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I felt the cry in his voice.
I felt the cry.
I felt the joy and I felt the pain.
"My name is Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou" -
that's how it's said. Wonderful.
"Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou.
"To the outside world, I am and always will be known as
"something else, but it's not my name. As a boy..."
I haven't read this for ages. I know.
"As a boy, my biggest fear was what my huge ambitions would stay just
"out of reach of the child that I saw in the mirror
"so I created a man in the image of a great friend
"that the world could love if they chose to.
"Someone who could realise my dreams and make me a star."
APPLAUSE
Basically we've been friends since we were 12 years old,
and, er, when we eventually got
a recording contract, we didn't see any reason to, er,
to bring anyone else in.
We thought the image would be very good. Two friends, you know.
Is it true that you were unemployed before you were successful?
Yeah, we were both on the dole. Both on the dole.
A friend of mine, Mark Dean,
had just launched a label called Innervision
and he decided to sign his mum's next-door neighbour.
He was already struck by George's star quality
because when he'd signed to Innervision, George went
for holiday immediately in Greece for two weeks
but flew back in the middle of it to get his hair cut!
And Mark thought that was so over the top and so superstarry.
It was not a good deal.
With young artists, one of the things
I say to them in that jubilant moment when they sign their first
contract is, "All you've done is get into the casino.
"You haven't even started playing the tables."
The actual demo tape that got us
the contract was about four minutes long, and, er,
it was just... We did it for £20 in Andrew's front room.
I first met George when he was an unknown teenager.
Erm, I met him at a small
gay disco above a pub by Manor House Tube Station in North London.
He was a great dancer.
He'd just sing along to all the songs
with a very good voice. I remember him telling me,
"One day I'm gonna be a pop star."
I thought to myself, "Well, maybe."
# Wham! Bam!
# I am a man!
# Job or no job
# You can't tell me that I'm not #
Two cute, gorgeous bubbly boys
and those voices together,
the harmonies.
They were box-fresh, minty clean, wholesome but sexy.
They just had everything from the go.
They were happy and poppy,
but had a little bit more sustenance.
I think I liked Wham in the very beginning
because of the stuff I read about them having
a social conscience and venting about being on the dole,
and that appealed to me so much more
than them just being pop artists.
They were just the sort of perfect pop package,
and really smart as well.
That kind of intelligence kind of billowed off them,
but they didn't make an issue of it.
That was the kind of clever thing about George -
the intelligence was sort of there,
but he didn't really care if you noticed it or not.
He was just looking to wow you as a pop star.
Pop became a very dirty word in England
for a good four or five years. Erm,
but it's definitely, er,
it's definitely the music of '83 in England.
You know, when George looked at Andrew,
that was Wham as far as he was concerned.
I actually thought Andrew was the key figure
because he was more confident, he looked good,
and he wasn't wearing a string vest.
People would say to George, "You're the songwriter,
"you're the singer, well, what does Andrew do?"
Andrew was the kind of look, the essence of it.
I just remember being, you know, immediately struck
by their bonhomie, you know. They were incredibly easy to be around.
You know, they were funny and they were bright.
I mean, they were 18 years of age.
George's father was Greek, Greek Cypriot.
When you grow up in England
but your parents aren't English, or at least in this case one
of your parents isn't English, the predominant pop cultural form
of your time is what you will turn to,
to find out who you are. And pop is more often than not
the engine of that realisation.
It tells you what you are. And Top Of The Pops,
I mean, Top Of The Pops, for someone like George, was
a news programme. It wasn't just an entertainment programme.
It was where you got your news from.
It wasn't cool, it wasn't hip,
but as far as young people were concerned, it was
the centre of the universe.
And it hit 15, 16, 17 million every week.
Who's in, who's out, who's top,
who's bottom, and who we need to care about.
And that was how we talked about it in the playground.
Good evening, welcome to Top Of The Pops.
A load of firsts tonight - it's the first chart of November,
it's my first Top Of The Pops,
and it's THEIR first Top Of The Pops. Wham!
The debut was very important cos
a debut was how you sort of announced yourself to
the world. And some artists came across as quite naive,
quite overwhelmed, like they hadn't thought it through.
And then there were other artists that had clearly... Knew all about
cameras and about red lights
and where to look when there was a red light on,
and George had that down to a T.
George was like a scholar of how to carry yourself on television.
# Well, I hadn't seen your face around town a while
# So I greeted you with a knowing smile
# When I saw that girl upon your arm
# I knew she'd won your heart with a fatal charm
I said, "Soul Boy, let's hit the town"...
They had their routines, they had the girls,
they had each other, of course,
and they were clearly going to be stars.
Right, now, I'm here in the middle of the nearest
to mass hysteria I've ever been in any way.
Last week I was an unknown, and suddenly I've got all these girls
around me. Anyway, I hear apparently you're in the process of trying
to change your record company or something?
Well, there's a lot of legal difficulties we're having
at the moment, erm, which is why we haven't got a single out at
the moment, which is a shame.
They had big hit records early on as Wham!
but these were dance records sold on 12-inch vinyl.
They didn't get a royalty for this.
It's very easy to say that we were all naive
and didn't know what we were doing,
but, you know, they had lawyers, I had lawyers,
erm, so I don't know really.
Basically, he knew what he was doing when he went to
the business just that much more than we did at first,
a considerable amount more, because he'd been in
the business for four or five years.
All the records they were selling,
they were absolutely making zero money for.
They needed money to get out of the Innervision contract.
The plan was then going on tour and creating Wham-mania.
I went to see them at Hammersmith Odeon where both Andrew
and George were putting shuttlecocks down their shorts
and then batting them out into the audience, which
seemed pretty gross to me at the time!
I must have been one of the only 12-year-old boys there.
I was there with my sister.
I must have seen thousands of gigs,
but that one I remember where I was standing, looking up at the stage,
and just watching this ridiculous kind of, erm,
cabaret happening onstage!
Fila sponsored the tour and George and Andrew took,
you know, great perverse fun at Whitley Bay Ice Rink, which was
the coldest venue this side of, you know,
the Arctic Circle. And I remember having jeans on
and a chunky jumper, and George going,
"You're not going on like that." I said,
"What are you talking about? It's freezing out there."
"No, Gary, we've got a deal with Fila.
"You've got to put the shorts on and the T-shirt." "What?!"
Actually the joke was on George
because halfway through the tour, he was
the one who ended up in bed with bronchitis.
How are you actually feeling now?
Er, on the mend, definitely on the mend.
Er, the voice is still not quite back yet,
but I feel fine otherwise really.
He's better now, though, isn't he?
During the tour, you started to hear this word Wham-mania.
On the front pages of the newspapers this was splashed,
and you saw the tension build
and the excitement as they conquered the country.
This was excellent
because it would provide money to fight the court case.
Innervision, they were a subsidiary of CBS
and so the plan was to force CBS to keep Wham!
and say cheerio to Innervision.
I think Mark Dean had an amazing eye and ear for talent,
and he correctly spotted George's potential.
I think one can feel a little bit sorry for Mark Dean
because he did provide great initial impetus.
A very self-determined young man,
totally in control of what he wanted to do.
George was pretty ruthless and knew what he wanted, and
Mark provided the stepping stone for him.
# Wake me up before you go-go
# Don't leave me hanging on...
They moved from something overtly political
to something far more hedonistic.
# I don't wanna miss it when you hit that high
It was as though they had received Thatcher's memo that your money is
to be made and enjoyed.
I thought, "This has got to be number one, and it was."
# ..before you go-go, ah
# Take me dancing tonight #
I remember talking to Ray Parker Junior in his studio in Los Angeles
and he was saying, "Guilty feet have got no rhythm.
"Damn, that's a good line!"
If you're obsessed with pop,
if you're buying those records,
your whole life is an apprenticeship for those moments when
a Careless Whisper lands into your head.
I can just remember being
a songwriter in Germany hearing Careless Whisper for
the first time on Armed Forces radio.
And I remember thinking, "How can a guy,
"you know, so young, write something so beautiful and mature?"
