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The truth about George Michael — by the friends who knew him best.

Simon Napier-Bell managed Wham! from 1983 to 1985. Now he’s made a film, George Michael: Portrait of an Artist, about the star — and no one had a bad word to say about him, he says.

The truth about George Michael — by the friends who knew him best.

Simon Napier-Bell managed Wham! from 1983 to 1985. Now he’s made a film, George Michael: Portrait of an Artist, about the star — and no one had a bad word to say about him, he says.

During fifty years as a music manager, I’ve often wondered whether it’s been a worthwhile way to spend my life. It’s a strange job; you subjugate your own creative ambitions to be an appendage to someone else’s. Sometimes it seems worthwhile, sometimes it doesn’t. A couple of times, just when I’ve been in maximum doubt, something has come along to validate it, which is what happened in 1983 when I first started working with George Michael. He was the type of artist who made being a manager feel like a worthwhile job.

It wasn’t just his songwriting and performance abilities, it was his awareness of image and confidence in himself. He was the most creatively complete person I ever managed, the only solo artist who could produce his own records better alone than with anyone else. There is virtually no other singer who can do that, not Paul McCartney, not Madonna, not Jay-Z, not Drake.

I only worked with him while he was in Wham!, just three years. When he went solo I stopped. Yet it was impossible thereafter not to follow his career in the same close way you might follow the career of a relative or a great friend.

During the time I worked with him one of the most striking things about him was his ability to think ahead about how each thing he did or planned might affect his career thereafter. One time he said to me, “I’ve never done anything I could regret later.”

Because George always worked with such a careful plan for where he was going — the correct flow of songs to build his audience, the correct order to release them in, the correct imagery to go with each one — I took what he said as just one more aspect of his nature. He thought first and acted accordingly.

But as I continued to manage him, I sometimes saw him take surprisingly clumsy steps, do things that really might not be in the best interest of his future career, come to decisions that were not as logical as he liked to think they were. After I stopped managing him, I saw him do this more frequently and I began to wonder if it was deliberate. Obviously, the most famous of these was his arrest in a public toilet in Los Angeles. Maybe what he’d meant about never doing things he could regret later was that he liked to challenge himself — to do silly or unplanned things and then solve the problems they caused, bringing himself to a new and refreshed point that he would never have been able to arrive at any other way. Coming through unscathed and thus nullifying any possible regret. In other words, he seemed to be playing a permanent game of “dare” with himself.

I had originally planned to call my new documentary, George Michael: Portrait of an Artist,“The Artist versus the Music Business versus Himself”. It didn’t really have to be about George, it could have been about any of the big pop artists in Britain; it could have been Lennon, or Bowie, or Elton. The industry is the biggest challenge to their fulfilment as artists — its uncompromising need for commerciality clashing endlessly with their need to experiment and find new artistic ground. And their other enemy is themselves, all those aspects of their characters that come between common sense and a smooth-running career. Once I saw it in that light, I realised the film could be a template for looking at the life of almost any great artist: Van Gogh, Rachmaninov, Rudyard Kipling, Orson Welles or Francis Bacon. I hoped that in the process of following George’s life from Wham! days to the end we’d come to understand more about him.

When I started doing interviews for the film I found that everyone who had worked with him, whatever they had gone on to do afterwards, considered their time working with George to have been some of the most rewarding in their professional lives. It was the same for me too; those three years with Wham! came to seem like the best thing I’d done as a manager.

During that time my management partner, Jazz Summers, and I managed to get them invited to play in China, the first western pop group ever to do so. Then, just 18 months after we started working with them, we got them a stadium tour in America, the fastest any British group had ever broken to that level in the US. That put the sales of their second album on a par with top American artists such as Madonna and Prince. And then under our management they each made their first million.

One thing I never discussed directly with George was his homosexuality. He knew I was gay, so if he had wanted to discuss it he could have. If he didn’t wish to, then it was no business of mine to bring it up. He would have been aware that I knew he was gay because he was shrewd enough to know that the gay network, which he was already a part of, was unable to keep any secrets from its members. There were a few occasions, though, when we did talk about it in a roundabout way.

Once was on an early morning shuttle from LA to San Francisco during Wham!’s first tour of America. It was in February 1985 and they had a gig that night in Oakland. I was reading the Los Angeles Times, talking to George about the things I was reading, and I remember him being unusually chatty. On an inside page I came across an article about Aids, which at that time was still in its early stages. The article said scientists had come to the conclusion that anyone gay who had had sex outside a monogamous relationship during the past 12 months would almost certainly get it and die.

It was a shocking thing to read and I remember dropping the newspaper, shutting my eyes and fainting. George noticed and asked what was wrong. What had I read? So I handed him the newspaper.

After he’d read it he didn’t say another word to me, not just for the rest of the flight but for the rest of the time we were in San Francisco. In fact, everyone in the crew was commenting — George seemed not to be talking to anyone.

