Documentary about George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley’s meteoric rise is a fun and moving watch that misses the chance to delve deeper
”Wise guys realise / There’s danger in emotional ties …” Here was one of the most artlessly, chillingly brilliant pop lyrics of the 80s, from Wham!’s Young Guns (Go For It), something to compare with the triumph of Madonna being a material girl in a material world. You can’t help thinking again about its relevance to Andrew Ridgeley and George Michael’s emotional ties to each other as you watch this entertaining but weirdly incurious documentary, composed of existing footage and voiceover commentary, apparently salvaged from earlier unidentified programmes.
Wham! was a pop band which lasted for four years, from 1982 to 1986, a meteoric fame ride which saw them devastate the music scene like Roy Lichtenstein’s fighter plane, clocking up a string of hits and getting canonised as pop A-listers alongside David Bowie, Bono, Elton John and Paul McCartney at the 1985 Live Aid concert; two grinning guys, still palpably overwhelmed with astonishment at their own success. They’d been inseparable friends since they were 11 at school in Bushey, Hertfordshire and still only in their early 20s when the band split up. (They also worked with, at different times, backing singers Dee C Lee, Helen “Pepsi” DeMacque and Shirlie Holliman, whose own opinions and inner lives are, sadly, of zero interest to this film.)
