George appeared on television for the first time in February 1981, holding centre stage at Le Beat Route in Greek Street. He seemed a little unsure of himself as the camera panned across the dance floor and lingered on him, a strapping seventeen-year-old with a black beard, his trademark bushy hair and wearing a vivid orange suit. They weren’t there to film him. He wasn’t a celebrity then. The crew from BBC Nationwide were preparing a feature on Spandau Ballet and the blossoming New Romantic scene.
George had loved the Soho club ever since the first time he was allowed in and spotted Spandau singer Tony Hadley at the bar and cultural icon Steve Strange playing Space Invaders. A schoolboy from Radlett could catch the bus into London and be mixing with the fashionable and famous who, earlier that day, he might have been reading about in pop papers and glossy magazines in the sixth-form common room.
Friday nights became his favourite time of the week, although he wasn’t always allowed in. Sometimes the club owner Ollie O’Donnell thought he and Andrew were just too suburban. Stung by such criticism, they began dressing in more outlandish clothes. Andrew started wearing a single plait in his hair in the manner of Adam Ant, as well as bright red satin trousers. When he wasn’t sporting his orange suit, George preferred a green waistcoat and matching hat.
Enforcing a strict door policy was one of the canny ways the clubs created exclusivity and publicity. Club host Steve Strange pulled off a masterstroke when he refused entry to Mick Jagger to Blitz in Covent Garden on the grounds that he was too normal and ‘didn’t look right’. Steve was a pop star in his own right with the group Visage, whose best-known song was the top-ten hit ‘Fade to Grey’. But more importantly, he blended music and fashion together – a trend followed by Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran and Culture Club, whose singer Boy George was once employed at Blitz as the cloakroom attendant. George had never embraced punk, so when he and Andrew tired of 2 Tone, they were in their element in this new cultural movement sweeping through London. As one of his closest friends observes, ‘George was a club boy.’
At Le Beat Route, George was able to reconnect with his inner disco. He was still a big fan of Roxy Music, who, along with David Bowie, formed the backdrop for the New Romantics. But he also discovered a funkier sound. In particular he liked ‘Burn Rubber on Me (Why You Wanna Hurt Me)’ by The Gap Band. It was one of those records that was a minor chart hit but became much more popular in the clubs. While the lyric was another that dealt with lost love – a man being abandoned by a girl – George was more interested in the beat. He liked it so much that, as George Michael, he sampled the track for his single ‘Star People 97’. Andrew first heard it lying in the bath listening to Capital Radio and couldn’t believe what a great track it was and an ‘absolute breakaway from the rest of the real middle-of-the-road shit’.
Sometimes David Mortimer would join them clubbing, but most nights it would be George, Andrew and his new girlfriend, Shirlie Holliman. George hadn’t dated since Helen Tye, but as from those early teenage years with Lesley Bywaters, three was never a crowd for the boys, especially if dancing was involved.
Andrew had met Shirlie on the eve of his eighteenth birthday in January 1981 in The Three Crowns. She was blonde, bubbly and self-assured. They hit it off straight away.
One of five children, Shirlie was born and raised in Bushey. Like Andrew, Lesley Bywaters and Helen Tye, she had been part of a generation that all went to the same primary and secondary schools. She was a year older than Andrew and had barely noticed him at Bushey Meads. She had spotted Georgios Panayiotou, though, and had been one of the gang who mocked him when he was carrying his violin case around the playground.
When she left school, she was working with horses, training to be a riding instructor and dreaming of being a singer. Andrew certainly gained her attention when he started telling her about his group. She immediately suggested that he should ditch the singer and use her instead. They started dating and, almost at once, she met Andrew’s best friend, Yog, when they went over to the house in Radlett. She was immediately struck by how close the two boys were, laughing at the same things, enjoying their music and each other’s company.
Although she and Andrew began a serious relationship, George soon became her best friend. She loved the nights they went dancing, not just to Le Beat Route but also other more local clubs around North London, like Bogarts in Harrow.
