Wham! George & Me by Andrew Ridgeley

Author:Andrew Ridgeley [Ridgeley, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780241385838
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-10-02T23:00:00+00:00

There was no getting round it.

While there were other TV shows like The Old Grey Whistle Test that did look beyond the Top 40, they only really focused on rock bands, or folk and country artists. For a while, it looked like our appearance on Saturday Superstore might represent the dizziest heights of our success. And if both Wham! singles sank without trace there was every chance Mark Dean would drop us. Having got this far it was inconceivable that this could be the end of the road.

What happened next was the single most important event in Wham!’s success. Unexpectedly, miraculously, Top of the Pops decided they wanted to have us on the show. There’s still something of a mystery surrounding the circumstances of our appearance, but apparently another band had dropped out at the very last minute. I don’t know who it was and we were never told, but fate stepped in and gifted us our golden opportunity. Anxious for a replacement act, one that could turn up at short notice, the producers scrutinised the weekly charts. Wham! came to their attention for two reasons. The first was that we were moving up the charts and had jumped to a position just outside the Top 40. The second was that we were a UK band, and able to drop everything at short notice. They called Innervision to ask if we could do it. There was only one answer to that. We grabbed the chance with both hands.

If somebody had told me when I was twelve that one day I’d be appearing on Top of the Pops, I’d have thought they were completely nuts. Both Yog and I had been such great fans of TOTP for so long, and following in the footsteps of some of our favourite bands gave us a huge rush of excitement. Neither of us slept very well on the eve of the recording. And while this was partly due to nerves, Innervision’s customary attention to detail didn’t help. The night before Wham!’s big break, we’d been booked into a King’s Cross hotel that probably rented beds out by the hour. And George looked to have been given the worst room in the dump.

‘What the bloody hell’s that?’ he said, pointing to the child’s bed in his room as we arrived. ‘Is that really for me?’

The bedlinen was made from some sort of nylon, and underneath, a plastic sheet protected the stained mattress from further soiling. My bedclothes were no better, but at least my bed was the right size. With his feet dangling off the end of the mattress, George had a terrible night’s sleep. A room cost £10 a night and even that was a rip-off. By the time we’d arrived at the BBC studios for our start time of 7.30 a.m., both of us were tired, irritable and wondering why we had to be there twelve hours before the show went out.

That wasn’t the only hitch. In a sign of things to come, George’s hair became the main focus and he spent hours in the BBC’s make-up department.

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