Never-seen-before footage of George Michael on stage, together with an interview which has remained unheard for 40 years, is to be released in an electrifying new two hour film. George Michael: The Faith Tour, has its world premiere tonight (TUES OCT 27) in London, before being released in cinemas nationwide from November 6.
It shows George, aged 24, conquering the world with his debut solo album, Faith, which sold 25 million copies worldwide. It also reveals his deep-rooted insecurities during his time in Wham! with Andrew Ridgeley.
The former school friends’ hits, like Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, Freedom and I’m Your Man, became anthems for the 1980s, as they bounced around in skimpy DayGlo outfits. But, with searing honesty, George reveals for the first time his loneliness and how he feared he’d lost his identity before he quit Wham! in 1986 to go solo – striving to become as big as Madonna or Michael Jackson.
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On the newly discovered private tapes, he confides: “I used to feel like I was a fraud. I felt like there was an element of me, which someday, everyone was going to wake up to and, you know, the bottom was going to fall out of my world. “I was most intimidated by my public persona, or stage persona … when I was all teeth and shorts … with Wham! But I believed in it as a great way to entertain people. I think I have diluted a lot of very, very emotional material by trying to maintain some kind of physical entity that wasn’t me.”
Created by George’s best friend David Austin and Andy Morahan, director of George’s videos for Careless Whisper, Father Figure and Faith, the documentary features footage shot at the Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy arena, during the European leg of the Faith world tour in May 1988.
Captured over two nights, it includes behind the-scenes clips of George from the Faith video, in his trademark Ray Ban Aviator shades, black leather jacket, cowboy steel tipped boots and Levi jeans. Most revealing of all is a brand new 15-minute documentary, Finding Faith, made by photographer Mary McCartney – daughter of Beatles legend Sir Paul.
In it, George narrates his story as a young star with dreams of going solo, speaking over reels of unseen portraits taken by American photographer Herb Ritts. He says of Faith: “This is the most personal thing I have ever done. Coming out of the Wham! thing, I felt like I had wasted most of the year feeling sorry for myself. I went into the studio when I felt good again. What Faith meant to me was that I had faith that life was still going to deliver.”
He reveals that his ballad One More Try was about a mystery relationship he was then in – long before coming out as gay in April, 1998, following his arrest in a Beverly Hills toilet by an undercover cop. He describes One More Try as “the best vocal performance I have ever done.” Written when he was working towards the relationship he was in, he continues: “It was that point where you’ve really had your guts ripped out by someone. You’re just about to make a real commitment. I just wasn’t sure if I was ready to. Most things on the album are intensely personal. They are not as depressing as some of the other things I have written, because I am not as depressed as I was.”
Explaining his songwriting processes, he adds: “I arrange everything in my head. Some things have stayed in my head for two years, whole big arrangements. I don’t like to commit things to tape too early. I used to write melody and then the lyric would come. They tend to come simultaneously now.”
On the private audio tapes, recorded between 1986 and 1988, George professes his ambition to be remembered as one of the great songwriters. The star, who died at his home in Goring-on-Thames, South Oxfordshire, from heart disease on Christmas Day 2016, aged 53, says: “I do feel it is a gift and if you have a gift you have to respect it. The most constructive thing I can do is become a great writer. I always look at it…my generation. I am one of the great achievers and I would like to become one of the great musicians. Prince, Jackson and me … we all made our biggest albums when we were 24-years-old.”
Claiming to have “changed a lot in the last couple of years,” he says gaining recognition for his achievements has boosted his confidence. He continues: “I am actually much more comfortable with my weaknesses as well. If you look at the Faith video, that is the strongest visual of me off the album. You know the jacket, the jeans, the boots, everything. I am totally comfortable with it.”
In the new movie, viewers will see thousands of fans in Paris going wild as George emerges from behind a specially constructed cage for the Faith tour. Choreographed by Paula Abdul, he played 109 shows in 16 countries between February 19, 1988 and July 6, 1989.
As he jokes about his poor French, fans are seen waving lighters and even sparklers as George delivers hit after hit – gyrating to I Want Your Sex and covers of disco classics Play That Funky Music and Lady Marmalade. George also delivers a powerful cover of the Stevie Wonder ballad Love Is In Need of Love Today, with the final film credits rolling to a new live version of Wonder’s piano song, Too Shy To Say.
A touching final tribute to George comes from his family and friends. It simply reads “For Yog” – his nickname, derived from a schoolboy mispronunciation of his Greek birth name, Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou. George signs off with a tribute to his fans, saying: “I feel something really strong and spiritual on stage. It is just an energy. I can’t fathom how that much energy can be transmitted to me and however many thousand people. The most enviable thing about being a pop star is that exchange of energy.”
* George Michael: The Faith Tour is released in cinemas, and selected IMAX venues, from November 6. A new 18-track live album, The Faith Tour, is released the same day. A free screening will air for NHS staff at the Roundhouse in Camden, London, on November 2 – 20 years after George’s free concert there to more than 3,240 nurses, recognising those who cared for his mother, who died in February, 1997, aged 57, from cancer.
Simon Napier-Bell, who managed Wham! from 1983 to 1985, said he would not have made Faith with George.
Simon explains:”I wouldn’t have let him do Faith. I knew he was gay and he was having a problem with it. The whole point of breaking up Wham! was to say, ‘right, now I’m going to be myself’.”
Instead, he says, George was “tempted by fame,” adding: “He wanted to be as big as Madonna or Michael Jackson. and so the Faith image was even more heterosexual than the Wham! image. He put himself in this terrible predicament of leaving Wham! so he could be himself and then making himself even more false.
“He wasn’t enjoying it. At the same time, at the end of two years of Faith, he’d had five number ones. He’d made himself $50 million. Faith did sell more than Madonna. So he’d achieved what he set out to achieve. Now he wanted to try to get himself back, rescue himself from the music industry. That was very difficult. He never really managed it.”
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