George Michael

George Michael (born June 25, 1963, London, England—died December 25, 2016, Goring) was a British singer and songwriter who rose from teen idol status with the Britpop band Wham! to global superstardom as a solo pop music artist in the 1980s and ’90s, with such hit songs as “Faith” and “Freedom! ’90.” Despite a waning career by the time of his death in 2016, he had a transformative impact on pop music and is considered to have been an important trailblazer for LGBTQ+ recording artists.

Early life

Born Giorgios Panayiotou, he was the youngest of three children in a family of English and Greek-Cypriot heritage. His mother, Lesley Panayiotou (née Harrison), was a former dancer, and his father, Kyriacos (“Jack”) Panayiotou, was a restaurateur who had immigrated to England from Cyprus in the 1950s. Giorgios was interested in music from a young age, but his father strongly disapproved of music as a career choice. This rejection made him only more determined to prove himself as a musician as he grew older.

When he was 12 years old, his family moved to Radlett, a town northwest of London. At his new school, he became close friends with a classmate, Andrew Ridgeley, who shared his love of music. Within a few years, they formed a ska band with other friends called the Executive, but it was short-lived. It was then that Giorgios Panayiotou changed his name to George Michael.

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Career with Wham!

In 1981 Michael and Ridgeley formed Wham!, a pop band whose name derived from a short rap lyric improvised by Ridgeley. The band landed a record deal the following year with the Innervision label. Wham! had its first hit in 1982 with “Young Guns (Go for It!),” a song of youth rebellion that was written by Michael, who also sang lead vocals. The band’s debut album, Fantastic (1983), went to number one in Britain.

The band’s next album, Make It Big (1984), was a tremendous commercial success, reaching number one in the United States and spawning a world tour. Its infectious first single, “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” was supported by a music video that showcased the band’s youthful energy, good looks, and colorful style, all of which seemed tailor-made for the burgeoning MTV era. Michael and Ridgeley became teen idols, although Michael quickly emerged as the more ambitious and musically gifted member of the band.

Michael had a supple and soulful voice that could be powerfully emotive on ballads such as “Careless Whisper,” a sultry song of infidelity with an indelible lyrical hook (“Guilty feet have got no rhythm”) that shot to number one and became a pop classic. Michael became the writer of most of the band’s songs and assumed more creative control of its output. For “Careless Whisper,” which he and Ridgeley first composed in 1981, Michael insisted on several rounds of production over three years before the song was completed to his satisfaction.

By 1985, when Wham! made history as the first Western pop band to tour China, Michael’s solo career seemed inevitable. He sang with other top musicians of the day on Band Aid’s charity single for famine relief in Ethiopia, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” (1984). In the summer of 1985, he performed a stirring duet with Elton John, “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” at the Live Aid benefit concert for famine relief. Also that year, Michael won the prestigious Ivor Novello Award for songwriter of the year. Only 21 years old, he was then the youngest songwriter ever to receive the award. In 1986 Wham! released Music from the Edge of Heaven, which includes the now-classic holiday song “Last Christmas.” Later in 1986 Wham! announced that it was breaking up.

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Solo career and personal life

Michael’s first single after the dissolution of Wham! was a duet with Aretha Franklin, “I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)” (1987), which won a Grammy Award for best R&B performance by a duo or group. Later in 1987 he released Faith, a remarkably confident solo album debut that sold 10 million copies in the United States alone. Four of its singles went to number one: “Faith,” “Father Figure,” “One More Try,” and “Monkey.” The album blended numerous musical styles, including pop, funk, gospel, soul, and rockabilly, and it spent 12 weeks at number one on the Billboard 200 chart. In 1989 Michael won his second Ivor Novello Award for songwriter of the year and two Grammy Awards, for album of the year and best male pop vocal performance (for “Father Figure”).

To distance himself from his teen idol days, he cultivated a new image and look that was showcased in the music video for “Faith,” in which he sports a leather jacket and boots, fitted blue jeans, and sunglasses while dancing around a jukebox and strumming a guitar. He became an international pop music icon, a level of fame he deliberately sought. He also achieved notoriety for the frank lyrics in his song “I Want Your Sex,” which some radio stations played only late at night. The music video, featuring Michael and his girlfriend, Kathy Jeung, was also controversial for its partial nudity. Although both the song and the video convey support for monogamous relationships, Michael was criticized in the media for ostensibly promoting promiscuity.

His next album, Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 (1990), signaled his desire to mature as an artist. Its first single, the ballad “Praying for Time,” addresses social justice concerns. Having grown weary of his public image, Michael refused to appear in music videos to promote the album. For “Freedom! ’90,” an upbeat song whose lyrics otherwise express his dissatisfaction with “playing the game” of stardom, he hired supermodels such as Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford to appear in the music video and lip-synch the lyrics as the leather jacket, jukebox, and guitar from the “Faith” video are shown being destroyed.

Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 went multiplatinum, but its sales were much lower compared with Faith, which led Michael into a lengthy dispute with Sony, his record label. He withheld new songs for a follow-up album and then donated them to the compilation Red Hot + Dance (1992), a music project to benefit HIV/AIDS research, a cause to which he increasingly lent his support. In 1992 Michael sued Sony to break his contract, citing restraint of trade. He claimed he had little creative control over his music and was being held unfairly to his contract, which required six more albums from him. The court decided in favor of Sony in 1994.

In 1996 he released Older, his most personal and autobiographical collection of songs, including “Jesus to a Child” and “You Have Been Loved,” both of which were inspired by his former partner, Anselmo Feleppa, who had died in 1993. Six of the singles from Older reached the top 10 in Britain, and the dance track “Fastlove” reached number one. He also received his third Ivor Novello Award. However, the album did not sell as well in the United States, where his popularity was waning.

In 1998 Michael was arrested for disorderly conduct in Beverly Hills, California, when an undercover police officer observed him performing a “lewd act” inside a public restroom. He was fined and ordered to undergo psychological counseling and perform community service. The arrest was treated as a scandal in the media and compelled Michael to publicly acknowledge that he was gay. In his interviews after his arrest, he rejected any implications that he should feel ashamed about his sexuality.

Michael continued to perform and record new songs, such as the cheeky dance single “Outside” (1998) and the gay anthem “Flawless (Go to the City)” (2004), but his music was now following trends rather than setting them. In 2006 he was arrested in London for possession of a controlled substance while driving. It was the first of numerous arrests and accidents that arose from his increasing drug abuse. The most high-profile incident occurred in 2010, when he crashed into a shop in London while driving under the influence. He served a four-week prison sentence and was banned from driving for five years.

Final years, death, and legacy

In 2011 Michael launched the Symphonica tour, a series of European gigs featuring a symphony orchestra. The tour was cut short in November when he fell ill with pneumonia. He resumed touring in 2012, performing his last concert in October of that year. A live album from the tour, Symphonica, was released in 2014, and it was the last album he completed. In 2015 he entered a drug rehabilitation program in Switzerland. Despite his troubles, his death at age 53 in 2016, caused by liver and heart disease, came as a shock to his fans.

Since his death, Michael’s career and his influence on new generations of pop recording artists have been the subject of numerous films and biographies. Notable among these is a memoir by Ridgeley, Wham!, George Michael and Me (2019), and Freedom Uncut (2022), a documentary that Michael had been working on at the time of his death. In 2023 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.