It was so, like, it was so elegant and mature
and so full of...of some kind of
French boulevardier,
his vision of life like Aznavour and these guys who've seen life
and they're kind of even a bit, you know, the schadenfreude
is, like, just overwhelming. Like, who the fuck are you,
that you're a teenager
and you're writing things like Careless Whisper?
The answer was that George, despite having written
a pop masterpiece, was just a teenager having teenage fun.
Sarah Jane Barker's on the line. Hello, Sarah Jane Barker.
Hello. Hello. Hello. They're all yours.
George Michael, please.
What things make you angry and how do you show it?
What things make me angry? Angry.
And how... I could slam the phone down! I may say...
Oh, I make George angry.
Andrew makes me angry, yeah. And how do I show it?
Well, I make the occasional solo record and say, like,
"You're gonna act that way, geezer, I'm off!"
I just like the fact that on Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,
he actually sings "I'm not planning on going solo"
and then the next record's a solo record.
We've got a new single coming out off the album, it's a brand-new one.
Great.
Called Last Christmas.
# Last Christmas I gave you...
Sleigh bells and everything actually. Oh, really?
# Duh-duh-duh-duh And the cover is amazing.
You've never seen us look so stupid in your life!
# This year, to save me from tears...
The lyrics were so clever and, you know, it might have been about
teenage angst and it didn't matter what age you were at,
whether you were going through it yourself or whether you'd been
through it, you could relate to what they were saying.
So, you'd see the video for Last Christmas,
and it would just be so plaintive and so painful and so brilliant.
Of course, Last Christmas is
the best-selling number two of all time
because it kept out of number one by Band Aid.
Last Christmas is a song that is obviously gonna snare
the mums and dads and the grans and the kids and stuff,
but of course, on the flip side,
you've got this song like Everything She Wants.
# Somebody told me
# "Boy, everything she wants is everything she sees"
Those lyrics are painful, painful,
you... It just gives you a physical reaction to it.
It was kind of ostensibly about a girl
but actually it was also a metaphor for capitalism
and the way capitalism works in the modern world.
So, why not become the capitalist world's representative of youth
culture and go to communist China?
And take along a world-famous film director with you,
Lindsay Anderson, and make a film of it.
I thought it was quite an inspired choice, I've got to be honest.
You know, Lindsay very left-wing film-maker,
you know, a pop band going to China, first time,
you know, closed borders,
terrified of the Western world kind of thing.
But we were dealing with a country that had never seen this before.
They just brought everything in from the airport on flat-bed trucks.
If it had rained that day, we'd never have played China.
# Everything you want, and everything you see
# Is out of reach, not good enough
The audiences was extraordinary cos they weren't allowed to clap.
They weren't allowed really to respond.
They're not allowed to shake, scream or make any kind...
and there are guards at all the tiers,
all the way round the auditorium.
TRANSLATION: The police were trying to contain
the crowds, telling them not to stand up.
The Chinese audience were pretty well behaved,
but the foreigners in the audience were going crazy.
They were all up dancing. The speakers were so loud -
boom, boom, boom.
Our Chinese concerts were never that loud.
My heart was jumping out of my chest.
It was very obvious that they actually wanted very much,
erm, to be able to appreciate what we were doing
even though there was no precedence for them,
and even though they obviously had no idea of how
to react to a concert, erm, a Western concert.
That was a kind of seminal moment.
I think what Wham! in China did was mark them out
as different from the crowd.
Motown returns to the Apollo!
And starring Debbie Allen,
Tempestt Bledsoe, Lisa Bonet,
Keshia Knight Pulliam,
Patty LaBelle, Little Richard, the Manhattans,
Marilyn McCoo, George Michael of Wham!.
THEY VOCALISE TOGETHER
It was the idea of doing something spontaneously as we did then.
Maybe he felt a little...maybe nervous, er,
and I just told him, "Don't tense up, it's all good."
You know, and we could.
# Hate's goin' round
You know he had a great voice.
It was fun, we just, you know,
we said, "Let's just have a good time."
CROWD CHEERS
So don't go away!
He was having hair extensions put in for this Different Corner shoot.
I just remember looking at him and thinking, you know,
"Why are you so sad
"when everything's going so well?" You know.
I mean, you've just had an album which is getting on
to sell 20 odd million records in a year,
and none of that success at this point seemed
to be making him to any degree happy.
# Take me back in time, maybe I can forget
# Turn a different corner and we never would have met
# Would you care?
A Different Corner is the first time where you can feel
the sexuality of the man,
not just as a subtext but as the context of everything he's doing.
It certainly felt as though we were being given access
to another side of him completely.
It's clearly the work of a confused person.
It's heartfelt and you want to help this guy.
It's a beautiful song which you can read about
a man absolutely fighting the tenets of his...
the central tenets of his sexuality.
Forget the composition,
just the way he presented that super-confident, brave song.
He used the image
to focus people's attention more by reducing it,
by making it simpler,
by making it more austere, if you like.
More like a Rembrandt late self-portrait,
so that you only focus on the sound of his voice
and the words that he's singing.
CROWD CHEERS
Shortly after A Different Corner was released, George announces the end
of Wham! and a huge concert at Wembley Stadium, the final.
These three amazing dancers - very sassy, all dressed in black,
and George is the middle one. No sign of Andrew.
He's gonna do that thing and he's gonna do it on his own.
It struck me that this wasn't Wham's last gig,
this was George's first as a solo artist.
CHEERING
# Yeah, yeah #
She's the best, quite simply she's the best.
And when Aretha turned up in the limousine,
she had just come from her fear of flying course.
She had an abject fear of planes.
She was trying to get round it, and that day they'd reached
the stage where you go hurtling down the runway
but you don't actually lift off.
So she was kind of nervous having come through that.
The pair of them just hit it off instantly.
You can hear it on the song, the ad-libbing.
It just worked out very well.
The Aretha video, shot in Detroit,
George and I flew to Detroit
and we went to a studio which had been booked.
Aretha arrived with 30 people
and six limos, basically.
And the interesting thing is people think it was shot in different
places because the shots of him
and Aretha don't quite look like they're together, and they were.
And what we found was that Aretha wouldn't look at
George when they were singing. She'd only look at her entourage.
# A bridge that's on fire
So, for her to get kind of eye-lined to George, we used
to have to move her entourage
all the way along the street behind his shoulder
so it looked like she was singing to him.
Any artist who wants to have a career in music
has to have a public image, and it has
to be separate from your private self, otherwise
destruction is lurking on the way.
It started with the styling. So the jacket, and then I found
the guitar at this pawn shop.
He had a stylist in LA that he didn't like and Mel -
his sister - and I went down Melrose
and found most of that stuff in Leathers and Treasures,
and there was a jacket with "revenge" on the back,
and then he put his pearls on, you know, which was his kind of
secret sign of his sexuality.
The public image has to have its roots in truth.
So it has to be some aspect of yourself that is true
but then you are performing that person.
# Sex is natural, sex is good
# Not everybody does it, but everybody should
# Sex is natural, sex is fun
# Sex is best when it's one on one
I honestly can't think of really
a more tasteless verse than,
"Sex is natural, sex is good,
"not everybody does it, but everybody should."
I mean that would rank really as one of the most banal and trite
three lines in rock and roll. How...? I don't think it's trite.
How many people have you met in your life that you think are better
for not having sex? If you think about it,
sex is natural, sex is good, nobody does it,
but everything should. I genuinely believe it, I think sex is a natural
part of life. I didn't say, "Have it now," or, "Have it when you're 12,"
or, "Have it when you're 14." I said everybody should have sex.
I'm not gonna sit and think, "Well, they wouldn't
"fancy me if I wasn't a pop star or if I wasn't a singer,
"if I wasn't rich." Because I am all those things, you know.
Once you create a persona for yourself in public
for your career that's separate from your private persona,
then you blow it up to cartoon-like proportions.
# Cos I gotta have faith
# Mm, I gotta have faith
# Because I gotta have faith, faith, faith
# I got to have faith, faith, faith
Faith, I like that.
# I got to have faith, faith, faith
You take some music and put an image with it, OK.
Take some music and put what George Michael did with Faith to it,
wow, you know, then it becomes a work of art.
And it is its own commercial masterpiece.