Shirlie recalled that they would work out their dance routines in George’s bedroom before emerging all sweaty, to be met by a raised eyebrow or two from his mum and sisters: ‘It was so much fun – they became my world. They were great times but I sometimes felt like a spare part next to George – his talent overawed me. He was the organiser and Andrew had the charisma.’ Shirlie always preferred dancing with George because she thought he had better rhythm than her boyfriend: ‘Andrew was too bony and hard and George was far softer – he just suited me to dance with.’
George was in his element. He told his friend and fellow club enthusiast, the writer Paul Simper, ‘I loved dancing at Le Beat Route. Nobody gave a fuck who I was, so you could throw yourself around. If Shirlie was with me we’d really do that pair dancing. We’d always make a bit of space and really show off.’ Shirlie doesn’t quite remember it that way. She joked that they only cleared the floor when they were dancing really badly.
His many club nights, aged seventeen, reveal the amount of freedom George enjoyed. As the young man of the family he was never prevented from going out, even though he was supposed to be studying for his A-levels. He didn’t tell his family or his friends that one of the places he occasionally slipped into was a gay disco above a pub close to the Manor House Tube station. The human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell met him there long before George became well known and was struck, as many were, by what a good dancer he was, always singing along as he showed off his latest moves: ‘He had a good voice and said he was going to be a pop star. There were lots of wannabes in those days, I thought.’
Incredibly, while he was leading an almost secret life as a club boy, George, or more precisely Georgios, had been appointed a prefect at Bushey Meads. It would not be an achievement that featured on his CV. He wasn’t the most popular, especially with the orchestra after he took a fellow violinist to see the deputy headmaster after he had told Georgios to ‘sod off’.
He sailed through his A-levels before settling to a summer of leisure with his friends. Shirlie had a car, which proved to be a great bonus, ferrying everyone to the swimming pool in Watford, where they splashed away their mornings before adjourning for ice cream, McDonald’s and milkshakes in the afternoon.
Andrew had left college with nothing to show for it except two years of fun and freedom. He took a job briefly as a cleaner and then worked in a warehouse before signing on the dole, which he preferred. George sarcastically said it suited his friend because he was a ‘lazy bastard’. That was not an option for him because his parents absolutely would not stand for it. Having decided he was not a candidate for further education, George was under increasing pressure from them to settle on a career. They gave him a deadline of six months to get a recording deal or he would be out on his ear. Jack Panos loved his son dearly, but he was becoming increasingly agitated that he was just drifting.
He started a job as a labourer but didn’t last long, although he found it a quick way to get fit and toned. He tried a few nights serving drinks in the Angus Pride but he kept getting the orders wrong and it soon became clear to everyone that he was not going to follow in his father’s footsteps.
Jack, however, secured him work as a DJ at a busy and popular dinner/dance restaurant in Rickmansworth Road, Northwood called Bel Air, which was owned by Andrew Georgiades, the father of George Georgiades. His old primary-school friend recalls, ‘George’s dad brought him to my dad and said, “Andrew, can you give him a job? He wants to bloody do music. I want him to build a career and he wants to do this. Can you give him a job doing something until he sorts himself out?” So Dad had him as a DJ. He didn’t like the music he had to play. It was The Jacksons, Lionel Ritchie and Abba, but his taste was a bit more funky.’
Georgios, as they called him at the restaurant, was forever trying to slip something more disco into the night’s music, usually without success. He was hidden from the diners behind a pillar so they couldn’t see the incongruous bearded figure in stylish winklepicker shoes. But they could hear him.
Looking back, George could laugh about it: ‘Every night I would have to say, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, I hope you have enjoyed your meal. Welcome to Bel Air restaurant, we hope you will partake of a little dancing.”’ As soon as he started speaking the restaurant would immediately go completely quiet, which he found embarrassing and nerve-racking: ‘My hands just used to get clammy and sweaty every night before I had to do this. I was absolutely hopeless at it.’
