George Michael Life

You did your Elvis dance to Faith at college-leaving do. Father Figure was on the Breakfast Show the morning you started work. You played Kissing a Fool on the first night in your own flat and I Knew You Were Waiting and Monkey while you wallpapered the back bedroom. There was Waiting For That Day when she moved in and Heal the Pain when she moved out. Cowboys and Angels is on tape you make for the car and if you've had a couple of drinks you can muster a pretty good version of Freedom, even if you say so yourself. You were off your face the night you disgraced yourself to Too Funky and Spinning the Wheel was left on your answerphone the night you were unfaithful. A caring soul sent you a copy of Older when a close friend died and You Have Been Loved still makes you cry. Probably always will.

"It feels good just to know that you are a small part of the soundtrack to people's lives," says the songsmith modestly as he waits for the kettle to boil in the kitchen of his North London home. For most of us the last decade has been a time of growing wiser and wider. For George Michael it's been 10 years spent making deeply memorable music and truly terrible tea. You first met over 10 years ago. Wham! was all over, you could say he was just out of short trousers. But now he's grown up and has some startling facial hair to prove it. His aunt thinks the beard makes him look like Jesus; others reckon he bares a closer resemblance to Satan. The truth, he chuckles getting busy with a brace of mugs, is probably somewhere in between. But George Michael isn't the man you think he is.

The first surprise is that he is neither in black and white or half shadow. He has an incisive, almost ruthless, intelligence and an unusually developed sense of self. But he laughs readily, swears like a Tourette's Syndrome trouper and enjoys nothing more than a self-deprecating joke. He is slighter and more finely featured than you imagined and as Woody Allen said, he has the most eyes you've ever seen. Everyone's got a bit of George Michael in them and I am no exception.

April 14 1988.

George is padding barefoot around a hotel suite in Amsterdam searching for a throat lozenge and talking more than he should. Last night, in full 'fairy biker' gear, he kick-started the European leg of his Faith tour. The performance was raunchily physical and the songs were astonishingly strong. They seemed to span thirty years of great songwriting - Faith's rockabilly pulse; the soul stylings of One More Try; the funky foundations of Everything She Wants and I Want Your Sex. Yet they were all written by George Michael .

"It's a fortunate position to be in," muses their author. "To be 24 years old and be presentable whilst still being able to write songs for a much older age group. Those two things have fought each other all the way." The tour seals George's fate as Britain's most successful solo artist but comes perilously close to breaking his spirit. "I genuinely thought, 'This is when it happens. This is when you lose it'" he recollects with a small shudder. "Do you know, I spent almost that entire year in sunglasses? I just couldn't make eye contact with strangers. I think I even went to bed in them."

November 9 1989.

In a West London studio surrounded by what Joan Didion described as 'the ominous blinking electronic circuitry with which musicians live so easily live', George is working on Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1. "I was trying to get rid of what I'd done with Faith." he explains later. "I think stylistically, although the songs are really good, I'd wandered off my natural path. Also I was too concerned with criticisms of my earlier stuff and that lead me to make an album that I thought maybe rock critics would have a more sympathetic view of. So there were lots of acoustic guitars and much more natural instrumentation and I was trying to emulate certain things that were too white in origin for me to really be comfortable with. I can't truly express myself fully without some R&B influence and with Listen Without Prejudice I drifted away from the black elements of my music." Listening to him you'd have thought he had made a less than magnificent album.