He was the only British artist who was competing at that level.
When the Faith tour came along, that was on
George's shoulders completely, there was no Andrew any more.
So, George definitely ramped his game up.
He decided he wanted Americans in the band.
So we trundled off to New York to get musicians
and then LA, and then we got a bass player
and a guitar player and a background vocalist from there
and that then became the band. And I remember
the sound check when he suddenly
realised that he had musicians behind him,
and we weren't machines. I could see it turn in his head,
"I've got real musicians here," and then that's how we got
to do Stevie Wonder covers cos he suddenly realised that he had people
that could actually play that stuff, you know.
He knew that this was all on him,
and he was far more involved in the planning stages.
George always wanted the record live,
cos I made that mistake on Faith - rehearsing with
the American band and putting a little extra guitar here
and a little bit...
He was not pleased when he heard it.
He wanted everything absolutely
the same, and every night.
He was far more aware of what was going on
and how this thing was building towards what ended up being
the biggest world tour in 1988.
CROWD CHEERS
Faith had this incredibly long run at number one in
the States, won the Grammy and so forth,
and produced five number ones, I believe. Er, incredible.
George Michael! George Michael! George...Michael!
CHEERING
He came down into the lobby of the Bel Age Hotel,
and George had the ripped jeans thing down,
you know? Long before it became fashionable.
He had this sense.
George had this sense of what was gonna be cool.
And he walked down into the Lobby of the Bel Age
with these ripped jeans on and I went, "Listen, mate,
"you know, we're just sort of breaking here in America.
"This is a pretty cool restaurant,
"and there's a dress code down there."
And he said, "Listen, come with me," he said.
"I'll show you why a dress code doesn't matter
"when you're George Michael."
And hey, we got out the limousine.
When George put his leg out the limousine, I could see
the security guy at the door looking at his jeans,
going, "Oh, he's going nowhere!"
But then George followed his legs out the limousine
and the doors just flew open. You know? Best table in the house.
He was suddenly a world superstar,
and I think that scared the life out of him
because Faith had made him such a... You know, he was such
a strong image and the record company wanted to
turn him into this celebrity.
That was the kind of period when he just didn't wanna be seen by anyone,
you know. He was upset that he was mobbed when he came off
a plane from LA or somewhere.
And he had a cowboy hat on,
a pointed cowboy, he had all the Faith gear on.
And I said, "Well, why don't you dress down a bit?" You know.
The problem is once you are seen in that light,
once you have...once they realise the money in you
and they see that you are a golden goose,
the complete focus becomes about that.
They were trying to control him
and, you know, keep him doing promo all around America
for months and months and months.
And, you know, being on every TV show and chat show and...
Are you gay? Am I gay?
That's a pretty direct first question!
Although pop is all about theatre
and performance, it has to have an authentic core.
No, I'm not.
There was mismatch between what
George was presenting and who he was.
But the main, the main, er, thing I like to express is that
I don't think it's anybody's business.
Most people seriously underestimate
what that kind of pressure is like,
that goldfish bowl existence.
Cos what I'm saying is I don't think it benefits anybody listening to my
music to know whether or not I was in bed with a dog
or a man or a woman last night.
You know, it doesn't make any difference.
Life seemed to be getting very difficult for him.
LAUGHTER
The way he marketed himself,
he made a rod for his own back.
So, the question about George is that having created this passion
play, having created this conundrum,
how the fuck do I get out of it now?
He was the most successful recording star in the world,
but he was basically unhappy.
If I use the analogy of American baseball,
you're no longer able to hit really cool singles and
doubles any more. Everything had to be a home run or grass them out
the park, and there was no... there was no visceral
width to the situation any more.
This is the moment that he turns from being a...
a Janet, or, you know,
a megastar on the global stage
to being one of the most serious
and interesting songwriters of his generation.
He does this meditative,
sad, hopeful,
beautiful suite of songs.
The music usually came first. Erm,
so we would construct some parts of
the song, and that may be constructed with just George
and a drum machine and some basic keyboards.
George needed the focus of the songs to be on his voice.
George wasn't a fantastic musician. However,
what he was able to do,
he could hear that music
and he would take quite a bit of time to work out how
to actually play that music.
And he was using incredibly expensive studios as almost like
demo writing sketchbooks.
The drum track is this - hopefully it should come up now.
He particularly hated cymbals and tom-toms.
So, the music became very simple. Everything had
to be in his earphones as he was singing it.
So, he'd say, "Now, the reverb is still not bright enough yet.
"Make it brighter, make it longer.
"Make those S's and T's last longer.
"I need every one to disappear into the distance."
And he needed that part of the process
to be right before he could move on.
And he would then start to write words in
the studio, sitting in front of the microphone.
And just build it up line by line.
Singing them, see how they sound, recording them.
"No, it doesn't sound right," change it.
It's like an artist with a brush and a...
"No, that line's not right." Get rid of that line
and try this new line cos it's got more impact,
it's rhythmically better, it sounds better,
the consonants are better. Well, let's say, erm,
Praying For Time, for instance.
If you go to a song like Praying for Time,
we had a band to record the rhythm track.
He sang the lyrics as they came into his head.
It was a way of working that I'd never, ever seen before.
There was never any lyrics written down, ever at all.
And he changed the lyrics as we were recording.
Praying for Time is his masterpiece.
A real anthem against poverty and injustice.
There comes a point where you have
to write something which you have not written before
and which you're interest, erm, your interest in any particular topic
or subject will inspire you, and that's why
I suppose eventually most lyricists do
approach wider topics than sex and love.
You can listen to Praying For Time,
and it's completely consistent
with this kind of character
who is trying to be worthy of his fame and what's happened to him.
What is my fame good for? How's it made things better for me?
He understands that really art gets reinvented
in the heart and the soul of the person experiencing it.
Every personal experience is slightly different,
and that's quite important to preserve.
The best pop songs are like Rorschach tests,
like the ink blot tests that psychologists give
to patients, where they see in those shapes whatever it is that's going
on for them. And in a way, pop stars are like Rorschach tests too.
People project onto them the person they want to see,
and when they become devoted to a particular artist, it's
because they perceive in that artist something that they're
missing in their own lives.
I don't believe that I am important as a pop star.
I don't think that there are many people that are important as
pop stars in the sense that they used to be.
I don't believe that I will leave a great mark as a, er,
as an entity. You know? I want to leave something as a writer.
At the centre of this beautiful suite of songs is a song,
Freedom 90, which is about him shedding his Faith image
and shedding his fame skin.
# All we have to do now
# Is take these lies
# And make them true somehow
# All we have to see
# Is that I don't belong to you
# And you don't belong to me, yeah, yeah
Then suddenly it's about artistic reach being everything.
They burn the Faith leather jacket in a closet.
You could not get anything any more symbolic than that.
You know he was saying, you know, "I wasn't that.
"I'm not that George Michael that was in Faith any more."
But I never wanted to be someone else.
I wanted to be a star, and I wanted people to love me
and recognise me in the street. As a child that was what I wanted,
but I never really wanted to be someone else.
But you don't have that many supermodels in your videos
unless you want attention.
Fame is the worst drug of all.
I've seen it destroy people.
There is no drug human beings will ever come in contact with
as powerfully narcotic as fame.
To be there and then down to be here
is, for some of them, more painful than any drug addiction.
They dynamic is, "Yeah, I wanna be famous, I love fame,
"I like the attention."
On the other hand, "Don't disturb me, I'm a private person,
"I wanna close the doors, I don't want paps outside my house.
"I don't want people investigating this."
It seems to me there's always a paradox,
what Jung called the tension of opposites.
He loved fame and hated it.
He loved the media and hated it.
He loved music but also hated the system.
So, there's the paradox.
On the one hand, what you long for is anonymity
and your individualism and your privacy
in a public space. And on the other hand,
you're required to play the game.
And to keep up appearances, and to put on a show from
the moment you get out of your front door.
It is true, yes, when you put yourself out there as
a performer, then you know your life belongs to the public.
But your soul belongs to God.
When he was at his most happiest was, I would say, after Rock in Rio.
# All we have to do now
He was fantastic!
