George Michael Overview

Michael was born Georgios-Kyriacos Panayiotou in East Finchley, North London. His father was Kyriacos Panayiotou, a Greek-Cypriot restaurateur who moved to England in the 1950s and changed his name to Jack Panos. Michael's maternal grandmother was from a well-off Jewish family... [more]

Michael was born Georgios-Kyriacos Panayiotou in East Finchley, North London. His father was Kyriacos Panayiotou, a Greek-Cypriot restaurateur who moved to England in the 1950s and changed his name to Jack Panos. Michael's maternal grandmother was from a well-off Jewish family and his grandfather from a poor working-class non-Jewish family. Their daughter was Michael's beloved mother, Lesley Angold Harrison, a former dancer who died of cancer in 1997. He spent the majority of his childhood in North London, living in the home his parents bought shortly after his birth. In his early teens, the family moved to Radlett and Michael attended Bushey Meads School. He began his career by forming a short-lived ska band called The Executive with his best friends Andrew Ridgeley, Paul Ridgeley, Andrew Leaver and David Mortimer (aka David Austin). George attended Kingsbury High School briefly in 1974, as did his sisters. It wasn't until he formed the duo Wham! together with Andrew Ridgeley in 1981 that success came for Michael. The band's first album, Fantastic!, was released going to no.1 in the UK and within a year they had released their classic debut single, "Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do?)". Their second single, "Young Guns (Go For It!)", became the first in a string of Top 10 hits in the UK singles chart. They followed with titles such as "Bad Boys", and "Club Tropicana". Their second album Make It Big was their breakthrough, eventually selling 6 million copies in the U.S. alone and made them international superstars. Singles from that album included "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go", "Freedom", "Last Christmas/Everything She Wants", and "Careless Whisper", which was released as a Michael solo effort. "Careless Whisper", written when Michael was seventeen, became one of the most played songs of the decade and was voted favourite record of all time by Londoners in January 1995 in a competition run by the capital's leading evening newspaper and radio station. He was also voted Best Male Singer that year by the same radio station's listeners and by the readers of a national newspaper. George also sang on the original Band Aid recording of "Do They Know It's Christmas" and donated the profits from "Last Christmas/Everything She Wants" to the charity. In addition, he added background vocals to David Cassidy's 1985 hit "The Last Kiss," as well as Elton John's 1985 hits "Nikita" and "Wrap Her Up." Wham!'s tour of China in April 1985, the first visit to China by a Western pop act, generated enormous worldwide media coverage, much of it centered on Michael. The tour was documented by celebrated film director Lindsay Anderson and producer Martin Lewis in their film Foreign Skies: Wham! In China and contributed to Michael's ever-widening fame. With the success of his solo releases "Careless Whisper" (1984) and "A Different Corner" (1986) stories of an impending Wham! split intensified, and Wham! separated in the summer of 1986 after a farewell single, "Edge Of Heaven", an album, plus a sell-out concert at Wembley Stadium that included the world premiere of the China film. The Wham! partnership officially ended with the little-known single "Where Did Your Heart Go?", which reached a peak position of #50 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart in November 1986. George Michael desired to create music targeted to a more sophisticated audience than the duo's primarily teenage fanbase, and the first step of his solo career, in early 1987, was a duet with soul music icon Aretha Franklin. The song, "I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)" was a one-off project which helped Michael achieve an ambition by singing with one of his favourite artists, and it reached number one in both the UK Singles Chart and the Billboard Hot 100 upon its release. For Michael, it became his third consecutive solo number-one in the UK from three releases, following 1984's "Careless Whisper" (though the single was actually from the Wham! album "Make It Big") and 1986's "A Different Corner". The single was also the first Michael had recorded as a lead artist which he had not written himself, with the exception of his turn in the Band Aid charity project of 1984. The co-writer, Simon Climie, was an unknown at the time, although he would go on to have success as a performer with "Climie Fisher" in 1988. With this song George won the Grammy Awards in 1988 as Best R&B Performance - Duo Or Group with Vocal. [show less]