George Michael

George Michael (born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou; 25 June 1963 – 25 December 2016) was an English singer-songwriter and record producer. Regarded as a pop culture icon, he is one of the best-selling recording artists of all time. Michael was known as a creative force in songwriting, vocal performance, and visual presentation. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2023. The Radio Academy named him the most played artist on British radio during the period 1984–2004.

Born in East Finchley, Middlesex, Michael rose to fame after forming the pop duo Wham! with Andrew Ridgeley in 1981. He took part in Band Aid's UK number-one single "Do They Know It's Christmas?" in 1984 and performed at the following year's Live Aid concert. His debut studio album, Faith (1987), won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year and became one of the best-selling albums of all time, having sold over 25 million copies worldwide. Michael then went on to release a series of multimillion-selling albums, including Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 (1990), Older (1996), Ladies & Gentlemen: The Best of George Michael (1998), Songs from the Last Century (1999), Patience (2004), and Twenty Five (2006).

Michael came out as gay in 1998, and was an active LGBTQ rights campaigner and HIV/AIDS charity fundraiser. His personal life, drug use, and legal troubles made headlines following an arrest for public lewdness in 1998 and multiple drug-related offences. The 2005 documentary A Different Story covered his career and personal life. His 25 Live tour spanned three years from 2006 to 2008. In 2011, Michael fell into a coma after developing pneumonia, but recovered. He performed his final concert at London's Earls Court in 2012. Michael died of heart disease on Christmas Day in 2016, at his home in Goring-on-Thames, Oxfordshire.

Michael had 10 number-one songs on the US Billboard Hot 100 and 13 number-one songs on the UK singles chart. His most successful singles include "Careless Whisper", "A Different Corner", "I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)", "Faith", "Father Figure", "One More Try", "Monkey", "Praying for Time", "Freedom! '90", "Jesus to a Child", "Fastlove", "Outside", "Amazing", and "An Easier Affair". His awards include two Grammy Awards, three Brit Awards, twelve Billboard Music Awards, and four MTV Video Music Awards. He was listed among Rolling Stone's 200 Greatest Singers of All Time and Billboard's Greatest Hot 100 Artists of All Time.

Early life, family and education

Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou (Greek: Γεώργιος Κυριάκος Παναγιώτου) was born in East Finchley, the only son and the youngest child of three. His father, Kyriacos "Jack" Panayiotou, was a Greek Cypriot restaurateur who emigrated from Patriki, Cyprus, to England in the 1950s. His mother, Lesley Angold (born Harrison, 1937–1997), was an English dancer. In June 2008, Michael told the Los Angeles Times that his maternal grandmother was Jewish, but she had married a non-Jewish man and raised their children with no knowledge of their Jewish background due to her fear during World War II.

Michael spent most of his childhood in Kingsbury, London, in the home his parents bought soon after his birth; he attended Roe Green Junior School and Kingsbury High School. Michael had two sisters: Yioda (born 1958) and Melanie (1960–2019). On BBC's Desert Island Discs, Michael said that his interest in music followed an injury to his head around the age of eight.

Early music

While Michael was in his early teens, the family moved to Radlett. There, Michael began attending Bushey Meads School in Bushey, where he was nicknamed "Yog" and befriended his future Wham! partner Andrew Ridgeley. The two had the same ambition of being musicians. Michael busked on the London Underground, performing songs such as "'39" by Queen. His involvement in the music business began with his working as a DJ, playing at the Bel Air Restaurant in Northwood, London, clubs, and local schools around Bushey, Stanmore, and Watford. This was followed by the formation of a short-lived ska band called the Executive, with Ridgeley, Ridgeley's brother Paul, Andrew Leaver, Jamie Gould, and David Mortimer (later known as David Austin).

Wham!

Michael formed the duo Wham! with Ridgeley in 1981. On the cusp of fame, he decided to legally change his name to the more accessible George Michael. The band's first album Fantastic reached No. 1 in the UK in 1983 and produced a series of top 10 singles including "Young Guns", "Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do)", and "Club Tropicana". Their second album, Make It Big, reached No. 1 on the charts in the US. Singles from that album included "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" (No. 1 in the UK and US), "Freedom", "Everything She Wants", and "Careless Whisper" which reached No. 1 in nearly 25 countries, including the UK and US, and was Michael's first solo effort as a single. In December 1984, the single "Last Christmas" was released. In 1985, Michael received the first of his three Ivor Novello Awards for Songwriter of the Year from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors.

Michael performed on the original 1984 Band Aid recording of "Do They Know It's Christmas?", singing his lines third, after Paul Young and Boy George. The song became the UK Christmas number one, and Michael also donated the profits from "Last Christmas" (which charted that week at number two) and "Everything She Wants" to charity. Michael sang "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" with Elton John at Live Aid at Wembley Stadium in London on 13 July 1985. He also contributed background vocals to David Cassidy's 1985 hit "The Last Kiss", as well as Elton John's 1985 successes "Nikita" and "Wrap Her Up". Michael cited Cassidy as a major career influence and interviewed Cassidy for David Litchfield's Ritz Newspaper.

Wham!'s tour of China in April 1985, the first visit to China by a Western popular music act, generated worldwide media coverage, much of it focused on Michael. The headline in the Chicago Tribune read: "East meets Wham!, and another great wall comes down". Before Wham!'s appearance in China, many kinds of music in the country were forbidden. The band's manager, Simon Napier-Bell, had spent 18 months trying to convince Chinese officials to let the duo play. The audience included members of the Chinese government. Chinese television presenter Kan Lijun, who was the on-stage host, spoke of Wham!'s historic performance:

No-one had ever seen anything like that before. All the young people were amazed and everybody was tapping their feet. Of course the police weren't happy and they were scared there would be riots.

Wham! performed their hits with scantily clad dancers and strobing disco lights. According to Napier-Bell, Michael tried to get the crowd to clap along to "Club Tropicana", but "they hadn't a clue – they thought he wanted applause and politely gave it", before adding that some Chinese did eventually "get the hang of clapping on the beat." A UK embassy official in China stated "there was some lively dancing but this was almost entirely confined to younger western members of the audience." The tour was documented by film director Lindsay Anderson and producer Martin Lewis in their film Wham! in China: Foreign Skies.

With the success of Michael's solo singles, "Careless Whisper" (1984) and "A Different Corner" (1986), rumours of an impending break up of Wham! intensified. The duo officially separated in 1986, after releasing a farewell single, "The Edge of Heaven" and a farewell compilation, The Final (their third album Music from the Edge of Heaven was released in North America and Japan), plus a sell-out concert at Wembley Stadium that included the world premiere of the China film. The Wham! partnership ended officially with the commercially successful single "The Edge of Heaven", which reached No. 1 on the UK chart in June 1986.

Solo career

1987–1989

During early 1987, at the beginning of his solo career, Michael released "I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)", a duet with Aretha Franklin. "I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)" was a one-off project that helped Michael achieve an ambition by singing with one of his favourite artists. It scored number one on both the UK Singles Chart and the US Billboard Hot 100 upon its release. For Michael, it became his third consecutive solo number one in the UK from three releases, after 1984's "Careless Whisper" (though the single was actually from the Wham! album Make It Big) and 1986's "A Different Corner". The single was also the first Michael had recorded as a solo artist which he had not written himself. The co-writer, Simon Climie, was unknown at the time; he later had success as a performer with the band Climie Fisher in 1988. Michael and Franklin won a Grammy Award in 1988 for Best R&B Performance – Duo or Group with Vocal for the song.