Goodbye George

Boxing Day morning, at 06.00am I was woken by the radio news, the carefully worded voice of BBC Radio news. I was due in working that morning so the radio kicking into life at that hour was no accident. The first item on the news was that George Michael had died. My mind was still awash with sleep and my first thought was that I was still dreaming, a bad and particularly nasty dream. This was not news anyone had been expecting and with a mental punch it woke me.

I have lived through George Michael’s career and I watched the changes in it and him.

I never liked Wham. My dislike wasn’t anything nasty or even based on their musical output. They were very much a pop group targeted at a straight audience. To me they were part of a world that I wasn’t. I was a gay teenager in the nineteen-eighties, and the world around me wasn’t a friendly place. Anyway Wham’s music was very upbeat and I was into much darker and more introspective music, music to suit my mood. Though George Michael was very pretty and very easy on the eye.

When George Michael started on his solo carer I wasn’t surprised but I still wasn’t that interested. His image was still very heterosexual and he was packaged to appeal to his straight women fans. One of the women I did my nurse training with was a huge George Michael fan at this time, she was also the most underhandedly homophobic people I’d met in a long while.

I was aware of George Michael in the following years, his battles with his record label and the videos he wouldn’t appear in, but he didn’t exactly blip on my radar. To me he was still the big haired and straight packaged male singer. Then he released the album Older in 1996.

The single Fastlove snatched at my attention. This was a song obviously written by a gay man, and a song I related too. He sang about watching his friends getting married and having children, watching his friends falling into an alien world. Then there was the heartbreaking single Jesus to a Child, here he was singing to a lost male lover. There was no ambiguity here, his lost love was a man. The songs on this album spoke to me on many different levels, here was a man who’d had so many of the same experiences as me, who was looking at the world the same way as I was, as someone who was not in the centre of it.

When I met Martin, my husband, I found he was a big fan of George Michael, and he had all of George’s albums. I now listened to them with different ears. George Michael slipped in so many different and subtle lines into his songs. The record company may have been sculpted his image into that of the straight singer but inside there a gay man struggling to come out.

Then he was caught in that public toilet in LA, and EVERYONE knew. With a smile and a shrug he laughed it off and then released Outside, a very upbeat song celebrating outdoor sex. I loved him for this, a shrug of the shoulders and a smile but no grovelling apology. He made a joke of it all.

George Michael has written some of the best pop songs we have had but he is more than that, his ballads and soulful songs are maybe some of the best songs written. My Mother Had A Brother tells such a lost story about such a lost person, the gay uncle he never knew.

His death has been such a shock and such a frustrating loss, he was due to start recording a new album in February. Those songs are now lost to us.

I will continue to listen to his wonderful albums and lose myself in his songs. As for those Wham songs, those bubble gum pop songs, well the subtle subtext of them is now fascinating.

Drew Payne