George Michael, the singer who spent his whole career trying to outrun the pop star he’d already become

George Michael

Photo: University of Houston Digital Library / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 25, 1963 East Finchley
Died	December 25, 2016 (53)
Occupation	Singer-Songwriter
Awards	BRIT Awards · Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Original Song · Grammy Awards

He gave back a Grammy nomination once. He refused to appear in the music videos for his best-selling album. He sued one of the largest record companies in the world for the right to stop making the kind of music that had made him famous. George Michael won almost none of these arguments at the time, and yet the body of work that resulted from all that losing is why people are still writing about him.

The contradiction at the center of his career was present from the beginning. Born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou in East Finchley, North London, the son of a Greek-Cypriot restaurateur named Jack Panayiotou and an English dancer named Lesley, he arrived at pop stardom through an almost comically efficient route: he and his school friend Andrew Ridgeley formed Wham! in 1981, and within two years they had a debut album at number one in the United Kingdom. But what would define his solo work was already visible in Wham!’s biggest hit. Careless Whisper, released in 1984, was credited to both Ridgeley and Michael, but had been written almost entirely by a seventeen-year-old Michael on a bus to a restaurant job. It sounded like nothing else on the radio that summer: a saxophone that entered already in mourning, a voice carrying loss more complex than the song’s scenario should have allowed. The teenage pop duo’s breakout hit was, at its core, adult soul music that had wandered into a haircut.

Wham! worked in part because Michael understood the machinery and could operate it without being consumed by it. Make It Big (1984) gave the duo their first American number one. Last Christmas, also from 1984, sold so well it became the UK’s best-selling single never to have reached number one — blocked, famously, by Band Aid’s charity single, on which Michael also sang. The duo became, briefly, the first Western pop act to perform in China, touring there in April 1985. By the time Wham! dissolved at Wembley Stadium in June 1986, Michael had already outgrown the format. What he could not yet outrun was the image: the tanned, grinning, impeccably handsome face that pop had decided he was.

The response to that image was Faith, released in 1987, which remains one of the more methodically argued first solo albums in the canon. Michael wrote and produced it almost entirely alone, a deliberate assertion of authorship. The lead single, I Want Your Sex, was banned by BBC Radio 1 for daytime broadcast, rejected by many American stations, and enthusiastically purchased by millions of people who found the fuss baffling given that the song was, in context, a case for monogamy. The title track — a rockabilly shuffle built on a minimal guitar riff Michael had written almost by accident — became one of the defining sounds of its decade. Father Figure and One More Try demonstrated a vocal range that pushed past what pop usually asked of its stars. Faith sold twenty-five million copies worldwide and won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year at the 1989 ceremony. Michael, twenty-five years old, had become the biggest solo artist in the world.

He then spent three years trying to work out what to do with that position. The result was Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 (1990), an album that announced its intentions before the first track: Michael refused to appear in any promotional videos for it, refused most interviews, and declined to tour in support. The music video for Freedom! ’90, the album’s centerpiece, featured five supermodels — Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington, Tatjana Patitz — lip-syncing to a song about the impossible weight of a manufactured image. Michael was not in it. The video was widely discussed; the album, which was genuinely the more vulnerable and less commercially straightforward thing he had made, was less well received by radio programmers than Faith had been, and Sony, his label, felt he had deliberately sabotaged his own commercial potential. The relationship deteriorated into a lawsuit.

In 1992, Michael filed against Sony Music in London, arguing that his recording contract constituted an unreasonable restraint of trade. The legal battle ran for two years and produced one of the more memorable pieces of courtroom testimony in music industry history, Michael describing himself as a “professional slave.” The London High Court ruled against him in November 1994, finding that Sony had not acted unconscionably. He appealed, lost again, and was eventually released from his contract through an arrangement brokered partly by David Geffen, in which Virgin acquired European rights to his recordings. It took six years to be free of a deal he had signed before he understood what he was signing. Most artists would have found this defeat deflating. Michael responded with Older.

Released in 1996, Older was the first album Michael made that engaged directly with grief. His mother Lesley had died of cancer. Anselmo Feleppa, a Brazilian dress designer who had been his partner and first love since 1991, had died in March 1993 from an AIDS-related brain haemorrhage; Michael had kept the relationship entirely private, and the loss had been carried alone. Jesus to a Child, the album’s opening single and the song he later described as among the most personal he ever wrote, addressed Feleppa without naming him. The melody has the quality of something resolved, of grief that has passed through its crisis and arrived somewhere like acceptance. Fastlove and Spinning the Wheel were the album’s other faces. Older produced six top-five UK singles — a record for a single album — and went to number one. It remains, for a significant portion of the people who love his music, the place they keep returning to.

