Ridgeley talks candidly about keeping up with his schoolmate, being lazy and the joys of walking away from fame.
As Wham! took their final bow in 1986, to more than 70,000 screaming fans at their farewell concert, George Michael leant into Andrew Ridgeley’s ear and summed up in one sentence the magnitude of both his destiny and of his debt: “I couldn’t have done this without you.”
Michael went on to become a platinum-selling solo world superstar; Ridgeley went off to Cornwall to take up paddleboarding. Michael would be revered as a musical genius, Ridgeley forever mocked as a talentless party boy, “Animal Andy”. He was once even memorably likened to sesame seeds: “The Andrew Ridgeley of garnishes — a hamburger would look wrong without them, but nobody knows what they do.”
On that Wembley stage his old friend had been right, though. Wham! did create Michael — but Ridgeley created Wham! After countless documentaries about his former bandmate, and 40 years on from their first hit, we can now see their story through Ridgeley’s eyes.
He arrives at the Sony office in King’s Cross looking simultaneously nothing like the 19-year-old we saw leaping about on Top of the Pops to Young Guns (Go for It) and exactly the same. At 60, rail-thin and well-preserved, wearing crisp charcoal sports leisurewear and white trainers, he holds himself very still, almost stiff, his face expressionless. The impression of vigilant precision is offset only by a playfulness in his eyes, where flashes of amused mischief evoke his old pop star persona.
Evidently intelligent, he picks his words with caution and care, displaying none of the classic performer’s impulse to entertain or ingratiate. It’s hard to tell if he is always this inscrutable. Wounds from his harsh treatment by the media might still be raw; at one point I refer to when Wham! split up and he interrupts sharply: “We didn’t split. We brought Wham! to a close.”
Yet when I ask if he feels excitement or trepidation about being back in the spotlight, he replies languidly: “Neither. I’m fairly indifferent to it, to be honest with you. None of it’s an overarching ambition at this time of life. I’ve seen it all before, and done most of it before.”
We can see it all now, in a new Netflix biopic full of archive footage charting their meteoric rise from suburban childhood bedrooms to US stadium tours. Ridgeley met Michael — whom he calls by his old nickname, Yog — aged 12, when the chubby, shy, bespectacled Georgios Panayiotou joined his class at Bushey Meads Comprehensive in Hertfordshire. Both sons of immigrant fathers — Michael’s was Greek Cypriot, Ridgeley’s had Egyptian/Italian/Yemeni roots — they bonded within minutes over their love of Queen, the Beatles and David Bowie.
In the sixth form Ridgeley badgered Michael into forming a band with a few other friends, but what was originally the Executive quickly petered out, leaving just the two of them, with Ridgeley on guitar. Six months after finishing school, in 1982, they signed a record deal as Wham!
Within months they were on Top of the Pops, singing Young Guns (Go for It). A string of hit singles — Club Tropicana, Wake Me Up Before You Go Go, Last Christmas — and No 1 albums followed, and in 1985 they became the first Western act to play in China. The global publicity this generated helped them to break America, and by the age of 22 they had defined the pop sound of the early 1980s — exuberant, fun, sexy, frivolous. If Wham! hits were the soundtrack of their generation, the soundtrack of Ridgeley’s life had become the roar of screaming fans and paparazzi lens shutters.
What’s striking about all the archive footage is the absence of any Simon Cowell-esque pop Svengali calling the shots — or, for that matter, even a choreographer or stylist. “It was all very amateur,” Ridgeley agrees with a grin. “Half the time the clothes we wore on stage were just each other’s clothes.” The teenage Michael was painfully self-conscious, insecure about his weight and hair and clueless about fashion, but Ridgeley saw himself as a dashing fashionista so took sole charge of the Wham! aesthetic, cobbling together what became their signature look —stonewashed denim, Choose Life T-shirts, neon shorts — on a shoestring. The cheesy outfits did nothing for the pair’s credibility as artists. As a low-budget branding strategy, however, they were sensationally effective.
That a total novice teenager did a better job of styling Wham! than the designers they hired later lends weight to Ridgeley’s theory that their success was entirely down to the authenticity of his and Michael’s boyhood friendship. “I think people recognised that, and I think it is attractive. Wham! was so much a representation of our relationship, and the thing that relationship was imbued with was our mutually juvenile sense of humour.”
If the pair had been teenagers today, he thinks they’d probably have been making funny YouTube videos. “We did find each other immensely amusing. That was a pillar of our friendship.”
