.. .it hit you: You’ve outgrown all this! Your selfimposed boyish-go-lucky veneer can no longer disguise the fact that there’s a fire in the engine room below! Things are definitely changing and like it or not, dear Teen Star, today you are a Man Star!

"When I was quite young I felt like an outcast, although not just from any physical point of view," Michael explains during a California vacation from Faith, his first official solo effort in America. While critics have commented on the unexpected "depth” and “complexities” of Michael’s restless songwriting, the artist himself clearly knows he’s been working from a dicey palate all along.

"I always had this feeling about myself, from very early on, before I knew that I wanted to be a writer or singer or anything, that I would be able to kinda bypass certain limitations by some kind of public acclaim. Maybe a lot of people have this feeling, but for me it was like a back-up system whenever I felt a bit low about something.

“In terms of how it affects me now,” he continues carefully, “I think it’s somewhat standard procedure for stars who make themselves into something special from a physical point of view— especially when they are nothing special to begin with—to sort of feel uncomfortable with their new image because, at least in my case, I felt that inside that image was the real thing, the real me. For instance, all the biggest stars are people that have huge imperfections and they probably hate them and try to overcome them on camera or record or whatevpr. Today I feel more comfortable with my imperfections than I did because I realize that I’m not going to wake up one day and learn that everybody has discovered them. Today, I realize quite simply that they are there and they’ve been there from the beginning. They are an integral part of me and very integral to the way I’ve always written and performed.”

Initially, Michael was content to let Andrew Ridgeley take the bows for Whami’s burgeoning popularity. ("Even when it was my turn to sing lead vocals, I felt like I had to treat it like a laugh, you know?”). But as time went on, there was a distinct shift in their delicate balance:

“It took me awhile to really start writing and taking myself seriously,” George recalls. “You have to remember that ‘Careless Whisper’ was written when I was 17. It was too heavy for our image originally; we had to wait over four years to record it. Once my writing really started to unfold, Andrew saw what was going on and he just.. .let go. He said: ‘Right, well, you know you’ve got to take the reins here, because there’s obviously something very much stronger going on here with you than either of us thought from the writing point of view.’ Since we both wanted success, we knew that was really the only thing to do, for me to take the reins and really go with it. But originally, Wham! was 50 percent me and 50 percent Andrew.”

With Michael’s songwriting abilities threatening to lift Wham! out of the prosperous teen machinery they’d fallen into, the duo struggled feverishly to maintain their good time front. “Listen, we weren’t even 20 yet!” the hardlyover-20-year-old steams.

“There was definitely an element of me wanting to hold back. I hated the idea that we were two old friends who had known each other 10 years and I didn’t want to do what everyone expected us to do: the cliched split. That’s what everyone wanted us to do the minute they saw the situation. I wasn’t finished with Wham!; I always knew there were parts of my songwriting that would not work there, that would have to be saved for a later time. I didn’t want to rush it. I didn t want to get to a certain point that I couldn’t come back from—before I needed to be there!

‘‘I still feel that to a degree,” he admits. “For instance, there are some songs that could have gone on Faith but I held them for later because I know they will still be there and they won’t be dated. They’ll be part of my next thing. My feeling when I was writing songs like ‘Careless Whisper’ at 17 was that I didn’t want to throw away the years between then and when we finally released the song by giving away everything I had. I could have been an MOR artist then, but I didn’t want to because even though my songwriting felt older, I was still only 18.”

Despite all the holding back and holding on, both George and Andrew could read the writing on the charts. Andrew was less and less involved with the band, leaving George to somehow fill the empty spaces.

“I was finding it harder and harder to give him that room, and he was finding it harder and harder to accept it because he knew it was almost charitable, and neither of us wanted that. We’d been through a lot of pleasant things and a lot of unpleasant things, and we were being forced to grow up very quickly. By the time we agreed to split, it was a relief to me. It was a relief to step out of that happy-go-lucky stuff and just be an adult.”

Being an adult for George Michael has mainly been about stepping securely into himself, taking the full control he’s really always had, putting the spotlight firmly on his own work and letting the fans fall where they may.

“It’s nerve-wracking,” he shrugs shyly. “When you’re given the freedom to do what you like because you’re no longer part of a group, you’re also given the freedom to make mistakes. I don’t think I’ve made mistakes with this album. I think it’s very honest, very much a progression that people can follow and enjoy. If I’m wrong, well, that will be tough because it’s all down to me now.”

Admitting that in many areas of his life he is more than happy to have “other people do things for me, because I’m sorta lazy in some ways,” when it comes to his professional life, Michael is totally incapable of delegating anything.

“All professional decisions have always been mine,” he emphasizes. “The more I learn how to do something, the more I have to be the one to do it. The video thing is a good example. Once I learned how to do it, I pretty much did and still do ail the directing and editing. I like my decisions. I’ve been pleased with the results. How can I work for months on something musically and then just hand it over to someone else to produce or film? I know a lot of artists can do that, but I can’t. I can’t even hand over my songs for other artists to record. I’ve been asked to work with Barbra Streisand and other artists that I’m quite flattered about, but I still write very few songs and they’re so personal to me.

“To be very honest with you,” he whispers, “and I hope this never happens, the only way I could just turn my stuff over to someone else is if I were to become less possessive about my music. But I think that as long as I’m still possessive about it, it means that I still care about it. I guess it’s something that has to happen someday, but for now, whenever I’ve had an offer to write for someone, I haven’t been able to do it. The songs are so. . .important. I’ve always put them first in my career. I’m proud of some of the other things I’ve done vocally and I’m proud of various other aspects of my career, but I’m still always aware that it has to start with the songs. The songs have always got to be the things I am the most proud of.”

Well, we sure know it isn’t his matinee idol looks. Since overcoming whatever “physical imperfections” George believed he had, he currently spends much of his spare time turning down Miami Vicetype glam roles with no substance. (“I would just be stuck there seeing this bespectacled 13-year-old kid in my mind, thinking what a phony I was.”) Instead, he sees a rich enough future right where he is, in his music:

“I’ve got huge amounts that I still want to do. All I know is that there’s still so much, so many ideas that I can’t possibly have hit on yet because I’m only a certain age, and because a year ago I hadn’t hit on any of the musical ideas that eventually made up Faith.

“There’s just got to be loads more ahead of me because I’ve still got loads more to experience,” he concludes. “The biggest change in me is that I’m a lot more open to things than I ever was. When you actually accept that you don’t know anything, it opens so many doors. Gone is that cynicism that comes with thinking that you know it all.”