I, also, am who I am because of Wham! Part 1 (of 4)

June 25th 2023: George Michael’s 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 Michael’s 60th Birthday.

In mid-1982 I met and became a friend of George’s, 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 ’80s circle,

Tolley Casparis

posted about George and that brief time we shared, on FaceBook.

What follows is Tolley’s 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].

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Tolley’s 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

Nic Briscoe

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 Ridgeley’s 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 ‘Explore Monagamy’ t-shirts etc included in Georege Michael’s merchandise, after the 1987 ‘I Want Your Sex’ monogamy remixes — 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.

Tolley Casparis

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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.

I’ve updated it slightly, in particular, to make it read more like an article than a personal post. I’ve 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 George’s not insignificant contribution to this.

George R.I.P.

From the off, I guess, I should make a few things clear. I'm no big user or fan of FaceBook, so maybe I totally make some FB faux pas here in my choice of usage, and I am purposefully not tagging names.

Well, Tolley's post about George Michael has left me feeling that I want to write more. For sure Tolley evokes perfectly and succinctly how it was. It was a magical time.

My reason for writing? Well someone much wiser than I once said that whenever anyone does or says anything there's always two reasons: the real reason, and then the reason that they tell everyone — kind of the cover story. I'll try not to waste your time and immediately peel back the veneer of any cover story, hopefully revealing the real genuine reason.

It's not so much that the record needs to be set straight, it simply feels that now, today is the best time just to say it like it is, or perhaps more accurately how it was.

There is already a vast amount of information available confirming what a great man George was. I don't think that is in question. Nevertheless, the focus of what I want to share, the purpose let's say, is to highlight that George, and my brief connection to him, quite literally changed and shaped my life, in the most catalytic sense one can imagine. And I can now see with the benefit of hindsight that this is true for so many people whose paths crossed with his.

I don't want to give the impression that somehow George and I were the best of best friends, I knew him briefly, during a period of maybe three or four years, and we were never super close, but we were mates, and it all started on a very level playing field, both of us young, definitely naive and at the beginning of adult lives.

My last contact with George was maybe eight or nine years ago when I was about forty-five or so. And what's key, what struck me so hard, was essentially he was the same person that I had first met back in London when we were both about twenty. He was friendly, open, seemed genuinely pleased to see me, and about ninety percent of our conversation was him asking me about me. For sure he didn't recognise me instantly, it took a few seconds for him to realise who I was, but once that was established there were no formal airs and graces, he was just totally normal and relaxed as if the twenty-year gap between our last meeting had never happened.

The truth was at that time I worked for a charity, and my board of directors and trustees were very keen, let's say even zealous, for me to utilise to their benefit some of my past music industry connections. And to that end, I had the opportunity to just happen to be somewhere where George would be. But when I met him and talked with him I just didn't want to do it. For me, George was a good mate from my twenties, part of a group of people that I had untold adventures with. And actually, that's how I wanted to keep it. Anyone who has spent any time in the music industry will tell you this is true — there is always someone who either wants something from you, to use you as a resource or wants to use you to get to someone else. Manipulation is the name of the game. Probably all par for the course, you'll say, part of being in the public eye. But George had never tried to manipulate me, he'd never been anything apart from friendly and generous, and the main thing I remember about him is him laughing and smiling. I just didn't want to ask him for anything, I was just very happy to see him. And that's the last time I saw him.