23. The End of a Party
George’s star turn at Live Aid, coming on top of success at a handful of US gigs during the Big Tour, gave us the confidence to plan a series of stadium shows. Through August and September, the Whamamerica! tour would take in stadiums in Illinois, Toronto, LA, Oakland, Houston, Miami, Philadelphia and Pontiac. Make It Big was a multi-platinum success by that time and we were determined to play in venues that could accommodate crowds as large as fifty thousand people. Of all the goals we set ourselves, conquering America was by far the most glittering of prizes. However, American concert promoters weren’t going to be easily convinced to book stadiums for a band with no stateside touring pedigree, regardless of our global success. So, in order to achieve this aim, our US agent played a clever game. They identified the areas where our record sales had been highest, and invited ticket applications for shows as a demonstration that we would easily fill such enormous venues. The ruse worked, and with the stadiums booked, tens of thousands of tickets were sold within hours of our shows being announced.
It wasn’t just our fans that wanted to see us. Wham! was now such a big noise that we even had some big names coming to the shows.
At Hollywood Park, Fleetwood Mac star Stevie Nicks came to see us but was, inexplicably, turned away by one of our security guards, prompting a furious reaction. There was an almighty fuss and I was drafted in to try to defuse the situation. I made sure she was admitted backstage and into the show and did my best to placate an artist I regarded as a goddess. But Stevie, it has to be said, was more than slightly tired and emotional and so I’m not sure my efforts to calm her down were entirely successful.
Other celebrity encounters were a good deal more rewarding. In Miami, the Bee Gees came to our show and invited us to dinner the following day. They later showed us around the studio in which they’d recorded the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever. Given our underage trip to the Watford Empire, and the countless hours we’d spent listening to their music, that day spent listening to their stories was a huge thrill for us both.
The real joy for me, though, was in simply spending time with George again. We were having a great time. The day-to-day laughing and clowning during Whamamerica! reminded me of being at school. We spent all our time on tour together, falling in and out of scrapes, or situations where one of us might turn to the other with a look of disbelief as we wondered, How the hell did we get into this? One record label event saw us posing for photos with a pair of girls dressed as flamingos, for reasons that were never really explained to us.
Even travelling around the country felt surreal. For the journey to the Hollywood Park show, the promoter had arranged for us to be driven in a stretch limousine with blacked-out windows. Our trip was given an extra layer of importance by an accompanying police motorcycle escort. Dressed in aviator shades and tight uniforms straight out of the TV show CHiPs, four outriders flanked us, each one taking turns to accelerate away and clear the traffic ahead. George and I cringed on the floor in the back of the car, out of sight and laughing hysterically at the preposterousness of the treatment we were being given.
Living back in each other’s pockets again, the in-jokes came flooding back, along with knowing looks and cheeky asides. It wasn’t as if they’d ever really gone away, it was just that, apart from touring with Wham!, George and I saw less of each other socially than we used to. There was still the odd night out, but most of the time we spent together was either recording or doing promotional work. On tour, thrust back together for long uninterrupted hours, the easy intimacy and unspoken understanding of our schooldays quickly returned. But this time there was no homework to spoil it.
That the fundamentals of our friendship remained intact was possibly even more important to George than it was for me. He had never taken to life on the road with the same enthusiasm as I had. He didn’t like to be away from home and the daily demands on him were so much greater than they were on me. The attention focused on George was growing, but he gradually accepted the pressure to take more interviews or make more personal appearances. It helped that George actually liked talking, and he was good at it too. During interviews together it was sometimes hard to get a word in edgeways and I was happy to let him crack on.
George seemed so enthused by the success of the American tour that it often seemed pointless to try to get my own point across, especially as he was openly discussing the possibility of a third album. ‘We’re just going to move on and do something different now,’ he told MTV. Inspired by the quality of our touring band he sounded keen to take a more spontaneous approach. ‘Well, I’d like to record a lot more of the next album live and just make it a lot more . . . I don’t know . . . less careful.’
There was no doubt in my mind that the album he was considering had the potential to turn Wham! into one of the biggest bands of all time, but sadly it came to nothing.
Instead, we were now in the end game. And, for all the fun that he and I had enjoyed together during Whamamerica!, he later confessed that he had found it particularly tough. We were both contemplating the future.
We had achieved everything we’d hoped for, and quickly. So quickly that we were sometimes caught off guard, especially at the speed with which America had taken to us. But as we toured the US highways, I realised that the dreams I’d once held as a kid during our first-ever gig together with The Executive had been fulfilled. There was really nowhere else to go.
I knew George was nearly at the point where he would feel comfortable going solo. His musical growing pains were almost over. Fantastic, Make It Big, the tours, Live Aid and the Apollo had provided the launch pad he needed to become George Michael, the multi-platinum, Grammy-award-winning, solo superstar.
