George Michael

George Michael was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou on June 25, 1963, in East Finchley, north London ^[1]. His father, Kyriacos Panayiotou, was a Greek Cypriot restaurateur who had emigrated to England in the 1950s and anglicised his name to Jack Panos. His mother, Lesley Angold, was an English dancer. Georgios grew up with two older sisters, Yioda and Melanie, in a household where his father worked long hours building up his restaurant business ^[1].

The family moved from Finchley to Kingsbury and later, as the restaurant trade prospered, to Radlett in Hertfordshire. Georgios attended Bushey Meads School in Bushey, where in 1975 he met Andrew Ridgeley, a confident new classmate who shared his obsession with pop music ^[2]. The two became close friends, listening to records, working out dance routines, and busking on the London Underground, where Georgios sang and played guitar.

By his mid-teens he had settled on music as a career, against his father's wishes. He worked briefly as a DJ at local clubs and restaurants while writing songs. In 1979 he and Ridgeley formed a short-lived ska band called The Executive with a few school friends. The group fell apart within two years, but the songwriting partnership at its core survived ^[2].

In 1981 the two friends formed Wham!, with Georgios adopting the stage name George Michael. They recorded a demo on borrowed equipment and signed to the small Innervision label in 1982 ^[2]. Their early singles, Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do) and Young Guns (Go for It), mixed dance-pop with tongue-in-cheek social commentary about youth unemployment in Thatcher-era Britain, and both reached the UK top ten after a breakthrough television appearance on Top of the Pops ^[3].

Wham! moved to Epic Records after a legal dispute with Innervision and shifted toward brighter, more polished pop. The 1984 album Make It Big produced a run of transatlantic number one singles: Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, Careless Whisper (credited to George Michael as a solo artist in Britain), and Everything She Wants ^[3]. Careless Whisper, built around a saxophone line Michael had written as a teenager, became one of the decade's defining ballads and confirmed him as the duo's creative engine: he wrote, sang, and increasingly produced the material himself.

In April 1985 Wham! became the first Western pop act to perform in the People's Republic of China, a heavily publicised visit that drew global press coverage ^[4]. Yet Michael was already outgrowing the duo's cheerful image. Wham! announced an amicable split in 1986, bowing out with a farewell concert before roughly 72,000 fans at Wembley Stadium that June ^[3]. Michael, then twenty-three, had written nearly every hit the group ever released and was determined to be taken seriously as an adult artist.

Anyone tracing George Michael achievements starts with Faith, released in October 1987. Michael wrote and produced almost the entire album alone and played many of the instruments himself. It topped charts on both sides of the Atlantic, generated four US number one singles (Faith, Father Figure, One More Try, and Monkey), and won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1989 ^[5]. Faith went on to sell more than 20 million copies worldwide, and Michael became one of the few British artists to top the US rhythm and blues album chart ^[5].

His 1990 follow-up, Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1, marked a deliberate retreat from stardom. Michael refused to appear in his own videos; the clip for Freedom! '90 famously featured supermodels lip-syncing the lyrics instead ^[6]. The album sold well in Britain but fell short of Faith in America, and Michael blamed Sony Music's promotion. In 1992 he sued Sony to be released from his contract, arguing that the deal amounted to professional slavery. He lost the High Court case in 1994, and his contract was eventually bought out by DreamWorks and Virgin, but the suit became a landmark episode in artists' battles for control over their work ^[6].

Michael returned in 1996 with Older, a subdued, jazz-tinged record shadowed by grief for his partner Anselmo Feleppa. It produced six UK top three singles, including Jesus to a Child and Fastlove, a British chart record for a single album at the time ^[7]. Across his career he sold well over 100 million records, won two Grammy Awards, three Brit Awards, and multiple Ivor Novello Awards for songwriting, and in 1996 was named Best British Male at the Brits ^[5]. He also sang memorable duets, including a live version of Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me with Elton John that reached number one in Britain and America in 1991 and 1992 ^[7].

Michael guarded his private life fiercely for most of his career. In 1991, during the Rock in Rio festival in Brazil, he met Anselmo Feleppa, a Brazilian dress designer who became his first serious partner. Feleppa died of an AIDS-related brain haemorrhage in 1993, a loss Michael later described as the most devastating of his life and one that shaped the mournful tone of Older ^[7]. His mother's death from cancer in 1997 deepened a period of depression.

In April 1998 Michael was arrested for a lewd act in a public lavatory in a Beverly Hills park, an incident involving an undercover police officer. Rather than retreat, he came out publicly as gay in a CNN interview days later and satirised the episode in the video for his single Outside ^[8]. From 1996 he was in a long-term relationship with the American businessman Kenny Goss; the two remained partners for more than a decade before separating ^[8].

His later personal life included repeated struggles with drugs. He was arrested several times for possession and for driving under the influence, and in 2010 he served four weeks of an eight-week prison sentence after crashing his car into a London shop front while under the influence of cannabis ^[8]. Michael spoke candidly in interviews about these problems, refusing to present a sanitised version of himself to the press.

After the covers album Songs from the Last Century (1999), Michael released Patience in 2004, his first album of new material in eight years. It entered the UK chart at number one and included the singles Amazing and Flawless (Go to the City) ^[7]. That year he announced that future work might be given away free online, with listeners invited to donate to charity, an early gesture toward the changing economics of recorded music.

Between 2006 and 2008 he undertook the 25 Live tour, his first major concert tour in fifteen years, playing to more than a million people across Europe and North America. In 2007 he became the first artist to perform at the rebuilt Wembley Stadium ^[9]. A later orchestral tour, Symphonica, began in 2011 but was interrupted when Michael contracted severe pneumonia in Vienna and spent weeks in intensive care; he later said the illness nearly killed him ^[9].

Michael died in his sleep of natural causes, attributed by the coroner to heart and liver disease, at his home in Goring-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, on December 25, 2016. He was fifty-three ^[1]. The date, Christmas Day, carried a painful irony for the co-writer of Last Christmas, one of Britain's most enduring seasonal hits. Only after his death did the full extent of his philanthropy emerge: he had quietly given millions to charities including Childline, the Terrence Higgins Trust, and Macmillan Cancer Support, and had made countless anonymous gifts to strangers in need ^[10].

Any George Michael biography has to reckon with a double reputation: the consummate craftsman and the reluctant celebrity. As a writer, arranger, and producer he controlled his records to a degree unusual for a mainstream pop star, and songs such as Careless Whisper, Faith, and Freedom! '90 remain fixtures of radio playlists decades on ^[5]. Last Christmas, written with Wham!, finally reached number one in the UK in 2021, thirty-six years after its release, and returns to the charts every December ^[3].

His Sony lawsuit, though unsuccessful, is still cited in discussions of recording contracts and artists' rights, and his decision to come out in 1998, at the height of tabloid hostility, made him one of the most prominent openly gay musicians of his era ^[6][8]. In 2023 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the documentary Wham! that year introduced his early career to a new audience ^[9].

For those asking who was George Michael, the plainest answer may be the one his charities gave after his death: a musician of rare melodic gift who preferred his generosity, like much of his life, to stay out of the papers ^[10]. Estimates of his record sales exceed 100 million, but his admirers tend to cite something less measurable, a voice equally at home in dance-pop, soul, and ballad, and a songbook he built almost entirely himself.