I, also, am who I am because of Wham! Part 1 (of 4)
June 25th 2023: George Michaelโs 60th Birthday
This week is more or less one year since I first posted here on Substack. I wanted to mark this with something a little bit different, and also something more personal, a glimpse into my world so to speak.
This Sunday, June 25th 2023, would have been George Michaelโs 60th Birthday.
In mid-1982 I met and became a friend of Georgeโs, and we shared a similar circle of friends for perhaps the next three or four years. Then we lost contact.
Sadly George passed prematurely on Christmas Day 2016. The following day, one of the friends from that โ80s circle,
posted about George and that brief time we shared, on FaceBook.What follows is Tolleyโs post and my response. To be clear these FaceBook posts were, as far as I know, only viewable to friends (in the know). With this and clarity in mind, I will redact some of the names, remove or add some links, and add some explanations [in brackets, in italics].
Tolleyโs post
December 26th 2016
Remembering all the happy times we had together.
I am who I am because of Wham! At 18 years old I found myself with Erin and Susan [close friends] on the island of Ibiza staying at Pikes Hotel where the other guests were George & Andrew, the crew filming the video for Club Tropicana, and the ambassador from Singapore to France (another story). If you pause the video at :49 and look to the right of the screen you will see me in a black dress.
On that trip I met
with whom I fell madly 18yo kind of love with and soon moved to London to be with him leaving behind USC and my dreams of being a lawyer. Nic's band Physique was managed by the lovely Sally-Anne Cooper and included Paul Ridgeley [Andrew Ridgeleyโs brother] on drums and Jaime Petrie as vocalist and frontman. London was ours as we held court every Monday night at The Camden Palace with the lovely Rosemary Turner [door-picker at Camden Palace] and Carol Hayes [a close friend, and a very well known London based PR and model-booking agent]. And Sharon [a close friend] was part of the publishing team. I worked at Premiere Models where we represented John Pearson who became a great friend and went on to star in the Freedom 90 video.But back to the 80's......does everyone remember the party when "Wake me Up...." hit #1? Or the shit I gave the boys for those Choose Life t-shirts? (they really didn't know, they thought they were YOLO [aka carpe diem], but they oh so weren't)? George and Andrew were acquaintances of mine, but they permeated my time in London in a particular way. There were a lot of fun, young bands then and some of them had moments of greatness, but then there was Yog, in the closet to the World, so shy and sweet, wanting to be one of the lads but always standing out, always shining as a true star does. As he matured, so did the music which made us think Choose Monogamy [I think this is a reference to the โExplore Monagamyโ t-shirts etc included in Georege Michaelโs merchandise, after the 1987 โI Want Your Sexโ monogamy remixes โ not sure?]? Shaking your ass is a mistake built to last? [References the lyric from Freedom, the actual lyric is: But when you shake your ass, They notice fast, And some mistakes were built to last.]
Tear down your image while you still can and for Christ's sake be real, be who you are and never shrink from that and especially don't accept another definition of who you are and what you stand for.
Thank you to all those who were part of that minute in time. You put the Boom Boom into my heart.
Having read this post above by Tolley, I sat down on Boxing Day 2016 and wrote a response. Here it is below, my FaceBook post.
Iโve updated it slightly, in particular, to make it read more like an article than a personal post. Iโve added a few things here and there, however, it is more or less what I posted on December 27th 2016. It contains one or two anecdotes, some of which may be of interest to those interested in the development of modern recording techniques, and Georgeโs not insignificant contribution to this.
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