# Is take these lies and make them true somehow
# All we have to see...#
He met the man who was going to be the love of his life,
Anselmo Feleppa.
He was so happy, he was a joy to work with.
The sense of humour.
Anselmo was a great bloke who'd come to the gigs,
sitting with the band and have a couple of beers with everybody.
We assumed that was George's partner
but he never introduced Anselmo at all in that way.
Anselmo was great to have around.
We all knew.
You're amongst friends, it's fine. Not a problem.
But for him, psychologically, there was a problem.
He then had the conflict
of not being able to tell anyone about this.
Cypriot culture around sexuality is very...it's, you know,
it was, "Oh, you'll bring shame upon the family."
Since he came from an immigrant family,
and I had come from an immigrant family in America, I then felt
quite a bit of empathy for him of the torture for coming out for him.
It's a very difficult childhood.
Father, a Greek immigrant, which wouldn't have been easy,
worked incredibly hard.
Disappointed having two daughters to start with.
Er, George came along - thrilled, but, erm,
George wasn't the son he wanted.
As soon as a boy realises he's a disappointment
to his father, there's such a crushing feeling.
It's like a cold hand gripping the heart.
Jack wasn't a bad man.
He grew up himself with his Greek patriarchal ideas that, you know,
the son follows the father.
And his business by this time was successful,
and of course, in that high expectation and traditional way,
he'd expected George to go into the business.
I spent my whole childhood between seven and about, well,
really until the day that I got my record contract having rows
with my parents and specifically my father.
And during family rows he would escape to his bedroom.
Erm, he lived a fantasy life.
The experience of not being loved,
not being properly seen had tended to validate it,
is traumatic as well.
When you're troubled or you've had trauma,
a way of dealing with it is to sort of reinvent yourself,
is to create a number of personas over the years,
try them out for size.
It helps you push back the bad stuff.
I knew Master George struggled within his life as I did.
I was just looking for my father to say,
"I respect you, I respect your way."
A lot of creative artists are
initially driven in their childhood
by a bad relationship with their father.
It's later in life that they come to realise that that bad
relationship has led to their creativity.
Trying to become famous is a way of getting validation
for yourself as a person
that you don't feel in a personal way
because you feel you're kind of, you are
the person your parents warned you against.
But if you can get lots of people to love you on a stage,
that will kind of make up for it and validate you
and make you a worthwhile person.
If they find the love that they were seeking from
the crowd in an individual who'll nourish them
and give them that support and love and validation,
then something interesting can happen in their career.
For the first time, George was really, really happy.
They'd spent time at George's fabulous home in California.
Anselmo travelled with him for concerts
and that sort of thing.
But tragedy struck.
There is now a danger that has become a threat to us all.
It is a deadly disease and there is no known cure.
The virus can be passed during sexual intercourse with
an infected person. Anyone can get it, man or woman.
Anselmo was diagnosed HIV positive.
For the man who once sang,
you know, "Wise guys realise there's danger in emotional ties,"
I mean, my God,
because of a disease that there's no cure for at that point,
you probably are. I think I knew, I was canny,
that was my insurance policy against this heartache.
The rock group Queen said tonight they were planning
a big musical event dedicated to their lead singer,
Freddie Mercury, who died last night of Aids.
George, knowing that his great love was seriously ill
and might not survive,
had to go onstage and be George Michael.
That's a performance you've been rehearsing your whole life for.
But knowing Anselmo was there,
he wasn't just performing it, he was living it.
How he had the nerve to just pull off such a moment of perfection.
# Can anybody find me
# Somebody to...
Come on!
AUDIENCE: # Love.
Anselmo died, and George wrote his mum and dad
a letter explaining what had happened to him.
And of course, his mum was absolutely horrified
that he'd gone through all this without her knowing.
And his dad responded also in a very sympathetic way.
It's a ridiculous situation to sign a contract when you're 18 years old
and be held to it for your entire professional career.
I am bound to a very old contract.
The end result is that I'm still a very wealthy man, so really
I can understand people thinking, "He should shut his mouth."
But the principal is wrong.
George reacted to Anselmo's death with anger.
There was an allegation at this time that one of
the executives at Sony had described George Michael as a faggot.
When this got back to George,
he told his lawyers that come what may,
the arrangement had to come to an end.
The copyright belongs to the record company.
They have loaned the artist the money to make
the recording. If an artist repays all those loans
and the cost of production has been paid off,
the copyright doesn't return to the artist.
I think that's what upsets artists the most,
is the fact that they've made the records,
and especially true artists,
they've kind of put their heart and soul into it.
They've actually made a person investment
into the record, and to find that then somebody can lock it away.
Imagine you go to the bank and borrow money to buy a house,
and you place the deeds of the house in the bank's vault.
You pay the mortgage and the bank keeps the deeds
and continues to own the house.
There isn't one other industry
that operates on this basis.
The music business uses you, so you're allowed to use it back.
The lawyers often were on both sides of the fence.
The lawyers were often representing
a lot of the senior executives in
the record company as well as representing the artist.
Label bosses and label heads of A&R
have got just as big egos as artists
but they haven't got the release of all the glory.
So they very often are quite hard on artists.
This is one industry which has been getting away with
the kind of stuff that the film industry
and the sports industry and the publishing industry
and just about every other industry has had to address.
You know, the right of the individual, the freedom of
the individual has been obtained in just about every other industry.
After three days, I knew it was a no-go.
Just look at the judge.
The judge was a property lawyer.
As far as he's concerned, Sony had a piece of property.
The judge who's trying him,
he's seen a guy complaining about the nuances of a life
of a very beautiful young superstar,
a very wealthy superstar. And I remember thinking at some point
that that wasn't gonna play well.
A terrible time of life that was, getting through
a three-month lawsuit when you know you haven't got
a hope in hell of winning.
I am shocked and extremely disappointed
at the judgment of Mr Justice Parker.
When Mr Justice Parker sent down his judgment,
the clue is in the first paragraph,
because he refers to George being a wealthy man.
I think we all realised, erm,
that he had made so much money that it seemed
a bit churlish to be splitting the difference over
a contract. On the one hand,
we'd heard how grown up he was and how independent
and how self-assured,
and yet we were being told that he was some kind of
little patsy being played around with by the record company.
The perception was that the men in the suits
and the record executives that came over from
New York were serious businessmen,
and this was a whiney recording artist
who had made lots of money and wanted more.
Even though I both created and paid for my work,
I will never own it or have any rights over it.
There is no such thing as resignation for an artist
in the music industry.
And peppered throughout the judgment, he refers to
the amount of money George has made.
At one point echoing a statement made by Sony.
George Michael was going from being excessively overpaid
to being grossly excessively overpaid.
When you get into court,
you know, it's a pretty vicious, dirty place.
Litigation is hideous.
It's exhausting, its unbelievably stressful.
For an artist to voluntarily do that, it's a real tribute
to the strength of their feeling.
They do understand how important it is for us to create,
and they will always have that particular leverage.
You have to face yourself and say, "What's more important to me?"
Is it going further in this fight, or is it getting back
and just writing songs and making music?
You're not just fighting for yourself,
you're fighting for a greater sense of what could make
the industry also greater. Because it was not necessarily
an industry that's ever embraced
change, even when that change has been clearly to its benefit.
All I know is, in this situation,
I can only move up from that position.
I mean, I've lost everything in terms of, erm,
what I tried to achieve with this action.
Well, what happens now, then?
Well...
What about if they said, "George, we'll release you absolutely,
"we're not even gonna ask for any transfer fee as long as just as
"a parting gift you give us one final album"?
I couldn't do that.
He knew he was gonna lose.
He knew it, he was a realist in things like that.
But, as he said, you know, "OK, so we'll lose,
"they win the lawsuit."
I'll never make a record for them again
and when I do, somebody else will pay the legal fees.
The legendary music mogul David Geffen went to Sony
and said, "Look, George is never gonna record for you again.
"Why don't you sell his contract to me, then at least you're covered,
"and we can all move forward?"
# Kindness
# In your eyes, I guess
# You heard me cry
# You smiled at me
# Like Jesus to a child...#
We were in the studio and George is beginning to write the lyrics
to Jesus To A Child.
