Beaming in from his beachside home in Thailand, former Wham! manager Simon Napier-Bell is evoking the spirit of Christmas past. Or, more specifically, the spirit of the British pop star now irrevocably associated with the season.
At time of writing, Wham!’s hit is this year’s favourite to be Christmas Number One. While it finally reached No1 in 2021, becoming the official Christmas No1 is a feat the single has never achieved, and it would be a bittersweet moment given that George Michael died on Christmas Day 2016, aged just 53, while his beloved sister Melanie Panayiotou, who travelled with him on tour as his hairdresser, also died on Christmas Day three years later.
Napier-Bell, now 84, remembers that terrible moment the news of Michael’s death broke. “I was having Christmas with my boyfriend in Borneo. My phone started buzzing. I got email after email after email. The Sun were saying: ‘£5,000 paid into your account in the next 10 minutes if you give us an interview.’ They’re vile people, they really are.”
But for all the tabloid ambulance-chasing that attended the Wham! star’s final years – dogged by illness, drug abuse and police attention – Napier-Bell prefers to hang on to better festive memories of the artist that he (and his business partner Jazz Summers) took on in 1983, the year of debut Wham! album Fantastic.
“George was at his best when we were having a good argument or a discussion,” he says. “George was very cantankerous, difficult, determined to win… He never thought for a second that what he said on any subject wasn’t right. George would say to me: ‘If you don’t agree with what I’m telling you, it’s because you’re not listening.’”
Case in point: in 1984, Michael decided he wanted Wham! to perform a concert on Christmas Eve. “I said to him that no one does gigs on Christmas Eve. There’s never been one in the history of London. There’s no transport. The police don’t work. No one will come. George said: ‘Well, I’m gonna do one.’
“So we phoned up Wembley and, sure enough, they were free and had no regulations [against it]. And George [was convinced] people would come. He said: ‘There’s no cars on the road on Christmas Eve, so all the parents will bring their kids.’ And we did two shows that day and it was totally packed. Most fantastic, happy show I’ve ever been at in my life. Everybody came – Princess Di turned up, Elton turned up…”
Michael had set himself the task of writing a Christmas song that summer. “It’s a magnificent piece of work, isn’t it?” he says of Last Christmas. “How can you create a Christmas song that has bells in it, which says ‘Christmas’ every three seconds, and yet has nothing cheesy about it?”
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**From The Telegraph:**
Beaming in from his beachside home in Thailand, former Wham! manager Simon Napier-Bell is evoking the spirit of Christmas past. Or, more specifically, the spirit of the British pop star now irrevocably associated with the season.
At time of writing, Wham!’s hit is this year’s favourite to be Christmas Number One. While it finally reached No1 in 2021, becoming the official Christmas No1 is a feat the single has never achieved, and it would be a bittersweet moment given that George Michael died on Christmas Day 2016, aged just 53, while his beloved sister Melanie Panayiotou, who travelled with him on tour as his hairdresser, also died on Christmas Day three years later.
Napier-Bell, now 84, remembers that terrible moment the news of Michael’s death broke. “I was having Christmas with my boyfriend in Borneo. My phone started buzzing. I got email after email after email. The Sun were saying: ‘£5,000 paid into your account in the next 10 minutes if you give us an interview.’ They’re vile people, they really are.”
But for all the tabloid ambulance-chasing that attended the Wham! star’s final years – dogged by illness, drug abuse and police attention – Napier-Bell prefers to hang on to better festive memories of the artist that he (and his business partner Jazz Summers) took on in 1983, the year of debut Wham! album Fantastic.
“George was at his best when we were having a good argument or a discussion,” he says. “George was very cantankerous, difficult, determined to win… He never thought for a second that what he said on any subject wasn’t right. George would say to me: ‘If you don’t agree with what I’m telling you, it’s because you’re not listening.’”
Case in point: in 1984, Michael decided he wanted Wham! to perform a concert on Christmas Eve. “I said to him that no one does gigs on Christmas Eve. There’s never been one in the history of London. There’s no transport. The police don’t work. No one will come. George said: ‘Well, I’m gonna do one.’
“So we phoned up Wembley and, sure enough, they were free and had no regulations [against it]. And George [was convinced] people would come. He said: ‘There’s no cars on the road on Christmas Eve, so all the parents will bring their kids.’ And we did two shows that day and it was totally packed. Most fantastic, happy show I’ve ever been at in my life. Everybody came – Princess Di turned up, Elton turned up…”
Michael had set himself the task of writing a Christmas song that summer. “It’s a magnificent piece of work, isn’t it?” he says of Last Christmas. “How can you create a Christmas song that has bells in it, which says ‘Christmas’ every three seconds, and yet has nothing cheesy about it?”
**Read more here:** https://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/interviews/simon-napier-bell-wham-george-michael-last-christmas/