Dave Amitri on Wham!
I watched the Wham! documentary on Netflix last night. It’s a remarkable tale brilliantly told. The use of George’s voice as co narrator is a stroke of genius by producer Simon Halfon.
You forget for a moment that he’s gone and imagine it’s him speaking in 2023. Even if you’re not a fan of Wham! (how that can be I’ll never understand but I’ll never judge either) but you do love music and the industry it’s a fantastic insight into how a band could make it big in the 80s but remain skint.
While it was all a laugh for the uber confident Andrew. It was very different for George. It’s still remarkable to watch him transforming before our very eyes physically and emotionally while trying to hide his sexuality from his fans and the press. Something he clearly struggled with wanting to be honest with his fans but fully understanding the consequences. Different times indeed, thank God we’ve moved on.
Both Andrew Ridgeley and George Michael had a dream and chased it. Wham! was enough for Andrew. George clearly wanted more. While they were active Wham! were and remain a joyous explosion of talent, fun and brass neck. This brilliant film captures it all.
This clip is everything you either love or hate about Wham! Either way I heartily recommend this documentary.
I was never a big fan, but they/George seemed to make this pop music malarkey look effortless and really good fun, which must have been difficult sometimes given the secret life he was forced to lead. As you say, thank God times have changed.
And even those who don’t like the music must acknowledge that George was, by any measure, a thoroughly decent bloke in an industry renowned for more than its fair share of idiots and timewasters. I remember him on Who Wants to be a Millionaire, pledging to make up the difference if he failed to win big for his charity. A lovely gesture, and little did we know that that was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to his generosity when out of the public eye. One of the good ones, gone far too soon. RIP.
Andrew Ridgely always seemed like a good sort too. He knew his job – don’t cause a fuss, bring your mate out of his shell, let him get on with the hard work of writing pop classics – and has always been clear about how grateful he was.
I’ll watch the film to learn more about the sort of music phenomenon we seem to be lacking a bit today.
I enjoyed a number of the singles inuding Bad Boys which they apparently hated. Will give it a watch. Not sure we are lacking in music phenomenons these days. They are everywhere! Was any act bigger than Taylor Swift right now?
Ridgeley must know stuff, loads of stuff but his protection of George and his legacy is admirable. Hooked up with a Bananarama and buggered off to Cornwall where he grew older and more handsome. I like him, the bastard..
There was a good interview with him in last weeks Sunday Times…..
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/andrew-ridgeley-on-george-michael-drugs-and-the-end-of-wham-sflkx69d3
Its probably paywalled, so here’s the text…..
“As Wham! took their final bow in 1986, to more than 70,000 screaming fans at their farewell concert, George Michael leant into Andrew Ridgeley’s ear and summed up in one sentence the magnitude of both his destiny and of his debt: “I couldn’t have done this without you.”
Michael went on to become a platinum-selling solo world superstar; Ridgeley went off to Cornwall to take up paddleboarding. Michael would be revered as a musical genius, Ridgeley forever mocked as a talentless party boy, “Animal Andy”. He was once even memorably likened to sesame seeds: “The Andrew Ridgeley of garnishes — a hamburger would look wrong without them, but nobody knows what they do.”
On that Wembley stage his old friend had been right, though. Wham! did create Michael — but Ridgeley created Wham!. After countless documentaries about his former bandmate, and 40 years on from their first hit, we can now see their story through Ridgeley’s eyes.
He arrives at the Sony office in King’s Cross looking simultaneously nothing like the 19-year-old we saw leaping about on Top of the Pops to Young Guns (Go for It) and exactly the same. At 60, rail-thin and well preserved, wearing crisp charcoal sports leisurewear and white trainers, he holds himself very still, almost stiff, his face expressionless. The impression of vigilant precision is offset only by a playfulness in his eyes, where flashes of amused mischief evoke his old pop star persona.
Evidently intelligent, he picks his words with caution and care, displaying none of the classic performer’s impulse to entertain or ingratiate. It’s hard to tell if he is always this inscrutable. Wounds from his harsh treatment by the media might still be raw; at one point I refer to when Wham! split up and he interrupts sharply: “We didn’t split. We brought Wham! to a close.”
Yet when I ask if he feels excitement or trepidation about being back in the spotlight, he replies languidly: “Neither. I’m fairly indifferent to it, to be honest with you. None of it’s an overarching ambition at this time of life. I’ve seen it all before, and done most of it before.”
