George Michael, once again

Parbina Rashid

He crooned ‘I Am Your Man’ and we teenyboppers from the George-ian era experienced our first crush. We were powerless in front of that irresistible charm, the looks, the confidence (‘If You Gonna Do It, Do It Right Now, Do It With Me’; no beating around the bush). But then, the heartbreak came soon enough, when someone so careless-ly whispered the word gay.

Michael the rebel (‘Wham! Bam!’), Michael the repentant lover (‘Careless Whispers’), Michael the frustrated lover (‘Freedom’), Michael the jilted lover (‘Last Christmas’)… That was George Michael as we knew him.

Now, here is a chance to know the man a little better. Director Chris Smith documents the journey of George Michael and his bestie Andrew Ridgeley as they changed the world’s pop scene with their band Wham! The documentary too is called ‘Wham!’ Simple and precise.

It begins with a shy and self-conscious Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou (that’s how George Michael was known then) meeting Andrew at Bushey Meads High School in Hertfordshire, England. George is 11 and Andrew 12. George with Greek Cypriot genetics (that explains his olive skin) and Andrew with his Egyptian origins. George comes from a conservative family with a dominating father, who forces him to stay away from music and study to become either a doctor or an accountant. Andrew is from an open family, where the mother maintains a scrap book of every single step of their musical journey, starting with their short-lived school band, The Executive.

Andrew takes George under his wing and eventually ends up being the wind beneath George’s wings as he soars sky high in his musical career. In that sense, ‘Wham!’ is as much about Andrew as it is about George; of their solid friendship which neither success nor death could break. George Michael admits it in every step of his life. In an interview, he says, “Andrew changed my life the way it needed to be changed.” We see George reiterating it after the famous last gig of Wham! in 1986 at Wembley, “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

And for Andrew, George always remains his ‘Yog’. During the video shoot of their first major hit song, ‘Club Tropicana’, in 1984, it’s Andrew that George confides in that he is gay. Andrew is happy to focus on honing the band’s image, giving his friend full freedom on the creative front. He gracefully accepts it when the overwhelming popularity leads George to chart a solo path. It’s touching how at the Live Aid concert in 1985, when George joined Elton John for a duet titled ‘Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’, Andrew sings on the sidelines. No anxiety, no complaints.

There is no underlying anxiety or tension in ‘Wham!’ the documentary either. Though it packs quite a few tricky issues like the disintegration of a band, success coming between friends and dealing with closet homosexuality and insecurities. It’s Andrew’s happy-go-lucky nature that keeps the tone in George’s life as upbeat as ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go Go’, and the same tone is maintained as well in the documentary throughout.

The prime source for this 90-minute documentary is Smith’s interactions with Andrew and the scrapbooks his mother maintained. There are, of course, stage show recordings, archival footage, and radio and TV interviews. Smith has done away with talking heads, except for a few brief appearances of George’s father. It’s mostly Andrew’s voice recalling the events as they unfolded, juxtaposed with George’s sound bites, cut-pasted from his interviews.

‘Wham!’ ends when Wham! the band ends. Once again, no tears, no melodrama. Just an epic last concert and a warm hug. It’s the postscripts that leave us with mixed feelings George Michael’s death in 2016 at the age of 53 and that ‘Last Christmas’ finally grabbed the UK Number One slot in 2021, 36 years after its initial release. ‘Last Christmas’ will definitely outlast many break-up songs!