team and didn’t join in the games of rounders or French cricket at break times or in the park after school. His principal interest was still nature until an event occurred, one he later described as ‘very strange’: he fell down the staircase at school when he was running for lunch. It was his Damascus moment.
He told Greek television, ‘I had a very bad fall, cracked my head and, in the year consequent to the accident, not only my interests but my abilities seemed to change. Before the accident, I was very interested in nature and biology. I was a fairly good mathematician and obsessively read books all the time. But after the accident, literally within two weeks, I brought home a violin – unfortunately a violin – and within months was obsessed with music. I had lost the ability to do any maths and lost my interest in nature and bugs, insects and stuff. So, my interests changed dramatically after that event. Not my personality though. But I have to believe that I wouldn’t have been a musician. It is possible that a flight of stairs contributed to musical history.’
Interestingly, in that particular interview George Michael was asked the questions in Greek but responded in English. As a boy he joined his sisters for Greek lessons at weekends but didn’t enjoy them, mainly because they were held on a Saturday when he had far better things to do aged seven or eight than to learn a very difficult foreign language. Every weekend a ‘crappy little van’ would collect them and other local children and drive a few miles to Willesden, where they would sit in a classroom for private lessons. Georgios gave the impression of making progress, but in reality after two years he could speak only a few words, although he did understand more than he let on. He was at a disadvantage compared to his friends at school who had two Greek-speaking parents. Lesley never bothered much with the language and she always spoke English to her children. It might have been different if Jack had been able to spend more time at home with them when they were growing up.
Jack’s determination to provide a better life for his family was beginning to pay off in terms of the presents he could buy his children and the holidays they could now afford more easily. Georgios loved the bicycle he was given on his seventh birthday. It was purple and blue and his most prized possession. He could now cycle up the road to see his pal David, who had actually moved to another house further up the same street, to the ‘posh end’ as George would later laughingly describe it.
You can often tell how well a family is doing by the things they chuck away. One afternoon after school Georgios was messing about in the garage when he came across an old wind-up gramophone that his mother had thrown out. It was the sort of retro piece of equipment that would be highly desirable now, but then it was just a dusty old antique. The record player became his principal preoccupation, especially when his mum gave him three old 45s to play – two tracks from The Supremes, the premier sixties girl band, and one from the leading British vocalist of the age, Tom Jones.
He would come home from Roe Green and, instead of dashing out to the field, he would hide away in his bedroom with his music: ‘I was totally obsessed with the idea of the records. I loved them as things and just being able to listen to music was incredible.’ George Michael would never have much in common with Tom Jones, the epitome of Welsh masculinity, but some of the later dance tracks of Wham! would have an affinity with the easy soulfulness of Motown. Lesley would have loved to dance to them if she hadn’t been so busy in the chip shop. At least Tom and Diana Ross were much cooler early influences than the Julie Andrews songbook.
For his next birthday, his parents bought him a cassette player with a microphone and he was able to tape the latest hits from the radio. He loved recording things; he and David became ‘The Music Makers of the World’, the name they gave themselves, and prepared to take pop by storm from the comfort of their homes in Redhill Drive. They also started to make their own tapes, of funny moments and little sketches that would have them howling with shared laughter. It was a pastime that Georgios continued to enjoy through much of his life.
Georgios had never bought a record. That was to change on the annual trip to Cyprus when he was ten and splashed out on ‘The Right Thing to Do’ by Carly Simon, which was a minor hit in the UK in 1973 when it was the follow-up to her best-known track, ‘You’re So Vain’. Carly Simon was one of the hugely popular group of female singer-songwriters of the early seventies that included Joni Mitchell and Carole King. They combined catchy melodies with heartfelt, introspective lyrics that often told a story of damaged love. She was the perfect choice for a sensitive boy like Georgios Panayiotou who, regardless of any future image, was always in touch with his feelings. ‘The Right Thing to Do’ was a song about Carly’s relationship with her then husband, James Taylor, another acclaimed musician of that age. The sentiment is a romantic one – ‘Loving you’s the right thing to do’ – but there’s a tinge of realism, of fading attraction and the need for reassurance … ‘Hold me in your hands like a bunch of flowers’.
This particular trip to Cyprus also marked the second time Georgios received a scolding from his father. He was with his cousin Andros when they developed a taste for nicking things from a local shop. They began by stealing sweets, some they ate while others they hoarded. Eventually their thieving got out of hand when they made off with a carton of Dinky toy cars. The shopkeeper realised it was them, found their stash and told their parents. Jack without further ado smacked his son around the legs, which effectively prevented Georgios from becoming Cyprus’s most wanted.
At least Georgios paid for ‘The Right Thing to Do’. Carly Simon had a touch more credibility than his other favourite record of that year: ‘Daydreamer’ by teenage heart-throb David Cassidy, who made a successful transition from television actor to pop star. David first found fame as Keith in the popular early seventies sitcom The Partridge Family. He sang lead vocals on a number of hits as part of the TV cast, including the number one ‘I Think I Love You’, before breaking through as a solo artist with hit singles ‘How Can I Be Sure’ and ‘Could It Be Forever’.
For a while, when ‘Daydreamer’ was at the top of the charts, Cassidy’s face stared down from the walls of a million adoring young teenage girls. He was blue-eyed, with immaculate teeth and hair, and, most of all, he was non-threatening; he was clean-cut and safe. Georgios liked both the song and the image of Cassidy. He never forgot the first time he saw the American star on television, heading a football on the roof of the LWT building on the South Bank. The camera panned to the ground below and there were thousands of girls screaming at him. He saw the adulation that Cassidy’s fame brought him and, although he was only ten, realised he wanted that for himself. Georgios longed to be put on a pedestal and adored from afar – famous but untouchable.
For a while Cassidy seemed to be on Top of the Pops every week. The long-running programme was essential viewing on Thursday evenings, and the following day it would be a major topic of conversation in the playground. He would join his friends to sing along to most of the chart hits, as did boys and girls all over the country.
On one rainy autumnal day the weather was too dismal to go outside, so everyone had to stay in the classroom for break. At that age, the boys tended to stick together at one end of the room and the girls would be grouped at the other. Georgios and Michael Salousti sat underneath a table and proceeded to give a rousing rendition of ‘Daydreamer’. ‘We were just singing away, minding our own business,’ Michael recalls. ‘You can imagine the scene – a bunch of kids making a lot of noise. We thought we couldn’t be heard amongst all the chatter. We didn’t notice, however, when it all went very quiet. Mrs Ash had walked in and there we were still singing, “I’m just a Daydreamer, I’m walking in the rain …”
‘Suddenly, all we could hear were the other children laughing away. And there was Mrs Ash looking down at us, trying her best not to chuckle away as well. You could tell she was desperate to burst into laughter. So we had to creep out from under the table completely red-faced and embarrassed.’
Georgios didn’t regard this as his first public singing performance, preferring to remember the less awkward gang shows that he took