We can see it all now, in a new Netflix biopic full of archive footage charting their meteoric rise from suburban childhood bedrooms to US stadium tours. Ridgeley met Michael — whom he calls by his old nickname, Yog — aged 12, when the chubby, shy, bespectacled Georgios Panayiotou joined his class at Bushey Meads comprehensive in Hertfordshire. Both sons of immigrant fathers — Michael’s was Greek Cypriot, Ridgeley’s had Egyptian/Italian/Yemeni roots — they bonded within minutes over their love of Queen, the Beatles and David Bowie.
In the sixth form Ridgeley badgered Michael into forming a band with a few other friends, but what was originally the Executive quickly petered out, leaving just the two of them, with Ridgeley on guitar. Six months after finishing school, in 1982, they signed a record deal as Wham!.
Within months they were on Top of the Pops, singing Young Guns (Go for It). A string of hit singles — Club Tropicana, Wake Me Up Before You Go Go, Last Christmas — and No 1 albums followed, and in 1985 they became the first western act to play in China. The global publicity this generated helped them to break America, and by the age of 22 they had defined the pop sound of the early 1980s — exuberant, fun, sexy, frivolous. If Wham! hits were the soundtrack of their generation, the soundtrack of Ridgeley’s life had become the roar of screaming fans and paparazzi lens shutters.
What’s striking about all the archive footage is the absence of any Simon Cowellesque pop Svengali calling the shots — or, for that matter, even a choreographer or stylist. “It was all very amateur,” Ridgeley agrees with a grin. “Half the time the clothes we wore on stage were just each other’s clothes.” The teenage Michael was painfully self-conscious, insecure about his weight and hair and clueless about fashion, but Ridgeley saw himself as a dashing fashionista so took sole charge of the Wham! aesthetic, cobbling together what became their signature look —stonewashed denim, Choose Life T-shirts, neon shorts — on a shoestring. The cheesy outfits did nothing for the pair’s credibility as artists. As a low-budget branding strategy, however, they were sensationally effective.
That a total novice teenager did a better job of styling Wham! than the designers they hired later lends weight to Ridgeley’s theory that their success was entirely down to the authenticity of his and Michael’s boyhood friendship. “I think people recognised that, and I think it is attractive. Wham! was so much a representation of our relationship, and the thing that relationship was imbued with was our mutually juvenile sense of humour.”
If the pair had been teenagers today, he thinks they’d probably have been making funny YouTube videos. “We did find each other immensely amusing. That was a pillar of our friendship.”
Any friendship — let alone involving an ego as ambitious as Ridgeley’s — would have been tested by Michael’s decision, one year into their success, to assume sole charge of Wham!’s songwriting. Originally the more confident, driven half of the duo, Ridgeley accepted his demotion with a graciousness that seems scarcely credible. He had co-written three of their greatest hits — Club Tropicana, Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do) and Careless Whisper. Why didn’t he insist on continuing to write?
“That’s a fair question. The answer is because there was a better songwriter in the group. Who didn’t need my assistance. That’s the bottom line. But it begs the question, perhaps, should I have continued songwriting anyway? Yeah, possibly I should have.” He pauses to think. “Yeah, I probably should have. But I didn’t have to — and so, being innately lazy, I didn’t.”
Lazy? He doesn’t look it in the film. “Indolent, then,” he offers, his expression lost in recollection as he murmurs: “A horribly indolent paperboy — not a good quality in a paperboy. The papers didn’t get delivered until midday on countless Sundays.”
Every subsequent step in Michael’s journey away from him towards solo stardom Ridgeley celebrated with the same improbable grace. He allowed Michael to release Careless Whisper as a single, sang backing vocals at Live Aid while his friend duetted with Elton John, and conceded to Michael’s decision to wind up Wham! without objection. Such selflessness is not unheard of, I suggest, but very rarely found in someone who dedicated their entire life to performing to hundreds of thousands of fans.
“Well, I didn’t need to receive the adulation of our audiences. I just liked playing live.” Aren’t the two synonymous? “They’re not. Yog, he did derive an affirmation — a physical sense of excitement from it. For him it may have satisfied a sense of self-worth; the sense of oneself validated by an exterior agency.” And Ridgeley didn’t need that? “No. For me it was purely about performing the songs.”
Ridgeley found the intensity of fans’ adulation disturbing. “I don’t understand what compels and drives people to that extreme. It’s not within me, and therefore I don’t think I’ll ever understand it. It’s derailing. Deranging.” One woman even wrote to him that David and Victoria Beckham had stolen her and Ridgeley’s baby. “It’s the extent to which they perceive themselves as being immersed in you, and vice versa. That’s the bit I just don’t get.”