It was far from the worst job in the world. The hours meant he could take on afternoon shifts as an usher and doorman at the Empire Cinema in Merton Road, Watford. He enjoyed being able to watch the films for free before hopping on a bus down to Northwood.
One evening a melody came into his head just as he was paying the driver: ‘It was as I walked on to the bus and was handing the guy the change. I remember getting the melody and going up and sitting at the back of the bus and putting words to it and everything. I used to do a little bit every day, on my way between working at the cinema and as a DJ … every day in my head.’
The melody on the bus became his most famous and popular song, the immortal ‘Careless Whisper’. He ran the melody past Andrew back in his room in Radlett and his friend came up with the guitar parts that earned him a songwriting credit on the track, one of only three he shared with George. Andrew was more impressed than his sister Melanie, who cheekily called the song ‘Tuneless Whisper’. George was very protective of his songwriting and wouldn’t have included Andrew unless he had made a real and important contribution.
For the lyric, George drew inspiration from his split with Helen when he had eyes for another girl. The teenage Georgios Panayiotou was in no way a player. He had just two girlfriends at school and did not sleep with either of them. He was, however, a creative and articulate young man who could put into words feelings of love and loss that would strike a universal nerve. Just six words became one of the great lines of popular music: ‘Guilty feet have got no rhythm’. He was still only seventeen.
At a later date, he played a demo of the song to Helen, with whom he remained on good terms. She remembers the occasion clearly. One afternoon when she was back from University College London (UCL), he rang and asked her to come over because he wanted her to listen to a recording of a new song: ‘I went to his house and we went up to his room and we sat on the floor and listened to his cassette. And we listened to “Careless Whisper” and I was completely astounded. I just thought, “This is amazing!” It’s such a beautiful song … so professional, so beautiful and I just knew it was going to be incredibly successful. I was really blown away.
‘I had absolutely no idea that it had anything to do with me or with him or anything of his feelings. He did not talk in a direct way about his feelings to me, other than his ambitions or his work and his creativity. He didn’t say anything about being conflicted about wanting to break up with me or anything like that.’
At this stage, ‘Careless Whisper’ was a one-off. Andrew and George couldn’t project their personality as two fun-loving soul boys through a song which possessed such an old-fashioned quality. They needed something more instant that better showcased them as club boys. They needed some dance tracks.
The two were still dancing at Le Beat Route whenever they could. On one particular night, Andrew was bopping about, showing off, when he started exclaiming exuberantly, ‘Wham! Bam! I’m the Man’ and doing a rap which George described as ‘terrible’, although in his defence, Andrew was just trying to be funny. Andrew’s performance gave George the idea for a new song. He was looking for energy, dance-ability and humour.
Rap music had yet to take over the world back in 1981. It was still in its embryonic stage of popularity and was the exclusive preserve of black American hip-hop artists. The Sugarhill Gang crossed the Atlantic with a song that is generally regarded as the first UK chart hit of the new genre. Their ‘Rapper’s Delight’, which combined rap and disco, had been a summer top-three hit in the UK in 1979. The lyric was spoken over a mix of the disco classic ‘Good Times’ by Chic.
George wanted to create a rap that you could dance to and came up with the lyric to ‘Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do)’, which wasn’t designed to be taken too seriously; it was meant to be fun. He saw it as parody of the times, or more precisely, a ‘piss-take’. Superficially, it glorified being on the dole with such immortal lines as: ‘I’m a soul boy. I’m a dole boy’. On closer inspection, it was almost a rap pitching Andrew against George.
The Andrew character may not have a job but he’s having a good time with the boys ‘down on the line’. By contrast, George is having to deal with parents or ‘folks’ who are telling him to get a job or ‘get out of this house’. It was early proof that George was a clever and articulate eighteen-year-old.
