George Michael: The biography Read online

  It was into this ‘foreign’ world that on 25 June 1963 Georgios Kyriacos was born in north London, the third child and first son to the Panayiotou family. The head of the young family was Kyriacos Panayiotou, a Greek-Cypriot immigrant who had arrived in England a decade earlier in 1953. Kyriacos had been born in 1935 in a traditional Greek homestead on the island of Cyprus. The family had lived for decades in the village of Patriki, about 18 miles northeast of the city of Famagusta along the ‘tail’ of land that juts out from the Bay of Famagusta and into the Mediterranean. Home for many centuries to a small Greek population of a few hundred, the village was located in a region which, when the land was partitioned in the 1970s to avert perennial conflict, would become the Turkish part of Cyprus.

  Kyriacos was one of seven children, having three brothers and three sisters. Like the vast majority of the island’s populace, the Panayiotou family were farm workers. In the north of the island the small dusty farms were home to olive and citrus groves, while in the south grapes and root vegetables were harvested. In many ways life was lived as it had been for centuries, with all working together for the good of the family unit. Several generations of one family often lived under the same roof in the rural villages, and the Panayiotous, like most traditional Mediterranean families, were extremely close.

  But trouble was on the horizon. For hundreds of years Cyprus had been strategically important for various regimes and ideologies. In the 1950s the island was largely populated by Greeks with a minority population of Turks, while the British occupying forces added a third dimension. Early in the decade, Greek Cypriots began a movement to form a permanent union with their Greek homeland. As the decade progressed, this campaign was to escalate, with riots taking place outside the British embassy in Athens, until in 1959 the dispute was settled and the island was ceded from Britain to Greece. Before this, while the Turks and Greeks of Cyprus readied themselves to do battle, Kyriacos Panayiotou was finishing school and finding work as a waiter. Then, as he reached the age of 18, came Great Britain’s call to the Commonwealth for immigrant workers. In 1953, two years before the riots reached Cyprus, he decided to try his luck and head for the UK.

  For Kyriacos himself, the timing was perfect, but he also had his family to consider and his exit was tinged with remorse. One less worker meant one less salary to add money to the family pot. With civil war looming, a conflict into which all the island’s young men would undoubtedly be dragged, it was a good time to go, but on the other hand he would be the first member of his family to leave. However, he did have a travelling partner, his cousin Dimitrios. The pair arranged to work their passage on a ship bound for England and in the summer of 1953 they set sail. Legend has it that they arrived with less than £1 between them.

  London in 1953 was still abuzz from the coronation of Elizabeth II on 2 June, after Edmund Hillary had brought glory to the Commonwealth by conquering Mount Everest for the first time on 29 May. Panayiotou was greeted in England by the sounds of Frankie Laine and Mantovani purring from radios on the dockside as he weaved his way through the bustling quay where goods from around the world were unloaded. On arrival he and Dimitrios immediately headed for the group of Greek Cypriots they knew were living in north London, and through family connections they were able to secure room and board while they looked for work. As a teenager in a foreign land, a land where a language was spoken of which he knew little, Kyriacos decided to simplify things by changing his first name to the more easily pronounceable Jack and shortening his surname to Panos. He soon found employment as a waiter, while Dimitrios set about working as a tailor.

  The newly named Jack Panos, like others of his generation, social standing and background, regarded hard work as the key to future success. Appreciating that he was at the bottom of the ladder, he began the long hard slog of pulling himself up. With little room and board to pay from his wages, he found that he had enough money left over to maintain a healthy social life while sending some back to his family in Cyprus.

  Panos worked hard, putting in long shifts at the restaurant, but as a fit and agile young man he always found the energy to go out dancing when he wasn’t at work. He would patrol the north London dance halls with Dimitrios and could dance a mean routine to the sounds of Tommy Steele and Elvis Presley as he grew to love both English and American rock and roll. He also attended various Greek events, dancing the night away at more than one wedding while managing to balance a full glass on his head. But it was rock and roll that he really loved – as well as, being quite good looking, the attention he received from the girls. He was certainly enjoying life in England.

  At a dance in 1957 Jack met a young girl named Lesley Angold Harrison. (The ‘Angold’ part of her name dated back to her ancestors, who had fled Paris at the time of the French Revolution.) Lesley enjoyed rock and roll dancing as much as Jack and the pair soon became an item, displaying energetic dance routines on Friday nights at the clubs and dance halls. They made a great couple, Lesley’s working-class background fitting in nicely with Jack’s own hardworking ethos. She lived with her parents and brother in one of a row of Victorian houses on Lulot Street near Highgate Hill. Around this time a local newspaper was running an item called ‘Search for a Star’ and Lesley sent in a photo of Jack. It was published above a caption that said, with slight exaggeration, ‘Jack Panos is chased down the street by girls wherever he goes.’ Before long, Jack proposed and Lesley accepted. Despite some reservations on the part of Lesley’s father, they were married soon afterwards.

