One of pop music’s most quietly radical qualities is how effortlessly George Michael carried his stardom. Unlike many of his peers, he wasn’t interested in spinning myths about himself. He didn’t pretend to emerge fully formed. He didn’t rewrite his history to present himself as a singular genius. Instead, he admitted something most artists quietly avoid: that he wore his influences on his sleeve.
In 1985, at the height of Wham!’s global dominance, George was already speaking candidly about the mechanics of his songwriting. In an interview with No. 1 magazine, he said outright that he had “no shame at all” in admitting that most of what he’d written came from other music.
“It’s very rare to get the combination of a great song and a totally original idea on the record,” he explained. “Quite often I’ll work towards a specific feel on a track, I’ll want a record to have a swing feel, or a straight-down-the-middle mid-tempo feel. There’s not much that I write that doesn’t stem from some other influence.”
He even mapped out where those influences came from. “For example, *Make It Big was a black album, which I was taking from the black sounds of the late 60s and early 70s, whereas on *Fantastic all I could handle was what I’d been listening to for the past five years and I didn’t have the guts to go any further back in my influences.”
This kind of honesty was practically unheard of among emerging megastars of the time. While others guarded their creative processes, George was completely unbothered by acknowledging his debt to soul, funk, and R&B. He understood that inspiration was not imitation, it was evolution.
He admitted he wanted to develop his own sound eventually, but with no sense of urgency. “I’ve got a whole lot of influences that I have to get rid of first,” he said, almost laughing at how unvarnished he was being.
Of course, the irony is that even while he saw himself as drawing on others, George’s songwriting already carried his unmistakable stamp. Tracks like Careless Whisper and Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go sounded like nobody else.
Years later, he would reflect again on those formative years. In a 2010 interview tied to the *Faith Legacy Edition, he acknowledged that stars like Prince and Michael Jackson shaped both his ambitions and his sound. “I absolutely wanted to be in the same stratosphere as them, definitely… I wanted to be in that vein but, mostly, I wanted to make music as good as theirs.”
For George Michael, being great never meant pretending to exist in a vacuum. It meant standing on the shoulders of giants, and daring to shine in full view of them.
