A sharp look at a pop band that parted at its peak, without resentment

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Wham!, Netflix (premieres July 5)
★★★★

To those of you questioning how important Wham! is in the pantheon of pop that they should warrant the Netflix prestige documentary treatment, well, I have two words for you: George Michael (immediate apologies to Andrew Ridgeley, but more on him later). Growing up, at least three unrelated Greeks told me he was their “second cousin”, which sort of sums up the hit duo’s historical significance (they weren’t professing blood ties to Peter Andre, for example.)

If the late Michael – born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, in North London to a domineering Cypriot immigrant father – has already been the subject of multiple docos since his 2016 death, Netflix’s Wham! is about his salad days, the preamble to the main event. It could’ve been called Wham! A Star is Born.

Wham bam: George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley in Wham!Credit: Netflix

The doco is directed by American filmmaker Chris Smith, who launched his career with the 1999 cult classic American Movie, another doco focusing on dopey friends with dreams of artistic glory. After the Netflix success of 2017’s Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond, Smith became a doco gun-for-hire of sorts for the streamer, directing Fyre (2019), Tiger King (2020) and Sr (2022): never particularly flashy or inventive, but always considered and affecting.

Like Wham!’s brief career, which lasted just four years and three albums, Smith’s film packs a lot into its 92 minutes. Largely drawn from unedited interview tapes with Michael and Ridgeley (which producer Simon Halfon procured from his friend, BBC deejay Mark Goodier), and visually aided by detailed scrapbooks of press clippings Ridgeley’s mum kept over the years, the doco does a lot – moving from the pair’s “preordained” friendship as 12-year-olds at Bushey Meads School to the “sellout” backlash they copped from the UK music press for eschewing their early glint at “socially conscious rap” (don’t laugh) in favour of shameless pop music.

The film especially does a lot with the ever-complicated Michael, touching on (deep breath) his ethnic whitewashing, his skewed body image, his overbearing father, his tortured sense of being closeted and yet a pin-up, his ego. In a telling glimpse of Michael’s intense ambition, he silently seethes when Band Aid’s hit charity song Do They Know It’s Christmas? – on which he also appeared – prevents Wham!’s Last Christmas from topping the UK pop charts. It’s also fascinating seeing Michael’s transformation across the Wham! years, from awkward performer with a shy smile to the star in shades and leather sharing a stage with his hero Elton John at Live Aid in 1985.

Over just four years, the duo became pop icons and pin-ups.

For a guy who penned Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go and Everything She Wants, it’s also fun seeing Michael, at just 20, already being an astute thinker about pop. In talk show footage from July 1983, with Wham! being slagged in the UK music press (including by John Peel!), Michael talks about a “certain escapist element” creeping back into the charts. “Three or four years ago with the punk thing, people were shouting. Now they’re not ashamed of being young, unemployed. They’d rather just go to a disco or a club and forget about it,” he says, in words that echo today’s pop landscape.

Ridgeley, who’s acknowledged in the doco’s credits for his “co-operation and contribution” in making the film, is fascinating in a different way. The “disruptive” son of an Egyptian immigrant dad (more laissez-faire than Michael’s), he was seemingly happy to let the pop-star life go, knowing that – unlike Michael, who he affectionately calls “Yog” – it wasn’t his fate. How many artists, in the biggest band in the world, after achieving worldwide number ones and selling more than 30 million records, would give it up so willingly, without bitterness or resentment? Pop star ego, Ridgeley never had it.

Early on in the doco, he notes some discomfort about having to hand all songwriting duties over to Michael, but also accepts it logically. Want hits? The better songwriter writes. Even by the end of Wham!, when he’s met with endless quips over his redundant role in the band from interviewers like Terry Wogan and Paula Yates, he affably laughs them off. At Wham!’s final farewell concert at Wembley in 1986, he walks off humbly. “I was happy for my friend. He stood on the cusp of greatness. But I didn’t know what being George Michael truly meant,” he says.

It’s a poignant parting note from a documentary as bright as the band’s short-shorts and as satisfying as their enduring hits.

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