The fatal flaw in his burning ambition to be a pop star, he explains, was a failure to factor in what being famous would actually be like. “I was just unaware that celebrity culture existed. We didn’t have that as any part of our experience of life. There was no Big Brother, there was no Love Island. Those music giants we loved and respected, our icons, we never felt a claim on them personally. So I was completely unprepared for it.”
Perhaps this innocence explains why he was never too worried that the secret of Michael’s sexuality would come out. At the height of Wham!’s success Michael was a regular in gay clubs, and Ridgeley agrees it is astonishing that no one tipped off the press. Had Michael not been arrested in 1998 for a lewd act in a public lavatory in LA, was his plan to keep it a secret?
“I don’t know the answer to that. I think he felt that he didn’t need to make an announcement — that would be an imposition on him. He wasn’t going to be backed into a corner.”
When Michael was arrested again, several times, for drug-related offences, and even jailed for a month in 2010, “I was concerned by his cannabis use, to be honest. But it’s not a subject that I can go into in great detail, because of my relationship with the George Michael estate. They’re very sensitive about that. It’s strange, because so much of his proclivities and peccadillos Yog talked about himself. And yet it’s an off-limits subject for the estate.”
Ridgeley said that Michael’s drug use came after Wham: “We were a pop group, not a rock group. It wasn’t around us… We were working a lot as well. It just wasn’t when he started smoking. That was in the mid 1980s, maybe, late 1980s, perhaps. I think that was the beginning of his drug use proper.
“You know what happened with cannabis through the 1970s to 1990 with its evolution from a fairly mild benign affair to super skunk. They went to great lengths to breed stronger and stronger varieties.I’ve other friends for whom cannabis use became a bit of a problem. And I personally think that it became a factor in Yog’s less edifying moments.
I ask if he shared his worries about drugs with Michael himself. “A little bit. But he was a little prickly about that sort of thing, he wasn’t forthcoming. I mean, he treated the whole episode of being jailed as an amusing sort of sojourn.” The pair remained close friends right up until Michael’s death on Christmas Day in 2016.
Ridgeley’s life since leaving Wham! has been altogether less eventful. He had a brief and calamitously crash-prone go at motor racing, released a solo album that sank without trace, fell in love in 1990 with Keren Woodward from Bananarama, and the couple moved to Cornwall, where they lived together in tranquil anonymity for 27 years, and brought up her son from a previous marriage. He took up paddleboarding, cooking, surfing and cycling (he is taking part in a 1,080-mile charity bike ride a few days after we meet). Following a thoroughly amicable separation in 2017 he moved back to London, where he lives alone. “I have girlfriends, yeah. But I’m not attached in any long-term relationship, and I’m pretty sure I’m not looking for one.”
Since the age of 23 he hasn’t needed to earn a penny. In 2020 he published a bestselling autobiography, and must have been gratified by the warmth of its reception, but when I ask if part of his motivation had been to correct the media’s misapprehension of his role in Wham!’s success, he says: “No, I never felt an urge to correct any misconceptions. That’s other people’s problems, not mine.” Isn’t indifference easier said than done? “It might be for some, but it depends how much you care about these things. I cared very little.” He minded press intrusion in his private life, but never, he insists, the mockery. Some critics poked fun at him by questioning whether he could even play the guitar. “I’m 60, and I don’t care.”
I’m curious about why, then, he wants to re-enter the spotlight with the Netflix film, and the release of a box set of vinyl singles of Wham! hits. The choice feels as enigmatic as everything else about Ridgeley. “Well, the response to the memoir brought home to me how strongly a lot of people feel about Wham!’s legacy. And that level of interest seemed to be a very motivational reason for actively engaging in Wham!’s legacy.” One young LSE student at a book signing told him he had written his dissertation on Wham! and China in the 1980s. “Which is pretty bloody good going for an economics dissertation,” he says with a chuckle. “But it showed me how large Wham! featured in people’s experience of their youth, how it set the backdrop of their growing up.”
Wham! could never have been one of those 1980s bands still going to this day, he says, because it was a “representation of us as youngsters. Of youth. So it was inconceivable that Wham! could mature into adulthood, whatever that might be. Wham! was never going to be middle-aged.”
Looking back, I wonder what advice he would give his teenage self, clowning around with a drum kit in his best friend’s bedroom.
“‘Work a darn sight harder, mate. Work harder at what you’re good at, because that has its own reward.’ I think the problem was that, in George, the talent was so great that it seemed as if we didn’t have to work that hard.” The paperboy’s indolence got the better of him? He allows a rueful smile.
