George Michael wasn’t who we thought he was

The first time I met George Michael he looked like the happiest man in the world. This was June 1983, a blisteringly hot month in a summer which seemed to be dedicated entirely to the celebration of youth. As well as Spandau Ballet’s “Gold”, the Style Council’s “Long Hot Summer” and Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon”, Wham!’s “Club Tropicana” was the soundtrack of the summer that year, a wickedly infectious dance track which – through the lens of Ibiza and Club 18-30 holidays – celebrated the West End nightclub Le Beat Route in Soho’s Dean Street, at which both George and I had been regulars since it opened at the tail end of 1980.

Even though we had shared a dancefloor, I first met him properly at the launch party of Wham!’s debut album Fantastic! Both George and fellow group member Andrew Ridgeley were dressed in white T-shirts, white linen trousers and white espadrilles, and they spent most of the night dancing to their own records, with smiles as blinding as the summer sun.

While their fame grew, George could still occasionally be seen on the dancefloors of London’s coolest clubs, his favourite being The Wag Club, where the famous could blend in with average punters without being hassled. While he loved American dance tracks by the likes of The Gap Band and Shalamar, he seemed happiest dancing to his own music, not least Wham!’s greatest song, “Everything She Wants”.

George was funny, ridiculously stylish, and rarely let his fame go to his head. Seeing as he and other stars were still nipping down to the Wag, sometimes an unsuspecting fellow clubber would find themselves surrounded by the likes of Sade, Spandau Ballet and George. I remember one such night, when a girl dressed head to toe in Sue Clowes streetwear managed to convince a bouncer that she was a friend of Bananarama. Finding herself overcome with emotion (no doubt brought on by imbibing a large number of imported lagers), she approached George and told him she thought he was the closest thing to God. Before throwing up on his loafers.

When George went solo, he very soon tired of the idea, and spent the rest of his career in a constant tussle between fame and furtiveness, never knowing how he wanted to be remembered (when he sued his record company in the 90s, people ringing his home got an answering machine message of him singing, to the tune of “Careless Whisper”, “No, I’m never gonna sing again / Bastards! Bastards! Bastards! Bastards!”). In the process he made some of the finest music of his generation, a body of work that I still don’t think has been fully appreciated.

A new book attempts a correction of sorts, Sathnam Sanghera’s hugely enjoyable Tonight the Music Seems So Loud: The Meaning of George Michael. A plaintive love letter, the book frames George as a genuinely brilliant songwriter, producer (he auditioned nearly a dozen different saxophone players for “Careless Whisper”), performer and general human being. It is no hagiography, and yet you emerge after 256 pages seeing George as even more extraordinary than you already thought.

Perhaps the oddest thing about Sanghera’s book is that there haven’t been more like it. But then it’s taken a lifetime for publishers to wake up to the fact that, as musical tastes have changed, and as popular legacy artists have acquired a new kind of status, a market for books of this ilk has slowly exploded.

Years ago, analytical books about the artistic merit and cultural resonance of artists such as Abba, the Bee Gees, Nile Rodgers and Freddie Mercury, say, would have been passed over by mainstream publishers, in favour of hoary old tomes about white rock bands. Female artists, black artists and gay artists tended to be largely ignored or treated as peculiar anomalies. Even Elvis Presley was treated as a tragic cultural phenomenon rather than an intoxicating performer.

George was interesting to biographers because of his sexual indiscretions, his attritional relationship with his record company, his open drug use (he famously went through a period when he was smoking 18 joints a day) and his flagrant tabloid indiscretions. He was also openly dismissed by serious rock critics because he was a bisexual artist who seemed to appeal more to women than men (at least heterosexual men). The fact he made some of the greatest records of the late 20th and early 21st century was apparently immaterial.

Generally speaking, George took most of this in his stride. He was arrogant enough to know he had created a new kind of pop – a kind of Adult Orientated Pop which elevated the form to something approaching art – and usually didn’t care that his work was misinterpreted. But then occasionally he would lash out and accuse everyone from the media to his record company to (sometimes) even his own fans, telling them all that he was never going to be a paint-by-numbers pop star.

In 2004, as editor of GQ magazine, I commissioned an interview with George, as we were honouring him with a Lifetime Achievement gong at the Men of the Year Awards. It was probably one of the most revealing interviews he’d ever done (“I used to sleep with women quite a lot in the Wham! days but never felt it could develop into a relationship because I knew that, emotionally, I was a gay man,” he said at one point), but it focused on his private life rather than his music. George was so open that he actively encouraged inquisition, so in some respects he was his own worst enemy.

George died in his sleep 10 years ago on Christmas Day 2016, an event so momentous that later that morning GQ carried three obituaries: one written by a staff member in France, another by a freelancer in London and the third by me, halfway up a mountain in Wales. Perhaps it wasn’t necessary to write three pieces, but we all wanted to tell the world how much he had meant to us. Twenty-four hours later we carried a fourth, which said, “Whatever you thought of George as a person, there is no getting away from the quality of his work”.

Tonight the Music Seems So Loud is a very good book, and I hope it brings more people into George’s orbit. He certainly deserves it. For too long he has been a tabloid punchline, a pop star doomed to be lambasted as much as he is heralded, a broken idol without the gravitas bestowed by longevity. I still listen to his songs, and still marvel at the way he could write about the world with the heart of a man several decades older than he was when he died.

‘Tonight the Music Seems So Loud: The Meaning of George Michael’ is published by Pan Macmillan, £22