Wham!: the good time boys

Have you seen the Wham! documentary currently airing to much comment on Netflix? No, I wouldn’t have done either had my wife not suggested it during the endless subscription trawl for something to watch. 

I have to admit I was tempted to demur. My tastes, particularly when Wham! had their heyday, lay more among root five power cords and big hair. The two boys from Bushey could only do the bushy locks of the rock gods. 

But yield I did because, let’s be honest, who doesn’t like, or at least find unobjectionable, a bit of Wham!?

Viewing was more than just the brief, warm embrace of nostalgia. The plain fact is that they were good at what they did. Bright, breezy, feel-good pop. Pretension free, despite an early music critic describing them as “socially aware rappers”, they were more foot tappers. More than that, they sold dreams. Suntans, cocktails, pools and girls. Ski lodges, pals and winter kisses. Eighties aspiration and they, like most of us, eventually got there. 

That was all the forgotten man, Andrew Ridgeley. All front and laughs. George Michael, underconfident, rode on Ridgeley’s energy as his own songwriting abilities started slowly to emerge amid the party boy image. 

Ridgeley, meanwhile, emerges well from the film. A friend and protector, he stuck his hand up to look after ‘Yog’ (a corruption of the Greek for George, the boy himself being of Greek-Cypriot origin) turned up dumpy and alone at a new school in Herts. He stuck by George thereafter. Through all his agonising over his sexuality, his body image and the constant need for number one hit affirmation. 

Ridgeley stepped back to allow Michael forward until the point where the ridicule that ensued his casting, like Linda McCartney, as a bolted-on tambourine rattler, proved too much and the duo called it a day.

The ‘erection section’ classic Careless Whisper had emerged by then, under Michael’s name, for all that it was a collaboration some years in the making. By the time sixth formers and freshers had got used to it as the climax to the evening, it had all the later Michael hallmarks of wistfulness, regret and misunderstanding.

Yog went on to triumph and disaster. A hugely successful solo career of which the album Older pretty much defined ‘class act’. His personal life, however, was marked by bizarre accidents, acts of gross public indecency, a bust-up with his record company and extensive drug use. 

He died the premature death that his metier and rather forlorn talent seemed to demand at only 53, mourned not just as a musician but as a man of considerable public and private generosity. 

All of which is rather the antithesis to what he and Ridgeley were together as Wham! Plain, old-fashioned, uncontentious fun. Even the Chinese let them in. No Cultural Revolution, just good times. Viewed from the distance of our oh-so-worthy times, that really is a dying art. 

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life