Any friendship — let alone involving an ego as ambitious as Ridgeley’s — would have been tested by Michael’s decision, one year into their success, to assume sole charge of Wham!’s songwriting. Originally the more confident, driven half of the duo, Ridgeley accepted his demotion with a graciousness that seems scarcely credible. He had co-written three of their greatest hits — Club Tropicana, Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do) and Careless Whisper. Why didn’t he insist on continuing to write?
“That’s a fair question. The answer is because there was a better songwriter in the group. Who didn’t need my assistance. That’s the bottom line. But it begs the question, perhaps, should I have continued songwriting anyway? Yeah, possibly I should have.” He pauses to think. “Yeah, I probably should have. But I didn’t have to — and so, being innately lazy, I didn’t.”
Lazy? He doesn’t look it in the film. “Indolent, then,” he offers, his expression lost in recollection as he murmurs: “A horribly indolent paperboy — not a good quality in a paperboy. The papers didn’t get delivered until midday on countless Sundays.”
Every subsequent step in Michael’s journey away from him towards solo stardom Ridgeley celebrated with the same improbable grace. He allowed Michael to release Careless Whisper as a single, sang backing vocals at Live Aid while his friend duetted with Elton John, and conceded to Michael’s decision to wind up Wham! without objection. Such selflessness is not unheard of, I suggest, but very rarely found in someone who dedicated their entire life to performing to hundreds of thousands of fans.
“Well, I didn’t need to receive the adulation of our audiences. I just liked playing live.” Aren’t the two synonymous? “They’re not. Yog, he did derive an affirmation — a physical sense of excitement from it. For him it may have satisfied a sense of self-worth; the sense of oneself validated by an exterior agency.” And Ridgeley didn’t need that? “No. For me it was purely about performing the songs.”
Ridgeley found the intensity of fans’ adulation disturbing. “I don’t understand what compels and drives people to that extreme. It’s not within me, and therefore I don’t think I’ll ever understand it. It’s derailing. Deranging.” One woman even wrote to him that David and Victoria Beckham had stolen her and Ridgeley’s baby. “It’s the extent to which they perceive themselves as being immersed in you, and vice versa. That’s the bit I just don’t get.”
The fatal flaw in his burning ambition to be a pop star, he explains, was a failure to factor in what being famous would actually be like. “I was just unaware that celebrity culture existed. We didn’t have that as any part of our experience of life. There was no Big Brother, there was no Love Island. Those music giants we loved and respected, our icons, we never felt a claim on them personally. So I was completely unprepared for it.”
Perhaps this innocence explains why he was never too worried that the secret of Michael’s sexuality would come out. At the height of Wham!’s success Michael was a regular in gay clubs, and Ridgeley agrees it is astonishing that no one tipped off the press. Had Michael not been arrested in 1998 for a lewd act in a public lavatory in LA, was his plan to keep it a secret?
“I don’t know the answer to that. I think he felt that he didn’t need to make an announcement — that would be an imposition on him. He wasn’t going to be backed into a corner.”
When Michael was arrested again, several times, for drug-related offences, and even jailed for a month in 2010, “I was concerned by his cannabis use, to be honest. But it’s not a subject that I can go into in great detail, because of my relationship with the George Michael estate. They’re very sensitive about that. It’s strange, because so much of his proclivities and peccadillos Yog talked about himself. And yet it’s an off-limits subject for the estate.”
Ridgeley said that Michael’s drug use came after Wham! “We were a pop group, not a rock group. It wasn’t around us… We were working a lot as well. It just wasn’t when he started smoking. That was in the mid 1980s, maybe, late 1980s, perhaps. I think that was the beginning of his drug use proper.
“You know what happened with cannabis through the 1970s to 1990 with its evolution from a fairly mild benign affair to super skunk. They went to great lengths to breed stronger and stronger varieties. I’ve other friends for whom cannabis use became a bit of a problem. And I personally think that it became a factor in Yog’s less edifying moments.
I ask if he shared his worries about drugs with Michael himself. “A little bit. But he was a little prickly about that sort of thing, he wasn’t forthcoming. I mean, he treated the whole episode of being jailed as an amusing sort of sojourn.” The pair remained close friends right up until Michael’s death on Christmas Day in 2016.
Ridgeley’s life since leaving Wham! has been altogether less eventful. He had a brief and calamitously crash-prone go at motor racing, released a solo album that sank without trace, fell in love in 1990 with Keren Woodward from Bananarama, and the couple moved to Cornwall, where they lived together in tranquil anonymity for 27 years, and brought up her son from a previous marriage. He took up paddleboarding, cooking, surfing and cycling (he is taking part in a 1080-mile charity bike ride a few days after we meet). Following a thoroughly amicable separation in 2017 he moved back to London, where he lives alone. “I have girlfriends, yeah. But I’m not attached in any long-term relationship, and I’m pretty sure I’m not looking for one.”
