It turns out that the writer Sathnam Sanghera, ‘The Boy with the Topknot’, has been a besotted George Michael fan since the age of eight, when he started listening to his older sisters’ Wham! records. This was an unusual thing to be as a Sikh growing up in Wolverhampton and it got him teased at school. But he stuck with it. So when a friend suggested that he write something fun to compensate for the years of heavy historical research he’d put into his excellent book Empireland, he decided to set off on a sort of pilgrimage in search of his dead hero.

First stop was Mondial Cars, a showroom in Northwood, north London, which used to be the Bel Air restaurant, where the teenage Michael worked as a DJ. Sanghera takes the bus there, because it was on this bus route that Michael wrote his first great hit, ‘Careless Whisper’, aged 17, in 1981. When the car salesman asks Sanghera what he is looking for – presumably hoping it’s a new car – Sanghera launches into his own pitch about the wonders of George Michael and the origins of ‘Careless Whisper’. He goes on so long that the salesman starts glancing at his watch, remembering he has to ring another customer.

Sanghera never met Michael, though there were a couple of occasions when he might have. He also chickened out of meeting the singer’s father. But he talked at length to Andrew Ridgeley. In Wham! days, Ridgeley was always the extrovert, the party animal; now, according to Sanghera, ‘you’ll struggle to find a more cautious, circumspect, carefully dressed, fitness-obsessed middle-aged man’. The one record he released after Wham! was a flop and he then pretty much disappeared from public view. He could live on his Wham! royalties and that was enough.

Sanghera also interviewed Michael’s early manager, Simon Napier-Bell, who told him about the control freakery:

George had a way of making anyone........

© The Spectator