“Yes. It did.””
That’s wonderful. Thanks Chris
Thanks for posting – most illuminating
More handsome? He looks like an aging, balding Robin Gibb. Not that there’s anything wrong with that
Look forward to watching it. Was recently re-watching the film about Wham’s 1985 tour to China and it is amazing to watch the innocent and unguarded banter between a couple of 23 year olds who had been funded to take a 10-piece band across the world to what was then a closed country. They were younger than my kids are now and it’s hard to believe there was a time when the music industry would invest in young talent and also allow such open access.
I think Andrew going full kit wanker in his QPR strip for a kick about with some local lads is my favourite moment. Like you say so young. That’s a remarkable film.
Their manager Simon Napier-Bell writes about the China trip in one of his books. It sounds like the sort of experience that must have been nerve-wracking, exhausting, and thrilling all at the same time, and good on them for doing it.
Bizarrely, Lindsay (This Sporting Life, If, O Lucky Man) Anderson was chosen to accompany GM and AR to Beijing to shoot the Wham in China film. He and GM apparently did not get on very well and as neither GM nor AR particularly liked LA’s proposed cut, the film was never released.
Bits of LA’s footage survive in the official release, but while the full print still exists, it can only be seen by special appointment with (iirc) Stirling University which holds all of LA’s effects.
Loved them at the time and still do.
Looking forward to watching this later this evening.
Pardon my dumbness but was George “forced to lead a secret life”? Wham! came along at the same time as Boy George, Marc Almond, Marilyn etc were in the charts and openly gay. You might say Wham! were more of a “boy band”, but would early 80s girls really be put off buying their records any more than Culture Club or Frankie Goes To Hollywood?
I completely respect the “my sexuality is none of your business” position – no-one expects all gay artists to be as strident in standing up for their love rights as Bronski Beat. But that’s a bit different to saying someone was afraid to come out because the times were so against it.
The only way I could see it having a negative impact on George’s career would have been when he was trying to break America as a solo artist..
Yes, a good point, not sure if addressed in the documentary, but George seemed to be dealing with a number of other demons as well
Boy George was not openly gay at the time, though, “I’d rather have a cup of tea” in public while privately in a relationship with Jon the drummer.
Bronski Beat, however, were open about it.
I’m not sure that they were openly gay. Like a number of LBGT artists at the time they were often camp but not overtly sexual (remember Boy George’s comment about preferring a cup of tea to sex). Marc Almond didn’t come out until 1987.
I wouldn’t underestimate the amount of homophobia around at the time. Consider the coverage of Freddie Mercury for example.
Perhaps it had nothing to do with his career – if his family was conservative and/or religious he might not have told them?
That was the crux of the matter. Mainly his father.
This sounds really good and I’ll watch it. I’m one of those people who admire George Michael for his obvious skill at what he did, plus his ambition and drive to get there, more than I admire his music itself. I can see Wham were perfect 80s pop, but (much like Culture Club or Fun Boy Three, for example) I could never see myself actively buying or listening to his music. But his music certainly brightens up a room when it comes on in a communal situation (I’ve heard tale of these gatherings and I gather they are called ‘parties’).
Also… ‘thank God we’ve moved on.’
Yeah? Are you George Bernard?
How many professional sportspeople must there be hiding their sexuality in 2023?
It’s a great view. They both come across as dear friends – that’s really the substance of the film, I think. Admittedly, he’s had 30 years to get over it, but Andrew’s willingness to ‘set George free’ to be the artist he clearly was is really quite extraordinary. Musically, I really liked Faith and Listen Without Prejudice, but that refracted glory doesn’t reach far back enough to illuminate the early Wham stuff which was a little light for me. But you can hear the emerging classicism as the film goes on and I’d certainly reconsider Make It Big as more substantial than I thought at the time.
The interview above is more introspective than Andrew gets in the film I think, in terms of any regrets or advice he’d give his younger self. He’s more equanimous in the film I’d say.
I agree that it’s a bittersweet reminder of a pop landscape that I remember being more richly populated and with more of a sense of ‘pop phenomena’. Yes, as above, Taylor Swift is culturally huge, but my sense is that the 80s had several similarly huge artists all in a wider landscape. Come to think, the film doesn’t say too much about Wham’s relationships with Spandau, Duran, Boy George etc (though GM’s reaction to band Aid keeping Last Christmas off the top spot is interesting.)
But definitely worth a watch.