Since the age of 23 he hasn’t needed to earn a penny. In 2020 he published a bestselling autobiography, and must have been gratified by the warmth of its reception, but when I ask if part of his motivation had been to correct the media’s misapprehension of his role in Wham!’s success, he says: “No, I never felt an urge to correct any misconceptions. That’s other people’s problems, not mine.” Isn’t indifference easier said than done? “It might be for some, but it depends how much you care about these things. I cared very little.” He minded press intrusion in his private life, but never, he insists, the mockery. Some critics poked fun at him by questioning whether he could even play the guitar. “I’m 60, and I don’t care.”
I’m curious about why, then, he wants to re-enter the spotlight with the Netflix film, and the release of a box set of vinyl singles of Wham! hits. The choice feels as enigmatic as everything else about Ridgeley. “Well, the response to the memoir brought home to me how strongly a lot of people feel about Wham!’s legacy. And that level of interest seemed to be a very motivational reason for actively engaging in Wham!’s legacy.”
One young LSE student at a book signing told him he had written his dissertation on Wham! and China in the 1980s. “Which is pretty bloody good going for an economics dissertation,” he says with a chuckle. “But it showed me how large Wham! featured in people’s experience of their youth, how it set the backdrop of their growing up.”
Wham! could never have been one of those 1980s bands still going to this day, he says, because it was a “representation of us as youngsters. Of youth. So it was inconceivable that Wham! could mature into adulthood, whatever that might be. Wham! was never going to be middle-aged.”
Looking back, I wonder what advice he would give his teenage self, clowning around with a drum kit in his best friend’s bedroom.
“‘Work a darn sight harder, mate. Work harder at what you’re good at, because that has its own reward.’ I think the problem was that, in George, the talent was so great that it seemed as if we didn’t have to work that hard.” The paperboy’s indolence got the better of him? He allows a rueful smile.
“Yes. It did.”
Wham!’s Fantastic reappraised
By Pete Paphides
One wonders what the fiercely ambitious, doggedly competitive George Michael would have made of Wham!’s absence from the rankings when NME revealed its 50 best albums of 1983. On one hand, his sights were no doubt set on a loftier prize than mere critical acclaim. Yet, on the other, it must have stung a little — because when it comes to debut albums by fresh-faced teenage stars, Fantastic was Wham! delivering far more than four hit singles and half a dozen makeweight tunes to bump up the numbers.
Forty years after its release, what strikes you as you listen afresh to Wham!’s debut album is that it’s the sound of an artist who has left nothing to chance. Wham! was a perfect marriage of concept and content. Although Andrew Ridgeley already realised that his songwriting could no longer keep pace with that of his best friend — he has only two co-writing credits on the record — his role was nonetheless crucial, not least because the carefree playboy persona created by the more introverted Michael was borrowed from Ridgeley.
Wham Rap! was the first song Michael and Ridgeley recorded as Wham! and took shape when the singer put on a Level 42 album and decided “it’d be really good to take a funk formula riff and put a really un-disco lyric to it and do a rap”. Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do) and Young Guns (Go for It) ensured that while the girls (and quite a few boys) became smitten with Michael and Ridgeley, boys found them hugely relatable. On the latter song they brought Shirlie Holliman and Dee C Lee centre stage for a mini-morality tale along similar lines to the Specials’ Too Much Too Young.
While the music press was falling at the feet of Scritti Politti for writing left-field pop songs about the emptiness of consumerism, Michael was taking the same agenda into the Top Five with Club Tropicana, which wasn’t lost on the Scritti frontman, Green Gartside, who later struck up a close friendship with Michael. Beyond the singles, Fantastic revealed the full extent to which the erstwhile Georgios Panayiotou had steeped himself in American R’n’B: the sinuous digital soul of Nothing Looks the Same in the Light; an effervescent rendition of the Miracles’ Love Machine; and A Ray of Sunshine, a Michael original that could just as easily have been a cover of similar vintage.
Fantastic isn’t just a classic debut album, it’s also an achingly evocative sonic Polaroid of a seemingly unrepeatable moment in time; the era of working-class soul boys who spent as much time curating their wardrobes as their record collections. If you really want to know what it was like to be a young person in Britain in 1983, there’s one album that will, unfailingly, take you back there. And it’s not in the NME’s 50 best albums list.
- Wham! is on Netflix from Wednesday. The Singles: Echoes from the Edge of Heaven is released on Friday
Written by: Decca Aitkenhead
© The Times of London