Andrew Ridgeley on George Michael and Life After Wham!

If you weren’t a young person in 1984, it is likely to be onerous to grasp this, however right here goes: There are Gen X-ers who bear in mind the place they had been the primary time they noticed the video for the Wham! clap-along pop anthem “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.”

In it, George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, the heartthrob frontmen of Wham!, put on large smiles and beachy quick shorts as they carry out their infectious bop — titled after a notice Ridgeley had as soon as left on his household’s fridge — for a small crowd of adoring followers. There had been fingerless gloves, neon face paint, white “Choose Life” T-shirts that had nothing to do with abortion: It was a new-wave dance get together for cool children who thought Mötley Crüe sucked.

Ridgeley, who turned 60 in January, remembers making it as nice enjoyable.

“It was our first video with an audience,” he stated throughout a latest video interview from his dwelling in London. “The atmosphere was really quite excitable and exciting.”

Ridgeley and his bandmate are the topic of “Wham!,” a brand new documentary that premieres on Wednesday on Netflix. Directed by Chris Smith, it charts the British group’s climb to pop stardom, starting with its ferocious look on the music present “Top of the Pops” in 1982, by means of the worldwide success that adopted the albums “Fantastic” (1983) and “Make It Big” (1984), and ending with the 1986 farewell live performance in London.

The movie, which is itself directed like a power-pop video, explains how the duo’s trendy mixture of disco, funk, pop and soul, in songs like “Young Guns (Go for It),” “Careless Whisper” and “Freedom,” helped make Wham! one of many greatest pop teams of the late twentieth century, though it lasted simply 4 years. Unlike bands that cut up over inventive or private disagreements, Wham! didn’t have an increase and fall. “It was just a rise and they called it a day,” Smith stated.

They didn’t break up both, stated Ridgeley, however reasonably “brought Wham! to a close in a manner of our own choosing.”

Fans is likely to be disenchanted to be taught that within the documentary Ridgeley is heard however not seen as he seems at present: debonair and patrician, with silver hair and a still-cheeky smile. Smith stated it could have thrown the movie’s mythic aspirations off stability if Ridgeley had been on digicam however not Michael, who died seven years in the past at 53.

After Wham!, Ridgeley informed me, he and Michael had been “no longer living in each other’s pockets” as that they had completed since they had been children. But their bond was mounted.

If Ridgeley is bored with being recognized principally for his friendship with Michael, he didn’t present it. He brightened when chatting about Michael, whose loss left Ridgeley feeling “like the sky had fallen in,” as he stated in 2017. But he didn’t appear into speaking a lot about his life now, aside from to say he loved biking.

The documentary contains archival media protection and tons of live performance footage, together with scenes of groundbreaking exhibits in 1985, when Wham! grew to become the primary Western pop group to carry out in China.

But it’s Ridgeley’s mom who equipped probably the most private treasures. Since her son’s grade-school days making music with Michael, she saved about 50 meticulously organized scrapbooks filled with pictures, critiques and different ephemera. They embrace snapshots from the mid-Nineteen Seventies when Ridgeley first received to know Michael as Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, the son of a Cypriot father and a British mom.

Ridgeley was additionally the son of an immigrant father — his dad was Egyptian — and a British mom, and he hit it off instantly with the boy he referred to as Yog, a nickname he used typically in our interview. The scrapbooks paint a vivid portrait of boys who liked Queen and “Saturday Night Fever” and desired to make music a profession.

“The only thing I ever wanted to do from the age of 14 was to be in a band, write songs and perform,” Ridgeley stated with a 14-year-old’s enthusiasm in his voice, including that fame and celeb “were never a motivating factor for either of us.”

Ridgeley stated he and Michael knew Wham! would have a finite life span as a result of Michael’s songwriting started “developing and evolving in a way and at a speed” that Wham! couldn’t accommodate. In November, Michael shall be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Since Wham!’s heyday, Ridgeley has battled the notion that he’s well-known solely as a result of he was in a duo with a extra proficient artist. The documentary makes a case in his favor although, tracing how Ridgeley, a guitarist, collaborated with the composer and performer Michael.

Still, Ridgeley acknowledged that his musicianship wasn’t in the identical league as Michael’s, “one of the finest, if not the finest, singing voices of his generation,” he stated, sounding like a proud brother.

When Michael got here out to him after they filmed the video for “Club Tropicana” (1983), 15 years earlier than he did so publicly, Ridgeley stated he supported him with love and a shrug. Michael was extra freaked out by how his father may react than how the general public would, Ridgeley stated; had Michael come out through the Wham! years, Ridgeley stated he and followers would have had his again.

“I didn’t think it was going to affect our success, and in the long term it probably wouldn’t,” he stated. “It would have been difficult for a while for him, there’s no doubt about that. It would have required management by us all. But after the initial sensationalism, it’s on the table isn’t it?”

After Wham!, Ridgeley launched a 1990 solo album that flatlined and he did a quick stint as a Formula 3 driver, however he has in any other case stayed out of the limelight. The British tabloids have saved breathless tabs on his love life — together with his 25-year relationship with Keren Woodward, a former member of one other ’80s pop group, Bananarama — a lot as they did once they gave him the Wham!-era nickname Randy Andy.

Ridgeley didn’t pursue fame additional as a result of being in Wham! gave him “everything he wanted,” stated Shirlie Kemp, a pal from faculty and a Wham! backup singer. Not simply professionally.

“I don’t think I ever met anyone else who was on par with George the way Andrew was, intellectually and with a sense of humor,” stated Kemp, whose husband is Martin Kemp of the ’80s band Spandau Ballet. “It was the best relationship I’d ever seen George have with anyone.”

Ridgeley stated “few stones remain unturned” as he’s labored the previous 5 years on initiatives which can be all-things-Wham! In 2019, he printed a memoir, “Wham! George Michael & Me,” and had a cameo that yr within the romantic-comedy “Last Christmas,” which was impressed by the group’s eponymous chart-topping vacation single. Later this month comes “Echoes From the Edge of Heaven,” a Wham! singles assortment.

He nonetheless appears to be in awe of what he and his finest pal made collectively.

“I could never quite really get that we had achieved the same kind of success as the artists that we revered like gods when we were growing up,” he stated. “We were playing Wembley Stadium, the same place Elton John played. You can say, ‘I am the same.’ But in your own mind, you’re never the same.”