The Scrapbooks

For twenty-four years George Michael was written as a scandal, and within weeks of his death on Christmas morning 2016 the same industry was writing him as a saint, at the same speed. Neither version has him doing anything. He spent sixteen years manufacturing instruments for controlling how he was seen: he wrote the songs so nobody else would write them, produced them so nobody else would produce them, and played most of the parts himself in rooms with almost nobody else in them. He built an aggressively heterosexual sex symbol and sold twenty-five million copies of it. Then he refused to appear in his own videos, which cost him the American market. Then he took his record company to the High Court to establish that he could not be marketed against his will, and lost.

In August 1984 a studio in central London was hung with Christmas decorations, because a Christmas single has to be cut in high summer to reach the shops. Inside: one performer, one engineer, two assistants. On the tape were a drum machine, a synthesizer, sleigh bells and a stack of vocals, every part played or sung by the same twenty-one-year-old, who had no formal training and played the keyboard, the engineer remembers, with two or three fingers. A single by an act at the top of the British chart would ordinarily have carried a producer with a fee, session players, an arranger, and a label man watching the clock. None of that was in the room, and it had not been dispensed with to save money.

All of it failed at once, on April 7, 1998, in four minutes for which there are two accounts, no recording, and no reconciliation. The chapter about those four minutes contains no scene, because each man was the only witness to the other. The book is built from what he could not prevent: a judgment, a coroner's finding, the personnel lists on the backs of his records, and roughly fifty scrapbooks Jennifer Ridgeley filled in a house in Bushey because she was keeping track of her son.