used to be. Jack revelled in his new freedom, far away from the disapproval of his father. He also looked the part with a fifties-style quiff and chiselled movie-star looks. ‘When he was very young, my dad was very handsome,’ recalled the adult George in his autobiography, published when he was still in his twenties.
At one dance, Jack met a radiantly pretty local girl called Lesley Harrison, who lived at home with her family in one of a labyrinth of then depressing and poor streets between Archway and Highgate. Lulot Street was a typical example, consisting of a line of Victorian terraced houses with outside toilets that George later described as ‘very working class’. His grandfather, George Harrison, had worked for the Post Office as a telephone mechanic. The street itself was demolished in the 1970s to make way for modern flats. In ‘Round Here’, George was perhaps more accurate in his description of his mother, saying she had a ‘real bad start to the game’.
Lesley was always well spoken with a soft and easy manner – she never sounded as if she should be behind the bar of the Queen Vic. According to George, it was only when her own mother – George’s grandmother, Daisy – died that she discovered she was half Jewish. Apparently, she had been disowned by her wealthy Jewish family for marrying a gentile.
The families who lived in her neighbourhood of North London were back then very old-fashioned in their views regarding immigrants. Greeks were placed firmly in the unwelcome category. George would later hear stories of those days from his parents: ‘There were places that would say, “No blacks, no Irish, no Greeks, no dogs” kind of thing.’ That attitude failed to deter Lesley, who fell in love with her dancing partner. ‘My parents were rock and roll dancers,’ George explained. ‘They met at a dance and my father used to throw my mother all over the show.’
They were good enough to enter competitions, and one teenage girlfriend of George remembers him showing her an old black-and-white photograph of his parents dancing. She recalls, ‘They looked amazing, with glamorous hairstyles and clothes like something out of the movie Hairspray. I remember wishing that we learned how to dance like that, proper couples dancing, not just disco.’
Lesley was clearly very proud of her darkly handsome boyfriend. She even entered his picture in a competition run by the now defunct Reveille magazine called ‘Search for a TV Star’. He reached the final and his photograph was published with the memorable caption: ‘Jack Panos is chased down the street by girls wherever he goes’. That may have been a slight exaggeration, but his son would be very impressed by his dad’s achievements, which were kept hidden when he was growing up.
Jack and Lesley were married in 1958. Her father didn’t attend for the simple reason, according to George, that the groom was Greek: ‘In those times, he saw that as absolutely the same as marrying someone of a completely different colour.’ One unavoidable fact was that Lesley from Lulot Street was now Lesley Panayiotou. It was a bold and strong-minded thing to do at the time, following your heart and hoping for a better life.
Jack was twenty-three and his new wife twenty-one. Their prospects didn’t look good as they settled down to married life. The young couple’s carefree dancing days ended to a certain extent when they faced up to the responsibility of raising their first child, a girl they named Panayiota but who everyone called Yioda. Their first daughter was born that October in the maternity annexe of the Royal Free Hospital in the Liverpool Road. At the time, Jack was working on the counter in a grocer’s and they were living in Kentish Town, one of a number of homes around North London in which they had rooms before they managed to buy their own house.
Almost exactly two years later, in October 1960, Lesley gave birth to a second daughter, Melanie, which is a name that sounds very English but is derived from ‘Melania’, the Greek for ‘dark’. Jack was now a waiter and they had moved a few neighbourhoods away to Muswell Hill.
The couple longed for a male child and their wish was eventually granted on 25 June 1963. They named him Georgios Kyriacos. The Greek pronunciation of Georgios is ‘Yorios’, which was a bit difficult for his elder sisters, so they called their brother Yogi, a pet name that stuck with him during his early years.
By the time of his son’s birth, Jack had worked his way up to be an assistant manager in a local restaurant. It would be many years before Georgios fully appreciated his father’s work ethic and commitment to improving the status of his family. ‘The honest truth is that the average Greek-Cypriot is a lot more hard-working than the average English man,’ he observed somewhat controversially. He described his father as the ‘absolute archetypal 1950s immigrant from Cyprus – very determined and every single member of his family made something of themselves. They were typical immigrants that worked their arses off and reaped the rewards.’
On his mum’s side, Georgios never knew his Uncle Colin, her elder brother. He died, aged thirty-eight, in January 1964 from an overdose of barbiturates at the house in Lulot Street when his nephew was six months old. His death certificate grimly contained the words ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘did kill himself’. The tragedy was hidden from Georgios growing up, but much later, as George Michael, he wrote a very personal song, ‘My Mother Had a Brother’, in which he revealed that his uncle was a gay man who had been unable to declare his sexuality because of the times in which he was born. He also said Colin killed himself on the day he was born, but this was dramatic licence.
The family moved yet again, to a small flat above a launderette in Holmstall Parade in Edgware, which was a small group of shops on the main A5 road with a bingo hall on the corner. The flat had a view of a dusty and shabby backyard on one side and the busy road on the other. It was hardly a step up from the familiar streets of North London that Lesley had been loathe to leave, but it better suited Jack’s ambitions.
While still very much London, Edgware had a more suburban feel to it than the old haunts of Archway and Kentish Town. The media liked to talk of ‘Swinging London’ and the ‘Swinging Sixties’ in terms of young Britain finding a new and exciting culture, finally free from the shackles of the Second World War. Jack and Lesley, however, were faced with a much more uninspiring life, trying to save enough to drag themselves out of their working-class monotony while keeping three young children clothed and fed.
At least now they were in the catchment area of a good school. Roe Green Infant and Junior Schools were in Princes Avenue, Kingsbury, less than a mile away from the flat. The junior school boasted the motto ‘Be The Best You Can Be’, a sentiment that resonated in the Panayiotou household and one that, professionally, George Michael was destined to follow.
In the summer of 1968, just before Yogi was due to start school, Jack took his family to Cyprus for the first time. He had not been back there for fifteen years and much had changed. The country had achieved independence in 1960 and joined the Commonwealth a year later. But it was not a stable time and the year of his son’s birth had seen the beginning of violence between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Greece wanted to absorb Cyprus back into the motherland – a policy known as Enosis – which inevitably led to bloodshed and the destruction of property on both sides. The adult George Michael would remember standing in front of the gates that led to the Turkish sector in Famagusta and being warned by his dad not to go in there because he might legally be shot by the armed patrols.
Jack’s cousin Jimmy and his young family went along on the holiday as well. The two men would still try to see each other in London at weekends despite their work commitments and Georgios became particularly close to Jimmy’s son, Andros, a friendship that would continue into adulthood.
During his time away, Jack’s father had died. The adult George would later comment that he was in little doubt that the grandfather he never knew was extremely strict with his children. He had a very old-fashioned Greek attitude that almost certainly included a degree of physical punishment: ‘I never met my grandfather because he died before my parents met, but everything I have heard points to the fact that he was loved