I’ve just said elsewhere that everyone needs a friend like Andrew. I genuinely think he’s OK with it all. It’s taken 40 years for people to realise his worth. What’s equally fascinating is how many old hacks are now claiming / admitting their love of Wham! Funny that
It’s a very good doc. We watched it a few nights ago and really enjoyed it. It’s not exactly hard-hitting and everybody comes out of it reasonably intact. I would have mostly avoided Wham when they were at their peak but GM’s solo career blindsided me and I now reckon him to be one of the great singers and producers of his time.
Loved Wham Rap when it came out, and Young Guns too. But Bad Boys was just daft and for me all the Princess Di style big hair and dancey videos were just not my thing at all, although they (usually) looked like they were having fun. George’s solo stuff mostly passed me by because it all seemed a bit “please take me seriously now.” Good on Andrew, he seems a decent sort and I may well watch this doc out of curiosity.
George in his Wham! days bears quite a resemblance to ex-UN climate head, Christiana Figueres
COP Tropicana…
A number of these big 80s acts started out a bit edgy and political, emerging at the time of post punk and indie only to end up commercial, slick and bland even. I thought Young Guns was kind of fresh and original when they did it on TOTP but they quickly moved on from there. We started watching the film. It’s good. Andrew setting the record straight somewhat. My sense of the early 80s was of good times, soul and funk infusing pop, we enjoyed dancing. There was the goth side of things too obvs but people wanted to believe they could make it. Spandau were working class and aspirational. Wham! sort of failed to grab me.
I don’t think that George’s taste and musical direction interfered with or undermined his admirable social conscience, which was evidenced many times during his career and beyond his death. It’s amusing to recall the ideological knots the likes of the NME had to negotiate when Wham! were prominent and active supporters of the miners strike…shorts and shuttlecocks didn’t really chime in with the asceticism of the agitprop likes of The Redskins…
NME loved early Wham!, remember them being on the cover when their first single came out
But as the documentary explains, they turned against them when they didn’t continue in the socio- political vein of WR and YG and went pop.
Also a brief sneer from Peel natch. I think George was a lovely guy, as was Andrew. These shows give a fresh recognition of them as people like The Queen one did. You don’t have to be mad about the music to apprecicate the documentary.
There is an Afterword T-Shirt slogan in there somewhere:
“You don’t have to be mad about music…but it helps!”
Never big Wham fans at the time, but me and the Mrs found it an entertaining watch, and good to see a music doc in which no-one was complaining about a former friend.
Lady G loves George so we watched it last night. Interesting archive. I would have liked more contributors and also to have had in vision interviews with Andrew. Funny, I quite like the band and their music and I can appreciate the perfect popness of it all but I never bought any of it and it never affected me in any way.
Watched it last night, very enjoyable. Experiencing the whirlwind of those years at top for they boys certainly brought home how astonishing it was that they were so young and how quickly everything happened. I certainly admire George Michael’s achievements at such a young age (even if I still don’t particularly like them as a band).
Like other people have said though, I kind of wanted more. It was over before I knew it, and felt like it didn’t really dig into anything too deeply. I thought we would see something about where Andrew Ridgeley is today, or more about George’s solo career. Although I suppose the fact it is a documentary called Wham! kind of indicates what the subject matter will be. Still, in comparison with that Bros documentary from a couple of years ago, or even that Metallica one from ages before that, I craved something a bit more juicy or surprising or illuminating.
Watched it tonight – excellent stuff. I thought they were fun at the time though not really my thing but as pop goes they couldn’t be beat and they soundtrack the early 80s for me. Boy did he have a voice.
I too read the Times interview with Andrew who I though came across extremely well. When asked how he feels about people saying he couldn’t play the the guitar he said “I’d say I’m 60 and I don’t give a fuck”. Good man.
Recommended.
At the height of his fame I remember him telling a story about travelling on a bus and immediately being pestered by teenage girls. He said to them “Come on – do you think a big star like Andrew Ridgeley would be on a bus?” and they left him alone.
Wonderful documentary, great to see sequences that have never been shown before. Something I have wondered about for a long time and which is also addressed in this documentary is that it is claimed that Wham toured in Europe?. Wherever I search online I can’t find this information anywhere….. On the other hand they participated in TV shows in other countries, but no real concerts except UK, Ireland, Japan, Australia, United States, Hong Kong and China. I was and am a big fan from Sweden and of course had hoped that they had toured in Scandinavia. Luckily, I was able to see all of George Michael’s all concerts in my own country, but I have always wondered about this specific question, anyone?