George Michael

Gavin James Gavin

Description

The definitive biography of George Michael, offering an expansive look at the troubled life of the legendary singer, songwriter, and pop superstar George Michael was an extravagantly gifted, openhearted soul singer whose work was both pained and smolderingly erotic. He was a songwriter of true craft and substance, and his music swept the world, starting in the mid-1980s. His fabricated image-that of a hypermacho sex god-loomed large in the pop culture of his day. It also hid-for a time-the secret he fought against revealing: Michael was gay. Soon his obsession with fame would start to backfire. As one of the industry's most privileged yet tortured men began to self-destruct, the press showed little sympathy. George Michael: A Life explores the compelling story of a superstar whose struggles, as well as his songs, continue to touch fans all over the world. Acclaimed music biographer James Gavin traces Michael's metamorphosis from the shy and awkward Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou into the swaggering, dominant half of the leading British pop duo of the 1980s Wham!; he then details Michael's sensational solo career and its subsequent unraveling. With deep analysis of the creative process behind Michael's albums, tours, and music videos, as well as interviews with hundreds of his friends and colleagues, George Michael: A Life is a probing, definitive portrait of a pop legend.

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 28 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781647006730
• Langue: English

Extrait

Copyright 2022 James Gavin
Cover 2022 Abrams
Published in 2022 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022930494
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4794-6 eISBN: 978-1-64700-673-0
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ABRAMS The Art of Books 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007 abramsbooks.com
To my friend David Munk
For believing in this project and in me
PROLOGUE
In early 2016, after thirty-three years of near-ubiquity in the U.K. press, George Michael, age fifty-three, vanished from public sight. For years, one of British pop s favored sons had sent out as many as a dozen tweets a day from his various homes in London and from dressing rooms, limousines, and posh vacation spots. But on February 11, he posted his last tweet for months to come. Hi lovelies! it read. Enjoy this playlist on Valentine s Day.
The Spotify link he shared didn t send listeners to Faith, I Want Your Sex, or any of his other dance hits about romantic and physical obsession, which were favorite subjects of his. Instead, he called the playlist Heartbreak by George Michael. The songs ranged from Last Christmas, the vengeful tearjerker he had written at twenty as half of England s premiere boy band, Wham!; to Jesus to a Child, an elegy for the love of his life, Anselmo Feleppa, who had died of AIDS years before Michael was out of the closet; to the Billie Holiday lament You ve Changed, featured in his last touring show, Symphonica, in 2012-2013.
The tweet was a smoke signal from a man in despair, yet almost no one perceived it as that-not even in the wake of a series of public scandals and accidents, one of which had left him in a bloody heap on a London express-way. Memories lingered of Michael in his late-eighties heyday: a butch, stubbly, leather-jacketed pinup boy who had become one of the hottest pop stars in the world. It had always been his gift to raise people s spirits, to make them feel less alone; just the mention of his name made people smile. Even when Michael was at his darkest, Danny Cummings, his longtime percussionist, felt a healing power in his voice. It had a frequency in it that was very sweet to the ear-angelic, he said.
To Lynda Hayes, who had delivered an uncredited but famous rap chorus on the Wham! hit Young Guns (Go for It!), Michael had an everyman voice-innocent, natural-sounding, with no frills. He just sounded like himself singing, and it was beautiful. Who couldn t relate to that? Performing in stadiums, Michael could transmit those sensations to thousands of people; his shows invariably ended with fans on their feet, dancing. He had done it on the tour for Faith , the 1988 album that had made him a superstar. And he did it again in Symphonica.
After the tour had finished, however, guitarist Ben Butler, who had played all sixty-plus performances, lost contact with Michael. I sensed that things were not well in his world, said Butler. He seemed to have gone completely off the radar.
The most recent published pictures of him came from Switzerland, where he had checked in for treatment at one of the priciest rehab facilities in the world. Photographers had snapped him on a street holding hands with his handsome Lebanese boyfriend, Fadi Fawaz. In his other hand was a cigarette. His goatee had turned gray; he looked bloated and weary.
Since the beginning, Michael had been adamantly private. No one will ever know any more about George Michael than they probably do about the next man on the street, declared Andrew Ridgeley, his partner in Wham!. But for some time, an artist known for his ironclad grip on every facet of his career had been spinning frighteningly out of whack. He could not face the day undrugged, whether by chemicals or anonymous sex. His once-burning ambition to make music had waned. In 2012, his worn-out body had nearly succumbed to pneumonia.
