ANDREW, GEORGE & WHAM!

MY PIECE IN THE TIMES THIS WEEK. MY APOLOGIES IF YOU'VE ALREADY READ IT

At the end of 2019, I had lunch with Andrew Ridgeley in London. I was finishing off a year’s filming on a documentary I was making about George Michael and was about to start post-production. Andrew had recently completed his book on Wham! and was talking about making a movie of it. He’d just done a photo shoot for a newspaper magazine to promote the book and showed me the pictures. I didn’t much care for them but a magazine cover would be great promo anyway. And it was.

‘The Redemption of Andrew Ridgeley’ said the headline, which reflected exactly an annoying comment I’d heard so often during the days when I managed Wham!. What does Andrew do? What does he contribute? Why is he there?

The image of Wham! - the style of Wham! - the personality of Wham! – all of it flowed from Andrew. Like an American buddy movie, it was a bromance - two young lads about town without a care. Except that, while that was true of Andrew it wasn’t so true of George. He was the pupil and Andrew the mentor. ‘Andrew was the first really strong person I’d ever met’, George said.

For some reason journalists couldn’t see it. Sathnam Sanghera, who’d written the magazine piece, researched some old press and found examples. One said Gordon Brown was ‘the Andrew Ridgeley of New Labour’. Another suggested sesame seeds were ‘the Andrew Ridgeley of garnishes – a hamburger would look wrong without them, but nobody knows what they do.’

Shortly after my lunch with Andrew, Covid arrived. Three years later, when it finally cleared up, there we were again, this time having dinner by the river in Bangkok. Andrew told me the Wham! film was almost finished. My film about George was too, so I sent him a link. A few weeks later, Simon Haflon, the producer of the Wham! film, reciprocated with a link to theirs.

To some extent, the book Andrew had written about Wham! had already set the story straight. But the movie did it even better. Directed by Chris Smith, it totally closed the subject down. Wham! was a perfect friendship. Two young guys enjoying life and each other’s reactions to it, getting together to form a pop group to which they contributed equally but differently. It was a beautiful balance.

The first time I watched the film, I couldn’t help but compare it with the 25 minutes of my film that covered the same ground. Basically it was the same story but in each case told for different reasons.

My film was about George, not Wham!. The 25 minutes of it that were about Wham! were there to give an insight into the George we were going to learn more about as the film progressed. It didn’t only include things that were strictly George and Andrew, it looked closely too at George’s lyrics, his attitude to business, the beginnings his solo career, his duet with Stevie Wonder at the Harlem Apollo and the video of A Different Corner. But since these were not really Wham! moments, Chris Smith’s film left them out.

When I first saw his film, I preferred my version of events - well I would, wouldn’t I - but looking at it again a week later, I decided Chris and his team had got it exactly right. I loved it.

The film is made up of archive material with a commentary by George and Andrew. In George’s case it was taken from archive material and in Andrew’s it was spoken as the film was being made. What it projects is exactly what Wham! projected at the time – two young guys living a life of elation.

It was clearly the happiest period of George’s life. Before Wham!, he’d had nothing but quarrels with his father. After Wham!, despite enormous highs, he also had unbearable lows. This was the one time in his life when things were almost carefree.

Together, they chased fun. But even as they did so, George began to feel distrust in the good times they were having. ‘The girls screaming was increasingly worrying. I knew I shouldn’t be trying to catch up with Michael Jackson or Madonna as a best-selling artist. But however distressing I was finding fame, my ego couldn’t be stopped. That bastard ego - it comes from a place of fear.’

When I talked to Chris Smith, the first reviews were just coming in, and they weren’t good. ‘This formulaic plodder,’ said The Times, while The Guardian called it ‘Weirdly incurious’. Both critics seemed surprised that Chris hadn’t imposed his own commentary on the story. But from making films myself, I was all too familiar with the number of people who need to be made happy with the end result – from the backers at Netflix to the people who control the music rights. And why not? If you want your film financed and the use of music approved, it seems reasonable enough to accommodate their points of view. And in this case, everyone had agreed it would work best if George and Andrew told the story.

Simon Haflon, the film’s producer, was afraid the film might catch some of the same sourness from today’s critics that the group caught back in the 80s. He told me, ‘When they started out, George wrote Wham Rap and the leftie music critics thought Wham! was going to be an agitprop group. So they gave them the thumbs up. But then their music morfed into Club Tropicana.’

I remember it well. We were shooting the video in Ibiza and I’d gone ahead, location hunting, and found Pikes Hotel. For George and Andrew it was everything they’d imagined but never actually experienced. Andrew says, ‘That was the point when we became pure Wham!’

But to their critics, they’d morfed into Cliff Richard in Summer Holiday. Halfon says, ‘John Peel, for instance, who’d given Wham Rap a few spins at the beginning, realized he’d been duped. We have him in the film looking very surly indeed.’