  Jack and Lesley didn’t have the most salubrious of starts to married life. Their first abode was a small flat above a laundry in Finchley, where house-proud Lesley fought a constant battle to maintain her standards of cleanliness and tidiness. She also had to deal with her father’s disapproval of the marriage. As George Michael explained: ‘Most people wouldn’t realise but the Cypriots as one of the countries in the Commonwealth were kind of invited to come to the mother country to rebuild the place after the Second World War. There were places that would say, “No blacks, No Irish, No Greeks.” So my father was part of that. My mother’s father didn’t attend their wedding because he was Greek, in those times he saw it as absolutely the same thing as marrying someone of a completely different colour. And so I’m only a little way away from that experience.’

  In 1959 the young couple were blessed with a daughter, Yioda. But children cost money, so Jack upped his work rate and was soon spending seven nights a week waiting tables, taking on lunchtime work as well to bring in more cash. Two years later a second daughter, Melanie, was born. By now Jack’s hard work was beginning to pay off and he’d been promoted to the post of assistant manager at the restaurant. A year later the final child, a son, arrived and was named Georgios Kyriacos.

  The day of the birth was one which would resonate throughout the family for ever more, for conflicting reasons: their joy at the birth of a son was tragically mixed with the news that Lesley’s brother had committed suicide. After rumours that he’d been found to be, or was at least suspected to be, homosexual, he was discovered dead with his head in a gas oven. Gay rights in Britain during the 1950s were unheard of; in fact gay men had no rights. After several high-profile court cases it wasn’t until 1957 that Lord Wolfenden published a report recommending that ‘Homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence.’

  ‘I didn’t know of the existence of my mother’s closest sibling until I was 16 or 17, because he had killed himself,’ George Michael later explained. ‘The idea of so wanting to leave this world and at the same time not wanting to because it would spoil the pregnancy of your sister, it’s just horrible, beyond horrible. And my mother told me that she thought he was gay. They had a very difficult childhood, and for some reason she didn’t think it was appropriate to talk to us about it until we got to a certain age. It’s a tragic story of how much more difficult it must have been as a gay man in the 1950s. If he’d held on and beaten his depressio
n for long enough, he would have seen the changes in life that would have made him at least a happy middle-aged man.’

  As it turned out, depression and suicidal tendencies ran in the family. Lesley was again devastated when she found her father’s body after he had taken his own life in similar circumstances. Once more, young Georgios was not told of this tragedy until much later in his life. George Michael would write about the events in the song ‘My Mother Had A Brother’, which appeared on the album Patience.

  Though they had been a culture-conscious couple at the end of the 1950s, the Swinging Sixties largely managed to pass Lesley and Jack by. Their flat was way too small for two adults and three children, so the family moved into its first house. Exemplifying the immigrant making his way in capitalist society through hard work, before the end of the 1960s Jack Panos took the plunge and opened a restaurant of his own, the Angus Pride in Edgware.

  While this move meant his family would potentially be much better off financially, it entailed a further increase in Panos’ working hours. He couldn’t yet afford a very large staff or trust certain aspects of the business to others, so he spent ever more time out at work. It also put an extra strain on Lesley. She was always working a day job, coming home to look after the children after school and then working in the restaurant to help out at night as well. For a while Lesley worked in Hyde House, a local high-rise office block, another time she was employed in a local fish and chip shop for the lunchtime shift. For the super-clean housewife this was awful: she detested the smell of the fish and the cooking fat that pervaded her clothes and hair. Still, she would do her shift, go home, scrub up and be ready for the children to come home from school. But the constant toil began to take its toll. Though the home would be spotless, Lesley was often on the edge of anger and exhaustion.

  George Michael could later recall this tired woman because he spent most of his home time with her. He remembered that as a young child he and his sisters would often be warned to keep quiet when their father was at home because he was asleep between shifts at the restaurant. Georgios consequently built a much stronger bond with his mother than with his father. Jack wasn’t a completely absent father – he did manage to spend some time with his son – but the youngster found this time was never long enough. Spending most of his time with his mother and two sisters, the young Georgios quickly became used to having females as his constant companions. The male influence on his early years was minimal, while his feminine side was allowed to flourish.

  Georgios received an early feeling of stability through his mother and a hardworking attitude from his father, although George Michael later admitted that he could never work as hard as his father did. Jack’s upbringing in Cyprus had been strict, with corporal punishment included, but he was determined not to treat his own children in the same way. In his 1990 autobiography Bare, Michael says his father physically punished him only twice as a child, and that on both occasions he deserved it. But the hard work left scars on Georgios. He recalls never being praised at home; his parents always seemed too busy for things like that.