They're coming at me,
with this gorgeous Latin music,
and it is heart breaking.
What I liked about George's voice
were songs that were talking about
you know, painful situations,
and I felt the pain.
When he suffered the loss of Anselmo dying
is when the very personal songs started to surface
because he'd had his validation,
he'd lost his validation
and there was nothing else to do but tell the truth.
With all that George again had gone through,
a grieving process with Anselmo, and what Pray To Me,
like, turning up on this record,
I just turned up as a 25-year-old kid
just full of positivity and anything was possible.
George just had a unique tongue.
I can't understand the magic of it,
but some people have just got a tongue that just works,
it just goes into your ears, and it works in your brain,
it goes down to your heart or wherever else in your body,
it just is a lovely thing to listen to.
# Five o'clock in the morning You ain't home
# Can't help thinking that's strange
# Yeah, yeah
# Baby, I just want you to know
# I won't go through it again...#
Spinning the Wheel is an absolute masterwork about safe sex.
These are incredible songs.
These are songs that nobody else was writing, music like that,
with that subject matter, at that time,
and this is where he's starting to present himself
as a documenter of gay men's interior lives.
When I first met him, George hadn't even come out,
so even that was very much of a kind of secret.
There'd be stuff about lyrics and I think I was such a fan,
I didn't ever wanna ask him to kind of spoil all that illusion
which is bizarre, even songs that I've kind of written with him.
When Fast Love came along I just thought it was one of
the best records I'd ever heard.
Fast Love on his original demo was like a Latin kind of ballad,
it was like a salsa, very chilled out kind of thing,
and I just put on my disco pants.
George had this way of giving you something that created
a particular dialogue between your hips and your heart,
but also your head.
We spent about three months on it and I thought,
"That's it, it done, it sounds great."
He comes in, he's like, "I want the track to turn into Forget Me Nots"
I was like, "What? What you talking about?"
# I miss my baby
# Forget me nots...#
Like all things, George would say stuff and you'd kind of be like,
"It's just a terrible idea," and you'd do it,
and it was an absolutely brilliant idea.
# Searching for some peace of mind
# Hey, I'll help you find it...#
On one level you could put it with his up tempo disco club hits.
There's an underlying bitter sweetness to that
with the Forget Me Nots sample where it's kind of,
there's a pain in there as well.
It's like, "Yes, let's go out," and it's about anonymous sex,
it's about one night stands but then also it's about the pain
and the loneliness that comes with that at the same time.
Fast Love was when the layers fell from even
the most naive eyes and we thought hang on a minute,
"What is George Michael actually singing about?"
When we were filming George,
it was almost like working with a Hollywood Icon.
He knew the exact angle that he'd obviously worked out in the mirror.
He had to see himself reflected in the map box of the camera.
So, if you were to pan off him and he'd go, "Whoa, whoa, stop!"
and the minute he couldn't see himself you'd have to start again.
In the end we invented a kind of little, erm, playback system
where he could see himself through the lens of the camera
and so it was almost like performing to himself.
And then he'd let you edit it,
but he knew exactly how he wanted to edit it
and it was always in his head.
We'd show him a cut and he'd go, "Yeah, great."
And then it would be, "OK, start again."
GULLS CRY
WAVES CRASH
We met, end of May,
and by the middle of June I came home,
and he said, "Darling, I wanna show you this jumper"
and he took me back to the house. I'm like, "Jumper?"
That's something a cheerleader wears, that's all stretchy,
one piece, that girls wear.
So I went back there
and he pulled out these two rings he'd got in Maxfield.
"I want you to have this. Let's be together."
They were best friends in many ways.
Kenny had quite a calming effect.
They both shared a great love of dogs.
For the first time in his life,
he can phone up his mum because she now knows, erm,
that he's a gay man.
So, he phones up to let her know that he's met somebody
and of course, she's wonderfully happy about this.
But during the same phone call
she also tells him that she's had a cancer scare
and that scare, unfortunately, became a reality
and she sadly died.
I suppose a lot of people would ask the question about why you,
as a public figure,
as somebody who is recognised, both here and America,
why do you take such an outrageous risk?
Well, I suppose that's the whole point, isn't it?
It gets addictive, reckless behaviour.
So, it becomes a point sometimes
where you're taking more of a risk, the chance of you being caught,
you're doing things more openly.
Beverly Hills Police Officers arrested the singer
known as George Michael.
It was a throwback to the '50s.
It was an Agent Provocateur.
The policeman was actively
manipulating himself which is really wrong,
that's entrapment.
There's someone standing there waving their genitals at you.
You don't think that they're an officer of the law!
It's not your first presumption.
I quite often see celebrities of what I call the bubbles of shame.
So, their lives are kind of all right,
but then they have a moment where they do something really reckless
and really foolish, almost as if they want to be exposed.
My reaction to this was, "I'm not gonna be like another one
"of these people that's peeking out from behind their net curtains
"a month later."
I thought, I'm just gonna go out for a meal.
I know they'll all chase me, and it did cause havoc,
you had all these cars going across red lights,
and I was just ambling down to my local restaurant, you know.
I think it's pretty brave of him to come and do something like this.
When you're caught, it's taking the responsibility away from you,
because it stops you in your tracks.
It's the moment where you have to go,
"Sharp intake of breathe, what shall I do now?"
And I literally got a call the next day going,
"I'm gonna make a song about it"
and it's kind of, "Great."
It was just the perfect answer.
It was the perfect clap back
and I think he just wanted to just go, "Fuck it,"
and just reply with a load of humour.
When you get on with somebody and you gel with them
and you've got the same sense of humour,
and when you tell somebody an idea,
sometimes you tell somebody and there's a blank look.
But when you tell George an idea and you see a little sparkle
and there's a little smirk...
So, he was really not George Michael the superstar,
George was in the crew van with all the crew
and everyone's chatting to him,
and he was telling everybody the stories of life.
He'd be telling about he was in a restaurant with Lady Di
and then he'd see someone putting a parking ticket on his car
and he'd go running out to the parking warden
and just offer his autograph.
Just really nice things like that kind of thing.
He'd say, "What are you thinking?"
and it would always be, you know, I'd kind of trigger it.
I think he had loads of ideas in his head.
For me, I wasn't quite sure how to portray the whole thing
but all I could see was just this toilet turning into a disco.
# Take me to the places that I love best
# And, yes I've been bad
#Doctor won't you do with me what you can...#
He wanted to kind of develop it more to make a secondary video
which was slightly more hardcore
and a more hardcore porn version of it running at the same time.
He was around maybe 50% of the time on the shots
and things like that.
Obviously, for his scene he was there all the time.
He would just let us go off and do things
cos a lot of it was shot from the air.
We wanted people making out in in public,
as if it was a nude scene or something
so it had to be done somewhere where people couldn't see you doing it.
Some of it was full penetration as well that we were doing.
So, yeah, that was full-on in the control tower.
People like myself trapped in that prism almost,
it was a kind of ray of light.
It was mocking his tormentors, it was ridiculing them,
it was making them look ridiculous and absurd.
Like the couple in the van on top of the cliff,
then we had the other couple who are kissing
on top of the mast on the ship.
The executive producer on it, who played the part,
he was one of the cops snogging on the roof with his partner.
He wanted to use it to let his family know.
The idea was to actually expand the video
and make a porn movie of it as well.
That was the idea, but it never got made. I think it got canned.
George, why do you feel compelled to open up
a very private part of your life and make it so public?
Well, I feel because I've kind of done that, haven't I?
I've done that in a way that I didn't really intend to.
Oh, thank fuck for that.
Thank fuck that he can actually be himself cos if he's pretending
we're having to pretend as well, you know what I mean?
Don't wanna be sitting there going, "Did you see the game, George?
"Look at the tits on her." That's pointless.
There were periods, more than a couple,
where the country wanted to put their collective arms around George
and say, "We like you, it's OK."
In a way he was in a situation where the closet door was kicked open
but then he walked through tall and proud.
That's the moment that he will be loved for forever
by a generation of gay men.
George had to do community service.
So, he came here, and he was put on dessert duty
and on that day we were making white cakes as dessert
for all of our clients.
