![]() In 1979, both aged sixteen, Ridgeley and Michael – who around this time stole the surname of a classmate – formed a two-tone band called the Executive with David Austin (who would become a lifelong collaborator) and Ridgeley’s brother Paul. There are many errors of this kind in the book. Ridgeley might have been a fan of Adam Ant but he wasn’t one at twelve, as Gavin says he was: he was fifteen when Adam Ant starred in Derek Jarman’s 1978 punk film, Jubilee, which wouldn’t exactly have been the main picture at their local Odeon the hit songs came even later. Gavin, with an American readership in mind, gets a little muddled trying to tell a Grease-style story about an unlikely lad’s rock’n’roll indoctrination, with Ridgeley as Rizzo and Michael as a chubby, unibrowed Sandy. In 1975, when Michael was twelve, his family moved to Radlett in Hertfordshire, where he met Ridgeley. ‘From the Supremes,’ James Gavin writes, ‘Michael got his first taste of the catchy hooks and beats that made a pop song unforgettable.’ Or as Michael put it, ‘I knew how to make these records and make them jump out the radio.’ Recordings were designed to be accessible, but also to last. The Supremes, the Four Tops and the Temptations were the flagship groups, and the best songs – minor key, four-to-the-floor pop stompers with bittersweet lyrics – were reserved for them. Local doo-wop groups were recruited from street corners and sock-hops and given in-house lessons in deportment it was crucial to present an image of Blackness that could attract a mainstream audience. In 1966, more than 40 per cent of the singles sold in Britain were by Black artists, many of them on Motown Records. He soon began writing songs with a friend, inspired by the Supremes and Tom Jones’s ‘Delilah’ (his mother had bought him a wind-up gramophone). He first showed signs of musical talent aged six, when he was overheard by a neighbour singing Stevie Wonder’s 1969 hit ‘My Cherie Amour’. ‘Depression runs in my family,’ Michael said. Lesley’s father had committed suicide four years earlier. He was six months old when Lesley’s brother Colin overdosed on schizophrenia medication while on temporary release from psychiatric care. ![]() Georgios (‘Yorg’ to the family but mispronounced as ‘Yog’ by Andrew Ridgeley, whose version stuck) was the youngest of three children, and the only boy. He was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou on 25 June 1963 in East Finchley, London, to Jack Panos – a Greek Cypriot restaurant owner who had anglicised his name – and his English wife, Lesley Harrison. G eorge Michael died at the age of 53 on Christmas Day 2016 despite his success, it was hard not to think of what might have been. Andrew Ridgeley and George Michael in the early 1980s.
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