Brits regarded the troubled star with sadness, Americans with pity. Few people, even most of his friends, looked much deeper. When you thought of George Michael, wrote Dan Aquilante in the New York Post , you thought of this carefully crafted image, amply displayed in his groundbreaking videos. The one for Faith showed him in his iconic pose, that of a leather-jacketed, shimmying, butt-shaking, post- West Side Story biker dude with stubble and an earring. For a star who had been terrified of opening the closet door, that revealing gay look implied a clutching at the truth, yet it flew over the heads of his mostly female audience. To them, said Johnny Douglas, one of his recording engineers, Michael was the most beautiful human being on earth. At the same time, Douglas added, he was the white male soul singer that I think every British lad aspired to be.
Yet Michael himself was a confusion. In interview after interview, he spoke of his longing to be embraced as a serious artist. His Top 10 single, Freedom! 90 found him pleading to be seen for who he really was. Sometimes the clothes do not make the man, he warned. But fame and its trappings had consumed him since childhood; he defined himself not as a singer-songwriter but as a pop star, which to Michael was a synonym for king. He pops the two p s when he says it, and his eyes gleam, giving the term a noble air, wrote the music journalist Rob Tannenbaum.
Yet he sang about freedom with his eyes hidden behind dark glasses. Writer Richard Smith saw numerous Michaels on display, none of them quite convincing. He always appears to be creating some new fantasy self, said Smith, and as soon as that betrays him he tries to kill it off, but then creates a new one to take its place. In the Guardian , Jim White wrote of Michael as a grand contradiction: a songwriter of real depth compromised by an addiction to the superficial, the glamorous, the unreal. David Geffen, whose mid-nineties record label, DreamWorks SKG, released the singer s most candid album, Older , sensed a man in deep discomfort with all he had fought to attain. He never seemed to be able to live in the career he d created for himself, said Geffen. Earlier, he had witnessed Michael s quixotic battle to cut himself loose from the record label, Sony, that had made his superstardom possible. The outcome had not been happy.
Michael yearned to hide, yet stood on gigantic stages in front of thousands. The front door to his home in the fashionable London neighborhood of Highgate was clearly visible from a low gate a few feet in front of it; anyone could see his comings and goings or wait there for an autograph. He nearly always obliged with a smile, for Michael was a gentleman. It was impossible not to like him, said David Bartolomi, one of the countless photographers who took his picture. Yet most of the time, Michael couldn t bear to look at his own face.
A companion of his since Wham! called the singer a sad, angry little boy. Friends such as Chris Cameron, his longtime keyboardist and musical director, were very worried about him. Cameron overheard a tense exchange between Michael and his manager, Andy Stephens, over Michael s self-destruction. The singer lashed out: Stop trying to save me from myself!
CHAPTER ONE
Almost everything to do with George Michael, from his gut ambition to his sometimes crippling insecurities, in some way pointed back to his father. Jack Panos was the model of a self-made 1960s man s man. Born Kyriacos Panayiotou in 1935, he had grown up with seven siblings in Patriki, a dirt-road village in Cyprus, an island in the Eastern Mediterranean. In later years he would boast of the life he had transcended: that of a shoeless child who survived on bread and olives and used a hole in the ground for a toilet.
Poverty had given him a fierce resolve to better himself. He and a friend, Dimitrios Georgiou, set their minds on the restaurant business, and in 1953 they emigrated to London, a popular destination for Greek Cypriots. They started as busboys, then became waiters. Kyriacos knew that if he were to keep climbing, his given name had to go.
His next step was to find a wife. At a dance, he caught the eye of Lesley Angold Harrison, a British girl from a working-class family. Reared in convent school, Lesley was a lady, fastidiously neat, quiet but firm, and gracefully spoken, with an almost Victorian reserve. She had all the makings of a proper mate, and Jack proposed.
Early in their marriage, they and another immigrant friend of Jack s shared a flat in Finchley, a suburb of North London. He and Lesley could only afford to live above a laundromat, especially as the kids started coming. In 1959, Lesley gave birth to daughter Yioda; two years later came Melanie. Jack was impatient for a son to carry on his name, though, and on June 25, 1963, in East Finchley, Lesley delivered a hazel-eyed, screaming baby boy.
Despite having anglicized his own name, Jack christened the child Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, which no Brit could pronounce. But he wanted to establish that Georgios was his father s son and a proud bearer of Jack s Greek heritage. Once the boy was old enough, Jack would send him off, grumbling, on Saturdays to Greek school.
Where Jack had come from, tradition meant everything. Sons were more important than daughters, and if Yioda and Melanie sensed his attitude, so be it. Georgios certainly did. I grew up with this terrible feeling of guilt, he said later. I was always the one that was gonna get the easy ride.
In fact, the pressures of being Jack s son wer