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Two Boys in Bushey: The Friendship That Built Wham!
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before the stadiums and the screaming crowds, George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley were just two teenagers in suburban Hertfordshire with an unshakeable belief in each other. This is where the Wham! story really begins.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before the matching white shorts. Before the finger wagging and the sunshine yellow.
Georgios, who would eventually take the stage name George Michael, was born in June nineteen sixty-three in East Finchley, North London. His father, Kyriacos Panayiotou, had emigrated from Cyprus and built a modest but stable life running restaurants.
At Bushey Meads, the friendship between Georgios and Andrew deepened through shared obsessions. They were both drawn to the music coming out of America and the UK in the late nineteen seventies, particularly the energy of bands like the Jam, the Who, and the emergent sounds of ska and soul.
By the early nineteen eighties, both had left school. Michael had taken work to pay his way, including shifts at a local cinema.
Their debut album, Fantastic, arrived in July nineteen eighty-three. It went to number one in the UK.
Their second album, Make It Big, released in nineteen eighty-four, didn't just repeat the success of the first. It multiplied it.
There's a temptation, when looking back at this period, to see it as accidental. Two kids who got lucky, caught a wave, rode it.
This is where Wham!'s story begins. Not at Wembley in the summer of nineteen eighty-six, though that's where it ends.
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