As the character took shape, I watched him physically transform himself. The Fila shorts, cropped T-shirt and baseball cap were now a fading memory. In their place was a styling that comprised figure-hugging jeans and low-cut T-shirt, plus leather motorcycle jacket and designer stubble. The makeover really suited him. But it was all so far removed from who he really was. When we first started making music in the late 1970s, he was an awkward kid, chubby and insecure; he was confused about his sexuality and believed himself to be unattractive. That self-image took a lot of time to shake off and it required a concerted effort to do so, but the persona he had constructed for public consumption hadn’t left George with a lot of space in which to develop his true self behind the scenes. He was driven by an unstoppable desire to fulfil his potential, but that had come at a price. As a young man still trying to find himself, George’s ambition to succeed had taken priority over everything else and that included his ability to openly express his sexuality.
His decision to keep that hidden only fed the uncertainty around his public persona. What the real implications of that were for George, I can’t say, but I knew he was never comfortable with the added interest that came with Wham! hitting the big time. Alongside the pressure to write and perform hit songs, his personal and private life came under intense scrutiny. Everybody wanted to know who the two boys in Wham! really were. They pressed us on our friendship and any division or friction they hoped might exist between us. They asked about our family backgrounds. They wanted to know about the girls and the parties they imagined were being lavished upon us. This was fair game for a band in the public eye, but given George was adamant his sexuality should be kept under wraps, it created a wholly unwelcome extra level of stress for him to manage. It wasn’t even that keeping his private life private was out of character for George. I certainly never met any boyfriend that George might have had while we were together as a band. But George feared that coming out publicly about his sexuality at the time of Whamamerica! would scupper any chances he might have of competing with artists like Madonna and Michael Jackson in the States. A terrible additional worry was the emergence of AIDS. I know I wasn’t the only friend of George’s who worried about him during that uncertain, frightening period. By the time George was eventually hounded into talking about his sexuality in 1998 he’d already had to mourn the loss of his partner, Anselmo Feleppa, to AIDS in 1993. It had devastated him but he’d been unable to discuss it in public. Had he spoken out earlier, who knows how differently things might have played out.
At the time, I reckoned that George opening up wouldn’t have presented too much of a problem. There were so many gay people in British pop music and the record industry that his news wouldn’t have raised too much of a fuss and he would have had the undying support of his closest friends. With hindsight, though, I’ve come to a rather different view. I’d been receiving so much unwanted attention of my own that flicking through the papers was a depressing experience. As a result I’d stopped reading tabloid gossip columns, so I was unaware of just how awful their attitudes towards gay people could be. I suspect that if George had told the truth then, every subsequent reference to him would have been prefixed by a reference to his sexuality: ‘gay icon’, ‘gay singer’ or ‘gay celebrity’. While his sexuality was important to him, he wouldn’t have wanted it mentioned every time someone wrote about his new record. The 1980s was a very different world to the one we live in today.
For what George was planning to do next, he needed the conditions to be perfect, both creatively and commercially. A prurient, mocking interest in his private life was the last thing he wanted. Looking back I now appreciate how naive I was about George’s dilemma. For me at the time it remained a non-issue, but George’s relative unease about being in the full glare of the public eye did have a bearing on how we chose to bring Wham! to a close.
After the news of our decision to bring Wham! to an end had been broken to Simon and Jazz, the only big decision left to make was what was to be done to close out Wham!’s story in the best way possible – a story that had produced so many hit records all over the world. We knew that if we were to announce a one-last-time-around-the-block tour there would be huge demand for tickets. With Simon and Jazz, I reckoned we should embark on a worldwide farewell tour, saying goodbye to our fans around the globe and going out in a blaze of glory. I loved playing in front of a crowd. If I could, I would have toured endlessly, but George was having none of it.
‘I want to do one show only,’ he said, which left us all a little confused. ‘There can only be one goodbye, one final concert where Wham! bows out.’
At the time I felt he was selling the fans short. I thought we owed it to them to say farewell properly in all the countries that had embraced us with such devotion: Australia, America and Europe, among others. But George had two major concerns. Not only was he focused on his solo career, but he was also fed up with his image within Wham!. The character the band forced him to play wasn’t doing him any good psychologically – it had been getting him down for quite a while and he later described Wham! as a ball and chain. It was impossible to argue with such force of feeling. I fully understood his decision and accepted it. In fact the only thing that did annoy me during that period was the cancellation of a contract we had signed with Pepsi worth over $3 million. It was a one-advert deal and there seemed no good reason not to do it, but once again George was thinking beyond Wham!. The clip was set to run for around eighteen months and so would have kept Wham! alive in the minds of the public at the very point he was trying to strike out on his own. When George pulled the plug I was angry about it as it would have helped us to recoup some of the vast expense of producing a one-off show, but in the end I reluctantly conceded that it had to go.
And so it was eventually decided that Wham! would play one show only at Wembley Stadium, a celebration of the band, which would include the premiere of Foreign Skies, the re-edited, reshot, remade film documentary of our Chinese adventure on the venue’s big screens. Set for 28 June 1986, our farewell event was to be The Final. All that was left to do was to announce our decision to the fans. After eighteen months of speculation about George going it alone, we wanted to break the news to them on our own terms.
If only.