This was a promising start to their songwriting together, but it became more problematic when Andrew and Shirlie decided to live together and moved into a grotty flat in the basement of her aunt’s house in Peckham, Southeast London, which was quite a dramatic move from leafy Bushey. They immediately felt isolated as it was such an effort to keep in touch with friends, particularly George.
Fortunately, neither of them enjoyed the experience very much, especially having to use an outdoor loo. After a few weeks they returned to their respective parents, although they continued their relationship. Now he was back home, it was a time for parties. Usually that would consist of Andrew getting drunk and George making sure he got home safely. The one time it was the other way round was when George made a rare attempt to chat up a girl in a club and was upset at being rebuffed. He decided to drown his sorrows in a bottle of vermouth and had to spend the night at Andrew’s house. He was in a dreadful state, on his knees in the kitchen, when Mrs Ridgeley found him; she kindly asked, ‘Do you want a bowl, dear?’ and thoughtfully provided one for him to be sick into if the need arose. The problem was he kept on falling forward and ending up with his head in the bowl. Eventually he was put to bed to sleep it off and in the morning Andrew’s mother, who seemed to know exactly what to do in these situations, brought him up a glass of the aptly named Andrews liver salts.
They found time to write another song together, although really the process involved George using his friend as a sounding board for his musical ideas. He had no intention of making a career as a rap artist: ‘Rap was quite funny at first but it got really boring,’ he declared.
Instead, he again drew inspiration from Le Beat Route and, specifically, its trademark Caribbean décor. He wrote a lyric about the perfect club where you might meet celebrities, get a perfect suntan and have free drinks. It was poking gentle fun at the Club 18–30 holidays – although George had never been on one.
Andrew was again keen for them to make a new demo and suggested they use his parents’ living room, first making sure they were out. They spent £30 hiring a Portastudio for the day. George had wanted one for his birthday but his father had ignored that request and given him a pair of fine antique guns as a financial investment.
They waited until the coast was clear, then set up everything using an old broom as a microphone stand and recorded bits of ‘Wham Rap!’, ‘Club Tropicana’ and ‘Careless Whisper’. They were little more than snapshots in sound and not completed songs by any means. By the end of the afternoon, they expressed themselves satisfied with what George would later describe as a ‘crappy little demo’.
Despite the obvious appeal of the fun dance tracks, they both realised that ‘Careless Whisper’ was a cut above. Andrew described it as a ‘worldwide number one’ in waiting. ‘Julio Iglesias will be green,’ he said. George was so proud of the song that he couldn’t stop playing it to people. When Shirlie heard it, she realised for the first time that he was going to be a huge star.
He was allowed to include it in his dinner set at Bel Air and the diners liked it. The manager of the Empire, Shirley-Ann Mallery, who had a soft spot for George, let him play it one evening in the foyer of the cinema and he received a round of applause. Nobody could have foreseen that it would become staple background music for thousands of foyers around the world.
The boys needed a new name. They didn’t want to resurrect The Executive and, this time around, believed something fun and boisterous would better fit their new image. Their first thought was Wham Bam! They had always liked the idea of calling a band after a record because one could publicise the other, as it did with ‘Hey Hey We’re the Monkees’ or any number of Wombles tracks. After thinking about it, they shortened it to Wham! as the Bam made it seem too silly, like something out of Batman.
‘Wham Bam’ had also been the name of a forgettable summer hit of the seventies by the American country rock group, Silver. Going further back, the pop pioneer Jack Good produced a show called Wham! in 1960 in which DJ Keith Fordyce introduced leading British acts of the time, including Joe Brown, Billy Fury and Johnny Kidd & the Pirates. Perhaps George had come across the 1963 painting ‘Whaam!’ by Roy Lichtenstein in his art lessons, one of the most iconic of all pop art images.
The suburban soul boys thought Wham! was original and reflective of the fun element they wanted to bring to their music. They later discovered that there was an American band of that name already in existence, which would be a small inconvenience.
