George Michael abhorred fame and did not lavish himself in interviews.
He only released four studio albums as a solo artist over a 30-year career.
However, his figure permeated popular culture and the fascination over the singer of
Faith
has lasted until today.
This is demonstrated by the premiere of a documentary and a book about his life that are published these days, just when the artist would have turned 59.
The two projects analyze the figure of Michael from very different perspectives.
George Michael: Freedom Uncut
is a film in which the musician himself worked with his old collaborator, David Austin.
It tells the professional career of one of the best pop voices from the eighties to 2016, the year of his death.
It is narrated in the first person and offers a partial version of the star.
George Michael: A Life
is a biography of journalist James Gavin that explores in great detail and anecdotes the singer's addiction to GHB or liquid ecstasy, his depression and his dependence on sex.
According to this account, Michael spent his later years sinking deeper into a swamp of drugs and prostitution and alienating all of his friends, including Andrew Ridgeley, the other half of the Wham!
Gavin has spoken with more than 200 friends and acquaintances of the artist to portray an emotionally fragile and insecure man.
According to the author's thesis, which several friends corroborate but his family denies, the interpreter would not have died of a heart condition, as was said at the time, but of an intentional overdose.
He committed suicide.
More information
George Michael died of natural causes
The documentary film focuses on the eighties and nineties, the creative peak of the artist, while the book mainly describes his last years of life, when he made more news for his arrests than for his new songs.
Both are pieces of a puzzle that the artist himself took it upon himself to assemble and disassemble before the public over three decades.
It is difficult to understand the career of George Michael, who would turn 59 this June 25, without delving into his biography.
Born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou in 1963, he rose to worldwide fame alongside his school friend Andrew Ridgeley.
Together they formed Wham!, a group adored by teenage girls and despised by critics.
Michael enjoyed a planetary fame that he never wanted.
He felt undervalued as an author, relegated to the status of a teen star.
He also did not take well to pretending to be a heterosexual idol to sell records to the female audience.
It's not that he wasn't ready to take on his sexuality, it's that society wasn't.
In the eighties Elton John and Freddy Mercury were married to women.
In Spain, Miguel Bosé walked hand in hand with Ana Obregón.
mainstream.
George Michael during a performance in Rotterdam (Netherlands).Rob Verhorst
George Michael could not live his sexuality in his private life, but he represented it with a certain impudent joy in public.
In his later years, looking back, Michael said his sexuality was an enigma, even to him, but his music was always honest.
"The songs I wrote when I was with women were really about women, and the ones I've written since then have been about men," he said.
"So when it comes to my work I've never been reticent about defining my sexuality."
Because George Michael was sex and his music was too.
On his first solo album, he broke away from his good-boy image to present himself as a sexually liberated man (in a story later imitated by many pop artists, from Britney Spears to Christina Aguilera).
His first solo song,
I Want Your Sex
, was dedicated to a man, but his then-girlfriend, makeup artist Kathy Jeung, appeared in the video clip.
“Kathy had a crush on me, but she knew I was in love with a boy at the time.
I kept saying he was bisexual…” she explained in a 2004 interview with the British magazine
Attitude
.
The song caused a lot of controversy for defending promiscuity in the harshest years of AIDS and its explicitly sexual message was censored on several radio networks.
For his second single,
Faith
, Michael recorded a video clip in which he reaffirmed the imaginary of the American macho (leather jacket, jeans,
cowboy
boots ) combining it with close-ups of his butt swaying to the rhythm of the music.
The singer was asserting himself as a mature composer and, at the same time, he was sexualizing himself.
The move reported him a planetary success.
He began to rub shoulders with pop royalty: Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince… They all stood out at a time when the great music stars defined an era.
But only one did it by confronting the record companies and renouncing media overexploitation.
If singers were kings, MTV was their palace.
In the 1990s, a good video clip could lift a song in sales and boost the popularity of its author.
This was the moment when George Michael decided to disappear.
He barely promoted his second and expected album, much less commercial and easy than the first.
In the video clip that was to present him,
Freedom
, he gave prominence to the five most important
top models
of the time.
The video was directed by a first-timer David Fincher, who before revolutionizing Hollywood already revolutionized MTV.
It has gone down in history as one of the best video clips of all time.
Freedom: Uncut
, the documentary that is presented these days, focuses on that creative stage of the singer.
Some of the participants in that video, such as Cindy Crawford, Kate Moss or Naomi Campbell, give interviews remembering the figure of Michael and discarded footage that Fincher did not use is included in the footage.
The documentary is narrated in the first person by the singer.
It focuses on his artistic facet, but does not avoid personal aspects such as the death of his mother and that of Anselmo Feleppa, his great love, who died of complications from AIDS in 1993.
These two deaths had a devastating effect on Michael and caused a descent into hell that music critic James Gavin focuses on for his book
George Michael: A life
.
"He was a pathetic, lonely and broken figure," the author told the British newspaper
Mirror
.
George Michael did not come out of the closet, he was kicked out in the most shameful way possible.
In September 2008, a plainclothes officer made a pass at him in a public restroom in Los Angeles, California, and when the artist played along he was arrested.
Searching it, they found marijuana and crack.
The former leader of Wham!
he was fined $810, but the harshest penalty was that of the media.
The tabloids on both sides of the Atlantic lashed out at him.
It was no longer the eighties, but a scandal like that could end the career of any singer.
Far from being intimidated, he explained himself the best he knew how to do it, with a song.
The music video for
Outside
, the
single
presentation of his compilation album, was based on the famous incident.
In it you could see several men dressed as police kissing in a disco-bathroom and a press helicopter recording different couples having sex.
Michael took control of the narrative, being sexual as ever and honest as ever.
George Michael, in a concert in Paris, in 2012. Francois Mori (AP)
But there was no song capable of silencing the news that followed.
A few months later, the musician was arrested again after a car accident and the police found him "drenched in sweat" with "eyes open and pupils dilated".
It was his seventh arrest in 12 years.
Galvin elaborates at this stage on his story, portrayed by the press at the time in a disjointed and sensationalistic way but now put into context to understand the impulses of a depressed, lonely and frustrated man who took refuge in drugs and sex .
"For Michael, GHB seemed heaven-sent," the journalist writes about this drug, a central nervous system depressant closely associated with sex parties.
“Apart from fueling his sexual compulsiveness, he made a depressed, self-hating man feel attractive;
He brought joy where there was little.
GHB gave him confidence… but it also took him to a new and terrifying level of self-destruction.”
Galvin describes one of the music industry's brightest stars as a lonely man, secluded in his mansion with hardly any friends and who spent his days watching episodes of his favorite soap opera,
Coronation Street
, while bingeing on full jars of Haagen ice cream. Dazs and junk food and GHB.
The author assures that the singer held parties with prostitutes and large amounts of drugs in his mansion in North London.
The description of the journalist agrees with the statements made this week by Kenny Goss, who had a relationship with the singer between 1996 and 2009. In an interview on the English program
Piers Morgan Uncensored,
the art dealer has reported that everyone all around her she knew that Michael would die soon.
"I spent a lot of time worrying about him," he recalled.
“What is the phrase that he says in one of his songs?
He says, 'I can see it in your eyes when you look at me like that, it tears me in two.'
Not know what to do".
George Michael died on Christmas Day 2016. The official report says that the death was due to heart failure.
His fans then remembered him with
Last Christmas
, a song that many read as a Christmas carol, but what it actually tells is a sad story, one of broken hearts, men who secretly love and the difficulty of trusting their lovers.
"All my songs are autobiographical," the singer used to say.