Wham! The biggest revelations from Netflix's new documentary on ...

Children of the 1980s rejoice.

Netflix’s new documentary Wham! (now streaming) is as much a celebration of the beloved British band –and their remarkable four-year rise to chart-topping and stadium sell-out success – as an in-depth look at two young men’s lives growing up in the UK in the first-half of that decade.

Inspired by Andrew Ridgeley’s mum’s extensive scrapbook collection of his and George Michael’s endeavours, Chris Smith’s tale (Branson) is an engrossing audio-visual montage which feels like a conversation with the pair, as they candidly reminisce about their successes and regrets.

Already having watched it twice, Stuff to Watch has picked out our favourite revelations from the 92-minute doco, which also features plenty of memorable music videos and live performances from the dynamic duo and their bandmates.

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George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley were the faces of Wham!

Ridgeley and the man born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou (Michael) first met at the Hertfordshire school in 1975 when ages 12 and 11 respectively.

While Ridgeley remembers the new boy’s “window-frame glasses” and “big bonce of hair”, Michael recalls being “slightly porky, very strange-looking and quite shy”.

Putting his hand up to look after “Yog”, Ridgeley says they quickly discovered they were “musically joined at the hip”, sharing a love of Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and spending hours doing skits and putting together comedy radio shows.

However, not everyone approved of their friendship, especially as Ridgeley’s school report described him as “disruptive”. “My parents thought he was the worst thing that could ever happen to me,” says Michael, who also admits that his Cypriot father banned him from buying records and listening to his stereo for a while.

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Andrew Ridgeley and Georges Panayiotou were inseparable as teenagers.

The pair were both 16 when they started the five-piece group The Executive in 1979.

“We played ska music [which included a ska take on Beethoven Fur Elise],” says Michael. “We were terrible basically. It fizzled out after a year because people didn’t turn up for practices or concerts.”

It’s here where Ridgeley makes the first of a few delightful contradictions of his friend’s testimony, describing “fizzled out” as inadequate: “It imploded.“

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Andrew Ridgeley brought his then girlfriend Shirlie Holliman in as a backup singer right from the early days of Wham!

Made for £20 in Ridgeley’s front room using a four-track port-a-studio and a microphone attached to a broom, they recorded what would become Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do), Club Tropicana and Careless Whisper onto a C-60 cassette.

Completed while bunking off school, it consisted of “only one song, ⅔ of another and a quarter of another” and was rejected by everyone, until Ridgeley finally shoved it thorough his neighbour Mark Dean’s (who had discovered New Romantic bands Soft Cell and ABC) letterbox.

“There was no music on it, just George singing songs with a scratchy guitar – but it was still great,” Dean, who subsequently signed them up, says in an archival interview.

After seeing the name G. Panos on their first single, Michael realised there was an urgent need for a stage name. So he took the anglicised version of his first name and paired it with the Christian name of one of the duo’s good friend’s Dads.

But despite gaining a huge following in clubs, chart success didn’t follow – and they were about to give up, when a phone call came from out of the blue in early November 1982. Another artist had cancelled, so could they play their No. 42 single Young Guns on that week’s show?

Despite Michael having to sleep in a hotel crib the night before recording and showcasing a routine they rehearsed in his mother’s back room (“no choreographer would put up with that shit,” Michael laughs), “there was a certain energy between the naffness” that clearly struck a chord with those watching.

“That was the moment that turned everything around,” Ridgeley says, as they detail how the single and the subsequently re-released Wham Rap! flew up the charts.

It was while shooting the Club Tropicana video on the Spanish island that Michael came out to Ridgeley and Wham! backup singer Shirlie Holliman (who later married Spandau Ballet’s Martin Kemp). “It didn’t have any bearing on our relationship,” says the supportive Ridgeley, “but we thought it was best not to tell his Dad.”

“I really wanted to come out – and then I lost my nerve completely,” recalls Michael. “So I created a new character, deciding to forge my identity though my success.”

For his part, Ridgeley “helped” by becoming known in the tabloids as “Randy Andy”, allowing Michael to “fly under the radar”.

Getting the opportunity to record at the famed Alabama Studios was initially a dream come true for Michael, but it rapidly went south.

As legendary producer Jerry Wexler kept reminding him, this was the place Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles had put down legendary hits. “I was absolutely shitting myself at having to sing this weedy little thing I wrote on the bus [Careless Whisper].”

The end product was a disaster. “It had been eviscerated. It was average, It had lost all it’s character,” Michael says.

He made the bold decision to re-record it, producing it himself – and going through 10 sax players, before he found Steve Gregory.

Having already secured free No.1s during 1984 (Freedom, Careless Whisper and Wake Me Up Before You Go Go), Michael was convinced he’d penned the fourth while watching a football match with Ridgeley.

To make it even sweeter, it was going to be a Christmas No. 1. But although delighted with the drunken music video recorded in Switzerland’s Saas-Fee (“You can barely see the people for all the hair,” Michael jokes of it), a spanner in the works came when Bob Geldof asked Michael if he would be part of a charity single to raise money to help fight the famine in Ethiopia.

“Like everyone else, I thought it was great,” Michael says of recording Do They Know It’s Christmas?, “but I had this little bastard ego thing that kept me thinking ‘shit, shit, shit’.”

His worst fears realised, with Last Christmas stuck at No. 2, he and Ridgeley decided they would donate every single penny of royalties from their song to the famine relief as well. Although, Michael admits even the feel-good factor of altruism didn’t make up for his disappointment.

Last Christmas did eventually reach No. 1 in the UK, on New Year’s Day 2021, just over four years after Michael’s death.

Wham! is now streaming on Netflix.