“Wham was never going to grow up!”
“How could these two idiots become so bloody massive?”
George Michael.
So begins Wham! which here in the UK had a one-off cinema screening night in late June before becoming widely available to stream via Netflix and perfectly in keeping with one of the documentary’s opening lines from George Michael above, this documentary film is irreverent, fun, full of joy, laughter, love and smiles as George and Andrew Ridgeley narrate us through just four short years of their meteoric rise and the year or so before as they forged the career they both dreamed of as schoolchildren. From children in school and Andy immediately volunteering to look after the “geeky” looking new kid in the oversized glasses he soon simply called “Yog” (abbreviated from Yorgos, Greek for “George”) through to their final sold out Wembley Stadium gig in the Summer of 1986, watching this film quite simply made my day as I smiled royally throughout.
The obvious confession I have to make is that I’m not, or was ever, a fan of Wham! I found their music to be too “poppy” and young even though I lived through their stratospheric rise as an impressible teenager. Back in those early to mid 1980’s my musical tastes were moving from, and shaped by, the “New Romantics” of Depeche Mode, then Simple Minds before a dalliance with the harder, metal sounds of Guns ’n’ Roses before I graduated to Bruce Springsteen and U2. From the 1990’s onward and way past the shortened career of Wham! I became a fan of independent and prog rock music with Pink Floyd and Radiohead pretty much topping and tailing my musical desires, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves and away from those halcyon teenage years of the 1980’s which from 1983 through to 1985 was largely dominated by the sounds and creations of two school friends, one of whom was driven to be THE number 1 sound of global music.
One of the many pleasing aspects of this documentary film is the proving that I was wrong to write off their early stuff as purely pop music as it was rather more than that and a signifier towards George’s social conscience and the music that would soon begin to emerge in his solo career post Wham! His 1990 album Listen Without Prejudice straddled the moving from vinyl to compact discs and was one of my first CD’s and an album I still adore and which will stand the test of eternal time. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves again as this documentary only makes a passing reference (as well as a touching tribute) to all things George Michael post 1986 but instead relies upon a mountain of stock footage of the times as well as the scrapbooks kept by Andrew Ridgeley’s Mum!
From these scrapbooks come the detailed journey of George and Andrew and their rap, disco, pop mash-ups that became their early 4-track audition tapes, the early record contract and the chase to secure the “Holy Grail” of appearing on the zeitgeist music television programme of its time here in the UK, “Top of the Pops”. Once the grail was attained, and to George’s own frank admission, he wanted number 1’s, a year of number 1’s and in the 1985 year of “Live Aid”, 4 number 1’s. He and Andrew had to settle for 3 plus a number 2 for arguably another song of theirs that will stand the test of eternal time, “Last Christmas”. World tours to America and China followed before they broke the news to the world that Wham! wasn’t designed to live forever or grow up, and in the baking Summer of 1986, they bid the world a joint farewell with a Wembley gig for the ages.
So often maligned as the added extra alongside George, Andrew is seen here exactly as George describes him in the continual documentary voiceover: the driving force, artistic creator, and anything but a simple addition to the mighty talent of one of the world’s greatest ever musical artists. Whereas Andrew “lived in the moment” and just wanted to have a laugh and joke with his best friend, George admits to the human failings and frailties that littered his later life as well as even the highest of possible points when at the height of their 1980’s fame. He talks frankly on his sexuality and being unable to express and open up on the subject, as well as feeling too driven by his ego and the insecurities that ate away at him.
I simply can’t recommend this enough. Treat yourself to a 90 minute time capsule of the early 1980’s and two lives fully documented of love and laughter, joy and friendship.
Wham! is one of the best films I’ve seen this year.
Thanks for reading. Please see my “Film” library for more spoiler free appraisals of hundreds of films old and new, or linked below are my three most recently published reviews from this year:
“Hypnotic” (2023)
“Well that’s some pretty impressive mind-reading”.medium.com
“Air” (2023)
A film about Michael Jordan. Without Michael Jordan!medium.com
Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning — Part One (2023)
“There’s no place I won’t go to kill you”.medium.com