  Fifteen years after arriving in England with nothing, Panos was the owner of a restaurant, while the family were in the midst both of moving house and rising very quickly from working to middle class. While Jack provided Georgios with ever more material comfort, Lesley had the greater influence on her son’s development. His English mother was almost ‘classless’, in the sense that it was difficult to know which class she belonged to. Her own mother had worried that she would turn into a tomboy and so sent her to convent school, which put her off religion for life and dissuaded her from imposing religious beliefs on her own children. Despite her own working-class background she spoke with a middle-class accent. Her approach to money was very different to that of her husband. While Jack constantly sought to improve his family’s standing by earning as much as he could, Lesley was almost afraid of money. This feeling filtered through to her son, who would have the same attitude to money well after he’d become a multi-millionaire.

  George Michael later said that he thought his mother always knew he was gay. ‘How could she not have been worried by my sexuality if her brother’s sexuality killed him?’ he said. ‘When you put your family tree together you understand so much more about who you are. Sometimes I felt that my mum made me feel that I wasn’t man enough, or boy enough, when I was growing up, which was so out of character for her, because she was such a great mum, and so liberal in her attitudes.’

  In 1968 Georgios started at the local Roe Green Primary School on Princes Avenue. One of his earliest friends there was David Mortimer, who lived on the same street. Georgios’ other male pal was his cousin Andros, Dimitrios’ son. While Jack had settled in north London, his travelling companion had eventually landed in south London, but once they had started their own families, they would take turns on a Sunday to travel across town for the day.

  In 1968, Jack took his family for a holiday in Cyprus for the first time and was joined by Dimitrios and his family. Not long after Jack left Cyprus, his father had died, so Georgios never had the chance to meet his Cypriot grandfather. And other things had changed dramatically on the island since Jack’s departure. The Panayiotou family had been forced to move home after the partitioning of the Greek and Turkish communities, and one of Georgios’ earliest memories of Cyprus was being told not to pass through a certain set of gates. It was carefully explained to the five-year-old that the Turks patrolled on the other side and he could be shot there just for being Greek.

  Georgios was usually a quiet boy who didn’t stand out from the crowd, but on the Cyprus trip he displayed his first hint of a wild streak. One day during the trip, Georgios and cousin Andros decided to steal some sweets from the local shop. They achieved this easily and scoffed the proceeds of their crime. The next day they went back and repeated the feat. Day after day this continued, the pair becoming ever more daring until they managed to make off with a whole box of toy cars. Georgios wasn’t really interested in toy cars, but he was excited by the fact that he could get away with it. When Jack Panos found out about the thefts he was outraged and slapped his son around the legs for good measure.

  The Panos family would take several holidays on Cyprus as Georgios was growing up – in other years the family vacation would be a visit to members of Lesley’s family on the Kent coast – and over time Jack helped five of his six brothers and sisters follow in his footsteps to England.

  The family moved in 1969 to a semi-detached suburban house in Burnt Oak, Edgware, near the restaurant. Here the Panos family had neighbours, including an elderly lady on one side and a large Irish Catholic family on the other. For the first time Georgios, now six, had a garden of his own and he was fascinated by it. He would spend many hours amusing himself deep in the plants, collecting insects as many young boys once did. He would also wander off to the nearby fields to explore, which sometimes alarmed his mother. He often woke up early and sat at his bedroom window waiting for the sun to rise so he could go outside to play.

  Before the age of seven Georgios took his first musical steps when he started violin lessons. He would continue these for six years, more at the behest of his parents than because of any burning desire to be a musician. But on his seventh birthday, in 1970, he was given a portable cassette recorder, and his imagination ran wild. Aided by anyone he could rope in, be it his sisters or David Mortimer, he would record himself singing the popular tunes of the day, using the original songs as backing tracks, as well as rudimentary ditties that he dreamt up himself. He and his accomplices would also script spoof radio shows, jingles and adverts.

  Georgios wasn’t keen on the violin lessons and soon began to sense that he wanted to be a singer, though he didn’t know if he could really sing or not. And despite Jack’s earlier love of rock and roll, any music heard around the house by the early 1970s would invariably be Greek, which Georgios grew to hate. Then one day he found an old wind-up record player that his mother had discarded in the
garage. With it he unearthed a trio of seven-inch singles, two by the Supremes and one by Tom Jones. It was a combination that would later tint his own musical output. As soon as he arrived home from school Georgios would either head to his bedroom to record the latest tune he had dreamt up or dash into the garage to play the three singles over and over again.

  As well as supplying Georgios with his earliest singles (in 1973, at the age of ten, he bought his first single, Carly Simon’s ‘The Right Thing To Do’, which grazed the Top 30), Lesley kept a close eye on what TV shows her son watched. One programme that he was allowed to stay up past his normal bedtime to watch was Michael Parkinson’s chat show, which Lesley felt was good wholesome family viewing. Little did she know that years later a whole hour of the show would be dedicated to her son.

  Jack kept discipline around the house on a tight rein. Mel and Yioda were allowed absolutely no boyfriends and when they went out Georgios often had to act as a chaperone. When the girls started regular ice-skating trips, Georgios had to go along as well. On these Saturday afternoons he found himself attracted to a girl called Jane, but she was pretty and he was chubby and wore glasses. At the time he thought he had no chance, though he would later meet up with Jane again.