The newly named Wham! began another depressing round of record companies in London – many of them had already heard The Executive demos when Michael Burdett was trying to progress the band. They always managed to bluff their way in for an audience, but that was as good as it got. It was a depressing time, when A&R men thought they could spot talent on the basis of listening for ten seconds before they turned off the tape. They would be sent on their way with the word ‘crap’ ringing in their ears.
The boys were getting nowhere and it wouldn’t be long before the six-month time limit set by George’s father for a deal to be signed would be up. They decided to approach again Bushey’s young music mogul, Mark Dean. Through Andrew’s mother, they kept hearing of his mercurial rise. In the world of music things can happen very quickly. He had moved on to an A&R job with Phonogram and been largely responsible for signing two of the biggest charts acts of 1981, Soft Cell and ABC.
Just twenty-one, he had the confidence and the swagger of a young man going places very fast. His ambition was to start his own label and he persuaded the powerful CBS company to back his independent Innervision Records. The deal was not a particularly good one for Mark, and the fine financial margins he had to work with would subsequently have a disastrous effect on his relationship with Wham!
That was in the future. For the moment his mum was pestering him to hear another demo from Andrew Ridgeley and his friend. Finally, he had a quick listen, expecting to once again be unimpressed. But he loved it. Instantly, he could envision success for the boys, who were clearly special: ‘I couldn’t believe it but I had stumbled on talent on my doorstep.’
He invited them to his new offices in South Molton Street and met George for the first time. He sensed that the duo had an appealing image and that they had a brashness that worked. He explained his philosophy: ‘I like good songs. I like songs with style. But if a band has no idea about the image they want to project, if they don’t know what to tell the press, then they can forget it. It’s all a question of attitude. I believe in arrogance and attitude. An artist should believe in what he’s doing.’
He suggested that he finance a proper demo of the songs. While this was beginning to be exciting for the two teenagers, George was still working at Bel Air. The night before the recording, he was the DJ as usual. It would be his last shift with his old friend George Georgiades, who was now at catering college. He remembers, ‘I asked him what he was doing tomorrow. And he said, “Well, I’m cutting a demo” and I thought, “Yeah, right.” I did wish him good luck but in my head I thought, “Let’s see how you do.” I never saw him again at my dad’s.’
Mark booked Wham! into the Halligan Band Centre in the Holloway Road, not far from the neighbourhood where George’s mother grew up. Madness and Spandau Ballet had rehearsed there and it was a well-known, if slightly dark, basement studio in North London. He also arranged for a proper band to back the duo dispensing with the usual drum machines and synthesisers. They re-recorded the demo songs as well as another that would become ‘Young Guns’ but that didn’t yet have a proper lyric. George had to write it in the studio, literally as they went along. He had help. The backing singer hired for the day was Lynda Hayes, who had settled in London after arriving from her native Chicago in the late seventies. Lynda had already earned a reputation as a dependable voice for adverts and studio sessions. She wrote the memorable line: ‘Hey shut up chick, that’s a friend of mine, just watch your mouth babe, you’re out of line’. Lynda loved that she was technically one of the first female rappers. She observed, ‘“Out of line” wasn’t even a phrase heard in England in 1982. I brought it from Chicago.’
Rather like ‘Wham Rap!’, ‘Young Guns (Go for It)’ was intended to be a witty social commentary. This time George’s target was boys and girls who marry too young and the ensuing drudgery in their lives. He explained, ‘It just seemed that the funniest thing relating to that was the way you get the boys up the pub saying, “Where’s so and so?” “Oh, he’s at home, she’s kept him in again.” It was tongue-in-cheek sexism.’ He even managed to give himself a name-check in the lyric. The overall effect was exuberant fun. You could imagine it being sung by the cast of Grease.
