THOUGHTS ABOUT GEORGE

Three conversations

George often teased me about being cynical, but I always denied it; I prefer to call myself a realist. One conversation in particular was when George and Andrew were with me in the coffee shop of the New Otani Hotel in Tokyo. We were there making a TV commercial for Maxwell tapes that involved George and Andrew being hung from the ceiling of a film studio on wires and made to fly around like Superman for six hours without a break.

      They had to do this because they urgently needed money. Despite having had hit records, Innervision, their record company, had paid them no royalties and George was talking about how bad the group’s deal was and how they urgently needed to get out of it. I explained to him that all record deals are bad; that if you get out of one record deal and into another one you’re not moving from a bad deal to a good deal, you’re simply moving from a bad one to a less bad one.

      “Do you blame us for signing with Innervision?” Andrew asked.

      “Not at all.” I told them. “Signing a bad contract is a normal initiation ceremony for an artist entering the business. The truth is, all record contracts are bad. You pay the costs; they own the copyright. It’s a corrupt concept.”

      “You’re being cynical,” said George. “Not at all,” I explained. “Just realistic.”

    Ten years later, the realism of the situation finally hit him. He started legal action against CBS Records over that very point. And lost.

Back in London he told me something else. “I’ve never done anything I could regret later.”

I said I didn’t believe him so he again called me cynical and we laughed.

But I think I’d understood him wrongly. I’d taken it to mean he was supremely careful in everything he did. But later, as his life unfolded, I decided what he’d meant was that any time he was confronted with a problem arising from a poor decision or silly behaviour he would somehow find a way switch it to his advantage, turning the problem into an opportunity. It was something he proved brilliant at over and over again, and as long as he remained confident he could always pull it off then I had to agree, he had no need to regret anything he did.

One thing I never discussed directly with George was his homosexuality. He knew I was gay, so if he wanted to discuss it he could. He also knew that I was aware of him being gay too - we had too many mutual gay friends for him not to. But if he didn’t wish to discuss it with me then it was no business of mine to bring it up.

Even so, there were a few occasions when I did so in a roundabout sort of way. Once was on an early morning shuttle from LA to San Francisco during Wham!’s first tour of America. It was in February 1985 and they had a gig that night in Oakland. I was reading the Los Angeles Times, talking to George about things I was reading, and I remember him being unusually chatty. On an inside page I came across an article about AIDS, which at that time was still in its early stages. The article said scientists had pretty much come to the conclusion that anyone gay who’d had sex outside a monogamous relationship during the last twelve months would almost certainly get AIDS. And die.

      It was a shocking thing to read and I remember dropping the newspaper and shutting my eyes, almost fainting, as the shock sunk in. George noticed, and asked me what I was reading and I handed it to him. As he read it he went white. And he didn’t say another word to me for the rest of the time we were in San Francisco.

     Until then, I’m pretty sure he’d been planning to come out when Wham! eventually finished. But with tabloid newspapers telling their readers that to mix with gay people was to risk getting AIDS and dying, it was hardly surprising he put the idea off for a while.