My mother found God around the time she had me and, although my father and elder siblings weren’t particularly religious Sikhs, I was raised as one. In practical terms, this meant I wasn’t allowed to cut a single hair on my body and that, by the time I hit 13, my locks, when unfurled, went down to my knees. This created all sorts of challenges for a self-conscious teenager and I eventually decided to cut my hair.
I can recall more about that first visit to a barber’s than I can of what happened yesterday. I remember how, after sitting me on a leather seat and bringing my topknot to his cutting level, the barber enquired: ‘How you want?’ In response, I pulled out the sleeve of the cassette single of Freedom! ’90 by George Michael.
It was a strange thing to do, not least because his haircut was barely visible in the murky shot. If pushed at the time, I might have explained it by saying that my sisters had been Wham! fans and I’d caught the bug. Maybe I would have added that his lyrics appealed: unlike most men in my life, he didn’t seem allergic to expressing actual feelings. Ultimately, I suppose the George Michael of the 1990s was impossibly glamorous to me, the exact opposite of who I was – and I wanted to be someone else.
The strange thing is that, more than 30 years later and two years after I started researching a book about George, I’ve finally understood why I was so drawn to him. I had no idea at the time, but he and I actually had a huge amount in common. We both had creative pretensions as young men, though while I was thinking about my next morose diary entry, he was writing one of the most successful love songs of all time, Careless Whisper, aged just 17.
Neither of us liked the way we looked. We both hated our hair. George’s remained such a challenge that, after filming on the Careless Whisper video was almost complete, he disliked the way it looked so much that the shoot was paused while his hairdresser sister Melanie was flown across the Atlantic at a reported cost of £10,000.
Perhaps more significantly, our families both had a history of severe mental illness. My father and eldest sister have schizophrenia, an illness that shattered our family. For George’s part, on the 2004 album track My Mother Had A Brother, he discussed the history of depression on his mother’s side of the family, with both an uncle and his grandfather having died by suicide.
The most significant and surprising parallel, though, is that Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou (his real name) came from an immigrant, minority ethnic background, like me. George’s father was able to settle in England in 1953 as a Greek Cypriot immigrant because he came, like my Indian parents, from a part of the British Empire (my parents having emigrated from the Punjab to Wolverhampton in the late 1960s). George’s maternal grandmother was Jewish, although she married a Gentile and raised her children to have no knowledge of their Semitic ancestry. This background has never really been part of George Michael’s popular narrative, but I feel it explains as much about him as it does about me.
It certainly accounts for his drive: his father worked day and night to become a successful restaurateur and the work ethic rubbed off . ‘I’m glad that my father’s Mediterranean and I’m not just of English stock,’ George once observed. ‘I think I would have grown up with less belief, more reservations about what I wanted to do with my life.’ At the same time, his father’s resistance to his creative ambitions gave him something to push against. ‘The fact that I had my father as an adversary was such a powerful tool to work with,’ George refl ected in 2005. ‘I subconsciously fought him to the degree that it drove me to be one of the most successful musicians in the world.’
I doubt there’s a single British Asian who doesn’t relate to this. I do, as someone who became the first in my family of factory workers to go to university, the fi rst in my extended family to go to Cambridge University and the fi rst in my entire ancestry (probably) to become a writer.
I think his background also explains the most significant decision of his lifetime: to stay in the closet for so long. In his father, he faced someone with traditional, homophobic attitudes. A man who, according to second cousin Andros Georgiou, hated pop music because he thought all pop stars were gay; who was forever trying to toughen up his son; who kept George away from a gay waiter who lived above the family restaurant ‘in case I caught something. In case I caught gay’. George added: ‘Knowing my father, he couldn’t even consider he had a gay son because he is of his generation, a Greek Cypriot man.’
As with his father’s infl uence, the subsequent repression was twin-edged: it made George miserable but also propelled him creatively. After all, one of the greatest drivers of art has always been the need to express feelings that cannot be freely expressed. The loneliness and longing he felt for romantic connection gave us the beauty of One More Try and the eroticism of Father Figure, with its talk of how ‘Sometimes love can be mistaken/For a crime’.
As it happens, hiding is something else George and I had in common. I was never confused about my sexuality, but I struggled in my late 20s to confess to my Sikh parents that I was dating (heterosexually) outside of my family’s religion. At one point, I even kept a second flat, just in case my parents visited and I had to pretend I wasn’t living with my non-Sikh then-girlfriend. I’m now happily married to someone who isn’t Sikh and my family adore her, and I’m glad George managed to free himself, too. The happiness he managed to secure, at least for a period during the late 1990s and 2000s, as an openly gay man, was a joy to behold.
And his activism continues to inspire gay people. He gave me a role model to emulate: telling my parents I wasn’t going to do what they wanted me to do, through my memoir The Boy With The Topknot, felt like coming out. And I drew solace from defiant remarks George made on Oprah Winfrey’s show in 2004 when asked if he fretted about his US fans not accepting his sexuality. ‘I’m not really interested in selling records to people who are homophobic,’ he said. ‘I don’t need the approval of people who don’t approve of me.’
If I had to pick out his greatest legacy, beyond this and the songs, it would be the way he transformed himself from a podgy, spotty teenager with thick-rimmed glasses and unruly hair into a sex symbol. (I manifested this uncoolness myself in the 1990s by being into George while everyone else was into Nirvana and Britpop.) And Wham! bandmate Andrew Ridgeley has observed his friend had no ‘instinct for fashion’, with his ‘blouses and frilly shirts, baggy, John Craven-style knitwear and clumpy boots’.
The fashion disasters didn’t ever totally cease, but what’s incredible is how George transformed himself into one of the most desired men on the planet, that supermodels wanted to be in his videos and that nowadays he’s in a category of his own. He was cool because he was okay with sometimes being uncool.
This is something that my George Michael fandom has taught me to aspire to, but it was also a prospect that my younger self couldn’t fathom in that Wolverhampton barber shop, as more than 5,000 days’ of hair growth fell to the floor.
Tonight The Music Seems So Loud: The Meaning Of George Michael by Sathnam Sanghera is out 4 June
Picador Tonight the Music Seems So Loud: The Meaning of George Michael by Sathnam Sanghera