The following year, 1997, his mother died. Michael later said those two losses in four years had reshaped him entirely.

In April 1998, he was arrested for public lewdness at a park in Beverly Hills, in what turned out to be an undercover police sting. He was outed as gay in the coverage that followed — something he had known about himself since adolescence, had shared with close friends and certain partners, but had not disclosed publicly. His response, once the initial shock of exposure passed, was characteristic. The music video for his next single, Outside, was set in a public bathroom, featured uniformed police officers dancing, and was widely received as the most dignified response to tabloid ambush that the era produced. He spoke about his sexuality calmly and without apology in a CNN interview. And then he went back to making music.

What followed, however, is the section of his career that his advocates have tended to skip past and his critics have deployed as a counterargument to everything else. The decade between roughly 2006 and 2016 involved repeated drug-related arrests, a 2010 prison sentence of eight weeks (reduced to four on good behavior) for driving under the influence of drugs, a 2011 hospitalization for a life-threatening pneumonia during the Symphonica Tour in Vienna that required a tracheotomy and left him briefly in a medically induced coma. There were long stretches of public silence that generated speculation. His output slowed. The planned follow-up to Patience — the well-reviewed 2004 return that had gone to number one in the United Kingdom — was announced repeatedly and never released.

The difficulty with the straightforward narrative of decline is that it sits alongside a separate and equally true account. During those same years, Michael gave a free concert for NHS nurses. He anonymously funded IVF treatment for strangers he had seen on television, whose stories had moved him. He donated the royalties from Careless Whisper and Last Christmas to Childline — a sum amounting to over one and a half million pounds — and asked that his involvement not be publicized. He gave Macmillan Cancer Support the rights to Older, which raised over two million pounds. He funded the Christmas tree and lights in Highgate for a decade, listed on council records simply as “a local resident.” These were not the actions of someone who had lost the thread. They were the actions of someone who had simply stopped performing his generosity for an audience.

His final album, Symphonica (2014), recorded with orchestral arrangements and produced by Phil Ramone, reached number one in the United Kingdom — his seventh solo chart-topper there. His final concert was at London’s Earls Court on October 17, 2012, the closing night of the Symphonica Tour. He was found dead on the morning of December 25, 2016, at his home in Goring-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. The cause was confirmed by the Oxfordshire coroner in March 2017 as dilated cardiomyopathy with myocarditis and fatty liver disease. He was fifty-three.

The posthumous accounting has, by any measure, been extraordinary. The documentary Freedom, which he had been completing before his death, was released in 2017 alongside a previously unreleased recording of Fantasy made with Nile Rodgers in 1990 — a collaboration that had been sitting in an archive for nearly three decades. In 2019, the film Last Christmas, directed by Emma Thompson using his catalog as its score, introduced his music to a new generation; This Is How (We Want You to Get High), a track recorded in 2015, was released alongside it. The same year, Last Christmas finally achieved what it had been narrowly denied in 1984: it reached number one in the United Kingdom, thirty-five years after its release. In 2023 and 2024, it did so again — consecutively — on the UK Christmas chart, becoming only the third song in history to top that chart in back-to-back years.

In November 2023, George Michael was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Andrew Ridgeley, who had been there at the beginning in 1981 and at the end of Wham! in 1986, presented the award. In early 2026, George Michael Entertainment announced a concert film documenting the 1988 Faith Tour — footage filmed at the Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy, accompanied by a live album containing eighteen previously unreleased recordings. More than four decades after he wrote Careless Whisper on a bus, the archive of what he made is still being opened.

His collaboration with Aretha Franklin, I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me), reached number one on both sides of the Atlantic in 1987. His live duet with Elton John on Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me, performed at Wembley in 1991 and released as a single, went straight to number one in the United Kingdom. His performance at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert in April 1992 — where he sang Somebody to Love with the surviving Queen members in front of seventy-two thousand people — is routinely cited as one of the finest live vocal performances in British pop history. He was, by any technical measure, among the best singers of his generation.

What the completed body of work argues, read from here, is that authenticity in pop music costs something specific and ongoing — not a single heroic gesture but a sustained refusal to stop at the point where the image becomes comfortable. George Michael was never comfortable in the image. He fought the machinery, lost the lawsuit, came out on his own terms after being outed against his will, gave away money he never told anyone about, and kept making records that went further than radio programmers wanted them to go. His sister Melanie died on Christmas Day 2019, three years to the day after her brother. Their mother had preceded them both. The family he came from is largely gone. What remains is the music, the argument it kept making, and a Christmas song that keeps finding its way to number one.