Around the same time, I remember them doing an interview with Paul Morley, another professional sourpuss. ‘You’re banal,’ he told George.

‘But people are banal,’ George responded. ‘Their lives are boring and they just try to get through it as enjoyably as possible.’

So Morley wrote: ‘Through their sour passion for enjoyment and their rejection of irony and curiosity they do not demonstrate strength but simple obstinacy. Just because the feeble ego-blast of their music is enjoyed by thousands doesn’t mean that the thinking ones amongst us shouldn’t mock its lack of excitement and invention.’

Amazing! Could he really have been listening to the same music as the rest of us?

The film tells us that during the filming of Club Tropicana George called Shirley and Andrew to his room and told them he was gay. ‘At that point I really wanted to come out’ he says in the film. ‘But then I lost my nerve.’

Andrew admits he persuaded him not to, mainly for fear of what his father would say. Then George gave him another piece of news. For Wham! to be truly successful, from hereon George would have to write the songs himself, without Andrew. It was the one and only time we hear anything regretful from Andrew. He liked sharing the songwriting; it had been their original plan. To be pushed out hurt. Yet he swallowed his pride and accepted it. ‘Slightly difficult, but a sacrifice I had to make. He was my best friend. And so…’

Their next hit was Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, their first number one. And while the lyrics may have felt like trivia, their purpose was something more than was on the surface. Essentially this was George’s coming out song. Not as gay but as pop. Whether it was that which triggered the critics’ disgruntlement or his concealed gayness, it was difficult to tell. On the outside Wham! we’re projecting joyful innocence; on the inside George was confined by his desire for success to a place he didn’t want to be. The closet. Ego trumping honesty. And despite his masterful lad-about-town act, it was failing to deceive the likes of Morley and Peel.

Then came Careless Whisper, another number one but this time released as a solo record. George was strangely un-proud of the song. He felt it had come to him too easily, without sufficient thought. He wrote it with Andrew over several days on the bus home from school and always maintained the lyrics had no real relevance to anything, just something he’d made up to describe a mild crush on a girl at school. But from its success he learnt that the public like to find their own truth in lyrics. Later, when he came out, people presumed the guilt in his rhythm-less feet had been the guilt of the closet. He always insisted it wasn’t, and on one occasion he explained to me, ‘After that song I made sure my lyrics always came from careful thought rather than something that just jumped into my head.’ He meant, I think, that impulsive lyrics could be a dangerous link between his subconscious and the public.

From Careless Whisper onwards, there was no doubt in George’s mind, he was on the path to a solo career, but that still gave him two more years of Andrew’s uncomplicated friendship. Later he would become richer, more famous and more musically respected, but he was never going to be any happier. And along with that happiness, Andrew gave him self-confidence.

Wham! had been built on the image of Andrew. From that George built his image as a solo star. ‘I went with full gusto into pushing the image of Wham,’ he says. ‘Forging an identity through their success.’

During all that time Andrew never hesitated to help him. ‘I supplied the thrust’, he explains.

The metamorphosis took two sell-out tours and six number ones. Then he was ready to go. ‘I went from being Andrew’s shadow to being the centre of attention.’

As their manager I watched all this happen. At 21, George was the only British artist ever to sing, write and produce his own hits. He was on top of everything creatively and liked to be in control. But as long as it was done in the name of Wham!, it still needed Andrew’s approval. Eventually George wanted to try it on his own. And Andrew, with extraordinary good grace, having coaxed all of this out of him, stood back and let him go.

It’s a perfect Hollywood story and sooner or later that’s probably where it will be re-made. But for the moment, this film captures it perfectly.

Director Chris Smith says, ‘When I was at school I was a Smiths fan. As I got older I realised Wham! couldn’t have been that big without there being something I’d missed. When I started making the film I became the Wham! fan I should have been when I was a teenager.’

Simon Haflon was the opposite. ‘I was a friend and a fan from the start. I first met George at the beginning of Wham! and last saw him three weeks before he died. I really wanted to get this right for him.’

I wondered whether the viewpoint of a friend would differ much from the viewpoint of a manager, they’re such different relationships.

‘The film-making decisions were all made by committee,’ Simon explained. ‘Me, my co-producer, Chris, and of course George too, a voice in the back of my head, watching everything we were doing, making sure we got it right.’

So I was wrong – knowing George as a friend was not so different from knowing him as a manager. Either way, you were expected to get things right.

And what about Andrew? Probably, aware of the voice in the back of Simon Haflon’s head, he was happy to let George have the final say.

WHAM! Available on Netflix

GEORGE MICHAEL: PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST. Stream it on Channel 4

Or in America released as ‘THE REAL GEORGE MICHAEL’ on Amazon Prime

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