Like all great artists, George was prepared to put his most painful experiences into his work. He perhaps did it more directly than any other music artist aside from Leonard Cohen, and like Cohen he had no fear of throwing his pain right in your face.

The first time he did this was when he was still with Wham!. A Different Corner was obviously about some deep emotional confusion. In interviews he talked about it obliquely but few people who knew him had any doubt that it was about his own sexual conflict. Yet for George, I felt that releasing that single wasn’t just an emotional release; it was almost certainly a considered part of his master plan for stardom that he should drip-feed the public with his inner complexities while simultaneously carrying them along on a wave of more traditional pop. He did the same with Faith, an album that clocked up four No 1s in America.

However, by the end of the 18-month world tour that accompanied Faith’s release, the pressure of maintaining the false façade that supported its image was too much for him. He snapped and said he would no longer do promotion for singles. He then disappeared into the studio to make Listen Without Prejudice, a covert coming-out.

That he still didn’t come out in a general way wasn’t surprising. Aids was now at its height. We were in a period when to say you were gay was, to the general public, to say you were the carrier of a deadly disease. The music business tradition was for pop fans to want more than anything else to get close to their idols and touch them. To have announced he was gay would have seemed to have been an instant end to success.

Eventually, his coming out was made easier by meeting Anselmo Feleppa, his first overwhelming passion. Anselmo travelled with him when he was gigging and they were unable to conceal their affection for each other from the people around them. Coming out is usually not a single big moment, it’s more often a dribble, or a leak. The first group of people to know were the musicians he worked with, his road crew and the other people who travelled with him. Then a broader group, eventually including his parents. By the time he was caught in the toilet in LA, the truth was, the press already knew he was gay. The arrest simply gave them the green light to start talking about it. For George, too, it was a green light. He could now make up for all those years when he’d concealed it.

The British public didn’t care much either. As Dylan Jones says in the film: “There were several moments when the British public wanted to put their collective arms around him and say, ‘It’s all right. We don’t mind.’ ”

What was so admirable about George from then on was the degree to which he pushed being gay to the forefront of everything he did and said. After Anselmo died, he got into a successful long-term relationship with Kenny Goss. It was the normalcy of their appearances in public that made the biggest impression. George would be doing an interview; Kenny would be in the background. “I’ve got to go home now,” Kenny would call out to him. “OK,” George would say. “See you later, darling.” Nothing camp, nothing hidden, nothing over-demonstrative, maybe just a peck on the cheek — just like normal people.

George did his utmost to make this the image he would project: being gay was normal, nothing more, nothing less. For someone in that position, with that much attention being paid to him, to project homosexuality in that everyday way gave young gay people more confidence in themselves than any amount of proselytising could do. It was impressive.

Admittedly, it went a bit wrong when he was arrested in the toilet for importuning, and later again on Hampstead Heath for cruising. But from then on he always owned his mistakes and in most cases turned them to his benefit. He’d become the world’s most public figure playing the “dare” game.

Several people who have seen the film have asked me, “Why did you interview that person and not this one?”

My simple rule was: “Do we learn something about George, or his music, or the environment of celebrity in which he had to exist?”

It was also quite selfish. I was learning about George for myself, as much as anyone else. Here was someone who for three years had been a huge part of my life and I wanted to discover more about what was behind his story, which like everyone else I’d mostly only followed in the media and through his songs.

Interestingly, although George frequently said he disliked interviews, he often told journalists more than he was prepared to tell many of his best friends. After he’d done an interview with Adam Mattera for Attitude magazine, George said he’d told him more than he’d told his analyst in twenty years of consultations.

Another journalist, Simon Hattenstone, found himself lecturing George on his drug habits, something George would accept from almost no one. Yet George then drove him home and had afternoon tea with Hattenstone’s family.

All together I interviewed 42 people — critics, friends, fans, writers, other artists, people who worked with George and people who advised him. From this came 50 hours of insight and anecdote, and from that came our documentary, 90 minutes culled from the 3,000 minutes we filmed.

Fellow artists Stevie Wonder, Rufus Wainwright, Tom Robinson and Sananda Maitreya (formerly Terence Trent D’Arby) highlighted some of the difficulties of being a performing artist and commented on the unique way George dealt with it. Record producers Chris Porter and Johnny Douglas talked about the way he worked in the studio and his extraordinary method of composing lyrics straight from his mind into the microphone. Stephen Fry told of his extraordinary generosity, and music critics Pete Paphides and Paul Flynn were hugely insightful on the impact his music had had on them and on the general public.

From not a single person did I hear anything but admiration for George as a person and an artist. It’s true there were stories of dark moments, angry moods, stubbornness and self-destructiveness, but for an artist those are not necessarily bad qualities. And George knew that all too well.

Perhaps, though, my favourite remark came from Kenny Goss. It rang so true of the George I managed and knew when he was in Wham!.

“When George was talking to you, if you disagreed with him he’d tell you, ‘It’s because you’re not listening.’ ”