He really cared about these clients.
It wasn't as if he picked a random place
to do his community service.
It was a place that he had been donating to for five years
and had served people who were dying of Aids.
He was very dedicated to doing this and very serious about it.
You know, he celebrated it.
People like George's life are accidents,
they're purposely designed into the matrix
to do what it is that they need to do to move the rest of us forward.
I used to be in charge of the fundraising
for the Terrence Higgins Trust,
the biggest Aids charity around
and I used to have these little dinners.
I'd have these big gala ones
but I'd have little ones for the big names.
I remember one where Mick Hucknall and David Gilmore
and George in a little downstairs room at Carluccio's.
I told them about what Terrence Higgins Trust needed to keep going,
what the work it was doing, and everyone around the table
was being extremely generous and George said,
"Erm, I was thinking maybe not just write you a cheque,"
and my heart slightly sank.
But, no, he said, "I've got this new album,
"this best of called Ladies & Gentlemen,
"and I thought maybe you could use the UK residuals from that."
I said, "What do you mean? The money you earn from it?"
He said, "Yeah." I said, "All of it?"
He said, "Yeah, but don't tell anybody."
So, I wasn't allowed to tell anyone, I can tell you now,
and people know what an extraordinary man he was.
But, wow, that generosity. I mean I...I cried,
I was just simply amazed by it.
Cos he was a sweet,
vulnerable, hurting man, for most of his life
and yet he had this giant sort of strength and courage
and this ability to say things that would do him harm as if he wanted,
like a child will break his own toys.
As if he wanted to break out of the space of stardom
and admiration and riches.
As if he wanted to be free of that
so that he could express something much more primarily about himself.
And that's almost the definition of an artist.
There were times in the last five, six years that I was very tempted
to just say you know what, "Forget it."
It was a four-year period of just making track after track.
"This is too difficult,
"you're not gonna come up with the album that you need."
I think it was just under 1,000 tracks.
"You're driving yourself crazy with it."
I think we whittled it down to about 300 tracks
that we had on data cassettes.
I was almost ready to give up.
Out of this 300
I think two ended up forming on to Patience.
The fact that it feels more gay to people is probably due
to the fact that my life is more of an open book these days.
By Patience he was like a blueprint
for an elder statesman of pop.
It would be a horrible way to leave my career,
to leave people thinking that my sexuality took away my market
cos I just knew that wasn't true.
And he really found his look.
It's really important to say,
"Look, it is not damaging, if you have ability,
"it is not damaging, erm, to have the confidence to come out."
Every album there were enough good songs on it to justify the wait
and I think as long as he kept doing that, his fans were going nowhere.
For my sins I do check out my fan websites
and they'll say, "He sounds a bit gay now,"
or, "That bit at the beginning there sounds really gay."
And you're just thinking,
"It sounds exactly like I've always sounded.
"It's just you know I am gay."
But he just seemed to be cruising at that point
into middle age pop serenity.
I think I have quite a good take on both sexes,
maybe cos I grew up with two sisters
and also because of the relationships I had
in my earlier life with women,
and now having totally, err,
I suppose,
I feel totally part of gay culture now.
# I'll be your sexual freeek
# Of the week
# You're such a sexy mama
# I'll be your inspirational brother
# I think I need a re-booty
# I'll be your sexual freeek...#
It was that level of defiance.
He wasn't going to be a sanitised air-brushed gay man
who you could have along at dinner parties
and "Isn't he so civilised?"
Freak, when you think of the public, it was maybe a step too far,
commercial public, cos it putting his sexuality out there in such
an aggressive way that I think people didn't know how
to take it at the time.
It was a rare commercial misstep for him.
We wanted to do a ballet which was just like
where George was the Devil,
and he also had this big, long cock which was like his tail.
He wanted to do it with the Royal Ballet
with them covered in tattoos glue sniffing.
George was telling me the idea and he was saying,
"I wanna be Captain FF" which was Captain Fist Fucker
and all these things and I was saying, "I'm not sure,
"I can't see how it's gonna work" and I didn't get it.
I just felt it was the wrong way to go,
to go too far to try and get a youth audience in.
Gay people are some of the most interesting people on the planet
because they are born into an environment
which is gonna be difficult for them,
The world is full of human beings trying to procreate
and that's not what we're here for.
If you are strong enough to realise that what you are is not wrong,
and yet a large percentage of the world is telling you it is,
then you begin to question everything.
# I'm gonna shoot the dog
# Come on, ladies
# Nine, nine, nine gettin' jiggy
# People, did you see... #
"Shoot The Dog" now is almost a prophetic song,
because almost everyone now agrees with him on the rights and wrongs
of the Iraq War.
But he took the stance that was, at that time,
considered very threatening.
Tony Blair has no authority to do this.
He's the Prime Minister, he is not someone we are supposed
to follow into lethal situations without asking questions.
I interviewed him in so many different situations.
One when he produced this record called "Shoot The Dog,"
which was about the Iraq War in the early 2000s,
and he was ranting against George Bush and against Tony Blair.
He came into the studio, and he sat down,
and we opened up the microphone,
and he just laid into to me,
into Radio 1, into everything.
You know, I mean, he had the forum,
you know it was live radio, he could say what he liked,
he had me over a barrel
and, you know, when George was on a mission, he was on a mission.
It was a very provocative record,
and it was a huge risk
with his American career which wasn't that big by then anyway,
so I'm not sure really how big a risk it was.
But it was typical George Michael.
It was provocative, it was designed to get everybody talking,
had a very provocative video with it.
And he knew that the media would be very important to him to drive
the narrative of that record.
This is about Rupert Murdoch and my making, er,
what he considered to be statements
that were anti-American at this time, er,
is something that is obviously...
I'm the kind of guy that has to be slapped down,
and I'm just saying, "I won't be slapped down."
You might even take away my career, you might manage it,
but I know that I'm not going to let it happen without a fight.
And basically, I am going to be in the centre of a war of PR
with Mr Rupert Murdoch if he doesn't leave me alone.
It's a fine line, really, between self-destruction
and contrariness, and bravery.
And he exhibits all three to me.
You take on the Murdoch empire,
you take on the tabloids at your peril.
I mean, they are very patient and very powerful.
And once you cross them, they don't forget.
The point that really destroyed him, I think, was when he came out
against the Murdoch newspapers,
and these papers went for him.
He knew he would get eaten alive, and he did.
With George being so upfront about his sex life and defending
cruising on Hampstead Heath,
er, with his political songs,
with a clear controversial social message,
he knew that the tabloids would probably gun for him.
And, indeed they did.
..Possession of cannabis after being found slumped in his car
on both occasions.
Sky's Sarah Hughes reports.
This stuff keeps me sane and happy.
I could write without it if I was sane and happy.
HE LAUGHS
Well, this is the worst possible timing for George Michael.
He's just started a 28-city European tour,
he's only had one date so far - and now, once again,
he's in the headlines for something other than his music.
The timing is atrocious.
OFF CAMERA: Is it an accident, or is there a possibility
that he does it deliberately?
Oh, a lot of people speculate that this is someone
who just likes the attention.
So, with that amount of power that he had in his command,
and I think he liked to challenge himself.
And I think what when you're a control...
..wanting to be in control,
one of the ways to challenge yourself or thrill yourself,
or entertain himself by putting himself into situations where
there was a huge challenge,
and he could potentially lose control,
he would dance on that knife edge.
It's the second time of the year...
George, George, George!
..an unused spliff in the car...
and no drink or drugs in my body. SHOUTING
He did manage to do the thing that he professed to want to do.
He destroyed his own star quality.
And in doing that,
he didn't become any less special.
In fact, he became more magical,
because he became more quantifiable, and more knowable to you.
There's no drink or drugs in my body.
As a journalist, you're aware it's all good fodder.
And as a big lifetime fan,
it's just desperately upsetting to see that the person that you
have always celebrated so much is reduced to becoming that fodder.
I have not cheated or lied about my sex life.
Why are those cameras there?
To trap an individual in something which is a completely normal,
commonplace, er, part of his cultural activity.