Pride of place in the recordings was reserved for ‘Careless Whisper’. George described it in his autobiography as ‘one of the most incredible moments of my life’, hearing his song, written on the bus, performed properly with a band complete with a real-life saxophone.
While he was glowing with self-satisfaction, Mark phoned to say he was heading over with a contract that Tony Parsons memorably described as a ‘premature ejaculation of agreement’. The three of them retired to a ‘greasy spoon’ café round the corner from the studios. Everyone involved seemed to have a different version of what went on.
George signed a contract with Innervision during this unscheduled tea break. It was completely out of character. He’d been cautious enough to employ a lawyer, Robert Allan, a friend of his father’s, to oversee negotiations between Wham! and Mark Dean, but when faced with a concrete offer, he seemed to panic and sign in haste. He didn’t take the trouble to ring Robert to check that he was happy and all the amendments had been taken in.
The meeting, if it can be called that, still grated with George more than twenty years later. He claimed that Mark told them that the deal would go away if they didn’t sign right then. Mark had also said they wouldn’t own the demos. George recalled, ‘It was a total threat, a complete and utter threat.’
It’s easy to cast Mark Dean as a villain in the scenario that left the boys with an appalling contract, but he too was a novice in such matters and had himself signed a deal with CBS, which would inevitably put the squeeze on his own company. He later maintained that he put no pressure on them to sign there and then and would happily have waited. According to Mark, Wham! were desperate for him to sign them, although he did admit in retrospect that all parties were very stupid to conduct business in this random fashion.
Everybody seemed in such a rush, swept along by the excitement of finally releasing a record and making sure they were in the next CBS schedule of new releases. In effect, on 24 March 1982, Georgios Panayiotou and Andrew Ridgeley signed their future away for a £500 advance each and the prospect of their name on a hit. They were far more beguiled by thoughts of fame than by the sums of money involved.
Perhaps the most obvious observation in the whole sorry saga is that Wham! did not have a manager to negotiate the deal for them but, as Shirlie pointed out, she had never heard George take advice from anyone. In the future it might have been more difficult to get out of if the contract had not been so laughably bad. The positive news was that they had a deal with someone determined to make them a success. There would be singles to record, an album to make and fans to idolise them.
The first task was to record their debut single, which everyone agreed should be the intoxicatingly catchy ‘Wham Rap!’ An experienced producer, Bob Carter, who had seen success with Junior and Hazel O’Connor, came on board to oversee the recording at the Maison Rouge Studios in Fulham Broadway.
All was set fair for a June release, except for one ongoing problem: George wasn’t happy with his name. The first pressing of the disc had already gone ahead with the credit G Panos/A Ridgeley. He didn’t like it. It was too Greek.
One afternoon he was discussing the problem with David Mortimer at his friend’s house in Edgware. It was commonplace for pop stars to change their names. Tom Jones, Freddie Mercury and Elton John were just three pop heroes who had found a name that better suited their image. Even David had changed his name to what he thought was the more pop-friendly David Austin. He said his real name reminded him of Meg Mortimer and her son Sandy, who were the lead characters in Crossroads, the popular long-running soap which seemed to be on television every night throughout their childhood.
Yog was happy with George. Many people called him that already, so he was used to it. Perhaps he should follow Elton’s example and opt for two first names? Michael came into his head because David’s dad was Michael Mortimer and he was sitting in his living room. One of his Greek uncles was also called Michael. And then he remembered his old primary-school friend, Michael Salousti. David liked it and so the decision was speedily taken. As with many decisions in his life, George acted quickly and firmly. He didn’t dither over it.
He did try it out on Helen Tye to see if she liked it: ‘He said his stage name would be George Michael. I said, “Oh, OK. Why?” He explained that it couldn’t be this long Greek name that didn’t roll off the tongue. He said, “I don’t want to be associated with Demis Roussos.”’
On the eve of his nineteenth birthday, Georgios Panayiotou prepared to begin an exciting new life as George Michael.