George Michael is counting the number of ways he has tried to destroy his career. There's the time he refused to promote his own work, and went to war against Sony, whom he
labelled a slave-master.
The years he refused to make records. The years he couldn't make records. The years locked away from the public, mired in despair and depression. Then there's sex -- the time he outed himself in a Los Angeles public toilet after being caught cruising by the police. And, of course, there is politics -- he made an anti Bush-Blair song, Shoot the Dog, that won him a whole new wave of enemies.
And still, somehow, he is huge. Now he has made a documentary,A Different Story. Typical Michael, he bought the unfinished film off the production company when he decided they were making a mess of it and that he could tell it better. It's that strangest of beasts -- a warts'n'all hagiography. Sure, he emerges a hero, but not without us knowing exactly what his enemies (and friends) can't stand about him.
He says he has been so remiss over the years, treated his fans so poorly, that the least he could do was explain what he's been up to.
The film, though heavy, isn't half as heavy as the story he tells me over the next few hours.
We are sitting upstairs in his management office just across the road from his north London house. He looks like you'd expect him to -- dark clothes, designer shades, designer stubble. He's 42 now, his skin is slightly pinched, the stubble beginning to grey, but he's in good nick.
"I'd say my recovery really started two years ago. So that's 12 years of depression and fear, and lots of other shit. I swear to God it was like I had a curse on me. I couldn't believe how much God was piling on at once. There was so much death around me, I can't tell you," he said.
In A Different Story, he asks his former Wham! partner Andrew Ridgeley whose life he would have rather had -- his own or Michael's -- as if there could only be one possible answer. It's rather haunting when you realize that he means only an idiot would choose Michael's life -- after all, to the public, Ridgeley is just the pretty boy who hung on to the coat-tails of the hugely talented Michael long enough to make a fortune and then disappeared.
I ask him why he would have rather had Ridgeley's life.
"Because he hasn't experienced loss. I wanted to say to him, `You don't understand, 12 years of my life disappeared into darkness.' Just because I managed to somehow throw a record out every once in a while to maintain a career ... " He trails off.
As a boy, George Kyriakos Panayiotou was both paralyzingly shy and desperate for fame. He was born in east Finchley in north London and his Greek father ran a restaurant with his English mother. He met Ridgeley at school, and they became friends -- Ridgeley's brash certainties complemented his more introverted talents. Michael says there was always a contradiction at the heart of himself and Wham! The band sold themselves on their sexual brio, but actually Michael was both confused and inexperienced.
Michael, who wrote virtually all the songs, soon emerged as the creative partner. He went solo in 1984, and with his first single (the classic ballad Careless Whisper) and first album, Faith, became the biggest singer-songwriter in the world.
RSS