He revelled in his own sexuality
and felt it was really important to be honest, upfront,
and open about the fact that he really enjoyed sex.
If you get some sanity back into the idea of privacy,
any kind of privacy, right?
Then the fact that these people are doing this to me
is completely immoral.
ALL SHOUTING: George!
Guys, watch your legs! SHOUTING CONTINUES
And the Murdoch newspapers were camped outside his house
24 hours a day following him.
They all knew that he was going to Hampstead Heath cruising.
They'd known that for years and years, and years.
But now, they went into overdrive.
Here is the reality of my life.
And if you're a straight person, you might not understand
why it makes me so happy.
I have a career that I love.
I live in the most beautiful house I've ever seen.
I have a wonderful partner of ten years.
I'm a very, very happy gay man.
The fact that I'm portrayed as some kind of loser by straight society
is their problem.
My problem is that I'm expected to live with people lying constantly,
one lie laid on top of another lie,
laid on top of another lie, and say nothing.
We was in San Francisco, and Kenny, George's partner,
was trying to help me get George to contribute to this documentary.
And every time I called, he'd say,
"George isn't sure he wants to do it now.
Anyway, I was going back to England the next day,
and Kenny calls and says, "George says he wants to do it!"
And he was living in Dallas, Fort Worth, where he had a place,
an art gallery with Kenny.
And so, I had to divert the flight and with the crew, and we...
We stopped off at Dallas,
and on the way to his house, he called up and said,
"Oh, I can't get my make-up artist.
"Do you mind if I use yours?"
I said, "George, I'm making a documentary series for the BBC!
"I haven't got a make-up artist!
"I mean, occasionally there's a fleck of something on my mouth,
"someone will tell me to wipe it away, but..."
He said, "Oh, oh, really?" And so, it was so sweet.
And so, he got someone in, then he came started talking about Aids.
And, of course, he immediately started saying things that were
dark and dangerous, and aggressive,
and angry, and political, and real..
And that's why he'd not wanted to do it.
And when he finished, he said,
"I knew I shouldn't have talked to you.
"I'll only get into trouble for this.
"'There goes George, shooting his mouth off.'"
And he was, you know, saying how people would respond -
and yet, he was tugged by this need to be absolutely raw and honest.
And by this knowledge that it would make his life more difficult,
but, you know, there'd be headlines,
people would say he was arrogant, or he was, you know,
self-regarding or something.
You just wanted to fold him in your arms.
# So now I walk in the midday sun
# I never thought that
# My saviour would come
# I think it's amazing
# I think it's amazing.. #
"Amazing" - it's a good song. Thank you, thank you very much.
Yeah, it really is. You must be very happy with it.
Well, it's kind of usual to hear me singing about love, really,
in the context of "Ooh, I'm in love" -
normally it's, "I'm so miserable! Love me, love me."
That's a song that I actually enjoy watching people, er, like, yeah.
Talking about the joys of meeting someone and being in love,
and how it makes a difference in your life.
This song is really, like,
"I just can't believe it, how fantastic and life-changing
"this relationship is."
I didn't want it to look like just some pop star let his boyfriend
have something that he wanted to do and just played with it.
So, he took it very seriously.
I just didn't want it to be a place where, er, very wealthy people
came to look at paintings or art.
And so, we were very, very philanthropic from the start.
So, we helped raised a lot of money in general,
it's a big part of it.
Yeah, we had one of the most amazing British contemporary art collections
in the world, and so, to make that full, it can't just be
what you like, and you know, art doesn't have to...
You don't have to love it, it can move you, it can make you think,
it doesn't naturally always have to evoke happy emotions.
If we're talking about rock music or pop music,
making music also is a form of visual art.
Its pretty much almost a portrait.
A self-portrait.
And what you're playing with, by definition,
if you're a rock star, is you're playing with the idea of identity.
You're playing with the idea of who you are.
He has seen a documentary that Tracey had done,
and we were eating at the Ivy, and he wanted to meet her.
So, I went over and said,
"Hey, can we come over and chat with you?"
So, we went over and chatted with her, and, er,
a lifelong friendship.
So, with the Tracey Emin works,
you know, they had this blur to its confessional quality,
this spidery writing expressing the feeling, floating it out there
and seeing what that feeling looks like.
Well, to me that's almost like how George would
throw a line out in the studio.
"Does it sound right? Is that what I really feel?"
George Michael is now on a 22-date North American tour,
his first in 17 years.
Now that California's handing out same sex-marriage licenses,
Michael says he and his partner of 12 years, Kenny Goss,
might make a trip to the courthouse and say "I do,"
though not any time soon.
When he toured Europe, every city we went to,
I had £25,000 that I could help an organisation.
For the most part, it was organisations that related to
nurses or children.
And so, I would research, find an organisation,
go and visit them while I'm there,
and then take as many people as possible to the concert that night,
and they would get £25,000, as well.
# If you're gonna do it, do it right
# Come on, baby, yeah # If you're gonna do it, do it right
# Whoo, take me on # If you're gonna do it, do it right
# Please don't leave me here # If you're gonna do it, do it right
# To do it on my own
# First class information # Oh!
# Sense your inspiration... #
The screens on the side he wanted curved, and then,
this big one that comes over in,
like, a wave, which was expensive.
And the production costs was huge, but he never really worried
about how much money was in his bank account.
He thought you only needed so much money.
George's mother was in a National Health Hospital when she had cancer,
and the nurses were incredible.
He was so impressed, and he wanted to give back.
So, he had this wonderful concert for them.
It's nice that someone's done something for nurses,
cos all the time we get abused verbally, physically -
and somebody's actually appreciated nurses.
Concerts to put on are very expensive, so I think people
don't realise, you just don't show up.
I don't think he ever worried about being, what was it,
Behind the Music, or whatever that is,
where they tell the story of a washed-up quarterback now,
and he's working at Wendy's.
Then we came off air.
And the editor was waiting for us outside the studio,
and she's jumping up and down
with excitement because one person's donated 50 grand.
And we said, "Who?" She said, "It's anonymous, I can't tell you."
And of course, all the philanthropy was secret.
It wasn't that we wasn't a great philanthropist,
he was a fantastic philanthropist.
But he would give with the condition
that you don't let people know it's me.
He would see things on television, or hear about something,
or read about something.
He would see somebody who needed a new set of glasses,
or a new set of teeth or something,
and he'd call in and he'd do it.
Also about helping friends.
I had a terminally ill child.
He had, you know, his house in the South of France -
Chez Nobby, that's what it was called.
You know, there was a helicopter to pick us up
and drop us off in the garden.
He was a guy who was looking for ways, like Bill Gates,
to give away the money he'd made.
We don't know, so let's go with instinct and just go...
Shall we go with C? C.
I'll tell you what, we'll go with C.
And if it's wrong, I'll match it, so we make it to 64.
That way, we can't lose, we're going to 64,
but we might still be going home.
That's fantastic of you.
We were having a problem making pay roll.
All of a sudden, a letter appeared at our doorstep that said,
"Dear Project Angel Food, keep doing what you're doing.
"Love, George."
He's our single largest donor in the history of Project Angel Food,
donating more than half a million dollars to us.
When you know that you're making the world a better place,
that is a positive feeling that helps lift you through downers.
District Judge John Perkins told George Michael that
he'd taken a "dangerous and unpredictable mix of drugs."
He banned him from driving for five years before sentencing him
to eight weeks in prison.
There were gasps and tears from fans within the court's public gallery.
There were tears, too, from George Michael's long-term partner,
Kenny Goss, as he left court alone.
The good life got not so good.
Hello, George.
I'm sorry to do this.
Thank you to everybody that supported me in there.
It was quite inspirational and, er,
I'm coming out here on my own
so that you'll realise I just want to start again.
Ooh! By the way, I've just thought of a really good idea for a song.
THEY LAUGH
And it won't be published, it'll be nothing to do with prison!
The thing about George is he hated interviews.
He didn't really like journalists.
But when he did decide to do interviews,
he was going to give you everything.
He was almost evangelical about his need to talk about his sexuality.
He was a compulsive truth-teller.
And initially, George was there in his sunglasses,
quite, sort of, reserved.
Spliffing his way through the interview -
spliffing one, spliffing two, spliffing three.
And then, he got more relaxed, the sunglasses came off,
the stories started flowing.
And what he still felt guilty about was having taken
so long to come out.
It was almost an act of penance.
And he'd have to tell you everything.
When he talked about the family history
and the suicides in the family,
and the impact of Anselmo's death,
and then, his mother's death,
and you started to see it all as one,
there was this real, erm,
suffering that he'd been through in his life.
Before that interview, there'd been a tiny, tiny story
saying he'd been cautioned for possession of crack.
And I found, at one point, I was becoming like some headmaster
to him, and I said to him,
"George, there was a story about you being caught
"in possession of crack?"
And he nodded.
And again, went into denial.
And in the end, I said to him, "George, look me in the eye.
"Were you smoking crack that day?"
And he kind of went... "Yeah, on that occasion, I was."
With all the fame and all the money, and all the great things, as well,
there was also this, sort of, spectre over him, I think,
from a lot of his life, of death.
Well, I didn't do that tour,
because...
Well, I wasn't sure that he should be out on the road, frankly.
But he obviously wasn't well.
You've been going for almost 30 years now, three decades.
How have you changed as a person from when you started?
Well, I suppose I've got a little bit more fashion sense
than when I started.
Other than that, I'm pretty much the same, I suppose.
It felt to me like it was something he was doing more for himself.
He's positioning himself as someone who had produced a canon,
and was singing these classics that, sort of, were from the canonical
classics of the previous century.
I think one of his things was to work with Phil Ramone
on an album.
He was very, very in awe of Phil Ramone.
APPLAUSE
If you go through his career, it's almost as if the camera's
just slowly zooming in -
and at the end, all you've got is him.
And I think you should probably know the truth behind this one
before I sing it.
His songs just got more and more intense.
And therefore, I think they become less pleasant for him to write.
My battles with various substances are very well-documented.
We had the tendency towards the slower more reflective material,
a, kind of, musical psychiatry.
The truth - Kenny and I have not been together for about
two-and-a-half years, and...
SCATTERED APPLAUSE
And all I'm going to say is I love him very much,
but my love life's been a lot more turbulent than I've let on.
Yeah, he wrote a song called "Where I Hope You Are".
Probably the very first break-up that song I've ever written.
I actually have listened to that song quite a bit, and I actually...
I didn't know that he was going to...
I didn't even know he was going to perform it, so...
# For so long
# There's been no-one else I care about... #
Living the life you've lived,
you know, with all the focus on you as a person,
how does that effect your life?
It's had catastrophic effects on my personal life.
What is so fantastic in your life that you can actually, you know,
live the way you do with all of this?
Music! Music. It's the only if it wasn't music,
if I wasn't absolutely driven,
and if I didn't find it impossible to live without music,
then I wouldn't be doing this any more.
So, you're actually happy?
Erm, I'd say I've never...
I'd say I haven't been happy with fame since I was 22.
Right? So, I've wished I was someone else since I was 22.
Because I do, I hate the effect it has on friendships,
on relationships,
on your privacy, I hate it, all of it.
George, I'd heard really loved Going To A Town,
and I got a call from George,
at 3.00 in the morning when I got to my hotel.
And he was talking about how much he loved the song,
how important it was -
and it was all, you know, wonderful stuff.
But needless to say, he was also very high.
HE CHUCKLES And half an hour passed,
an hour passed,
an hour-and-a-half passed,
and then, eventually, he actually...fell asleep.
I enjoyed the experience cos it was so unusual.
I mean, in retrospect, it is quite tragic,
you know, cos he lost that battle.
# I'm goin' to a town that has already been burnt down
# I'm goin' to a place that has already been disgraced
# I'm gonna see some folks... #
He's turned it so completely into a George Michael song,
that you can almost see him more clearly.
Having George Michael sing that song
was one of the high points of my career,
and an epic moment that I could...
That, to the end of my days, I will refer to -
especially being, you know, a gay boy who, you know,
at puberty, drooled over his behind.
HE LAUGHS
Er, I've got Streptococca-something.
HE LAUGHS
It's a form on pneumonia.
And they spent three weeks keeping me alive, basically.
The last ten days since I woke up, literally, thank you people
for saving my life...
VOICE BREAKS: ..which is something I've never had to do before,
and I never want to do it again.
He was very ill, post that time when I saw him...
..in the immediate aftermath,
and he was not a well man.
And it took him a long time to recover from that.
Whether he ever recovered fully or not is open to question.
There was dark demons involved that led him down a dark spiral.
George's family had an uncle who was a depressive,
who killed himself.
And that's a genetic thing.
I doubt you could override that, to that extent.
It was a self-destruct for reasons that George knows.
One could hypothesise that perhaps it was the death of
George's therapist, friend,
father figure in the form of Barry Nacouper,
that was a grief too many.
That's a very strong ally,
somebody who you really trust who's on your side.
On his piano, there was a photograph of Barry Nacouper -
given that a tradition of a grand piano is that you have
the photograph of the person you love most in the world,
or for your most loved one.
Barry was an incredibly important figure in George's life,
and his death must've brought him
an overwhelming amount of grief.
When he dies, there's a very slow progression down,
and then, it seems to go further and further down.
And there's nobody else to whom he trusts.
He was putting on weight, he was getting very morose,
taking more and more drugs.
Inevitably, the voice did deteriorate.
His voice - which is, I think, after he got pneumonia, was why he,
you know, became more depressed.
He was just desperately miserable within his life and who he was.
It's just awful.
It was his descent into drug use, that was the thing,
cos that was what was destroying him.
The circle of people around him had changed,
and they were all part of that same lifestyle.
You know I know people who worked very closely with him
who would despair of how he was being.
He was on a downward spiral.
I went and had a meeting with him up in the house,
but he didn't want to be in at all.
So, we just went to Barcelona,
shot it in a really old vintage, fairground in Barcelona.
He didn't come with us. And then, it was really weird, though.
So, we'd be shooting, and then,
I'd hear George's voice behind me.
I'd go, "What the fuck?"
And then, somebody would hold a laptop open,
and George was on Skype looking at what we were doing, and it was like,
"Hello there, mate."
That's a wonderful example of how one musician
can bring their history, their story, their persona,
their image to someone else's song.
And that song becomes something else,
and it becomes about George Michael,
or it becomes about who we think George Michael might be,
or might have been.
# Let her down easy
# Her heart is on the line
# Let her down easy
# And you'll grow up in time... #
If you're thinking about art and music...
..George's music,
I think you can think of it all as an astonishing sequence
of self-portraits...
..in which the artist, George, is looking at himself in the mirror
each time he comes up with a new song, and he'll say,
"Right, who am I? Who are you?"
And each time, there's a different answer.
And if you listen to all the songs,
and you watch all the videos one after the other,
you emerge with this wonderful sense of the indeterminacy of a self,
the fact that all the richness, if you like, that how many selves
you can be - and I think that's one of the things
that people love about him.
I think that you can see that there's a darkness there a lot.
There's a lot of darkness there.
And you can conclude, from the end of his story,
that the darkness won.
But I always like to think that there are all these other sides,
and one of those could have won, it just didn't.
You know, such and such happened in a certain period of time,
and his demons got the better of him.
But they didn't have to - and he left us with
so many angels, that maybe that's enough anyway.
"My name is Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou" -
that's how it's said. Wonderful.
"Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou.
"To the outside world, I am and always will be known
"as something else, but it's not my name.
"As a boy..."
I haven't read this for ages. I know.
"As a boy, my biggest fear was that my huge ambitions would stay
"just out of reach of the child that I saw in the mirror.
"So, I created a man in the image of a great friend that the world
"could love if they chose to.
"Someone who could realise my dreams and make me a star.
"I called him George Michael,"
"and for almost a decade, he worked his arse off for me
"and did as he was told.
"He was very good at his job - perhaps a little too good.
"Anyway, shortly before I was approached with the idea
"of this book, I decided that his services were no longer required.
"He went quietly, he didn't make a fuss.
"I know many of you will think that that was a strange thing
"for me to do, but believe me, he really had to go."
Subtitles by Red Bee Media