George Michael had the highest hit rate in the history of the US Hot 100. Nineteen entries, eight number ones. 'Last Christmas' has been covered more than four hundred times.
Ten years after his death, there's been no big tribute concert, no statue, and almost no serious book about his cultural legacy. Until now...
Sean Adams and Helena Wadia spoke to Sathnam Sanghera, historian, journalist, and lifelong George Michael fan, about his new book Tonight the Music Seems So Loud: The Meaning of George Michael.
Sathnam Sanghera is the author of Empireland (British Book Award for Narrative Non-Fiction, Channel 4 documentary), Marriage Material (shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, adapted for stage in 2025), and The Boy with the Topknot (Mind Book of the Year, BBC film). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society, and has been a George Michael fan since inheriting the bug from his sisters during Wham! mania in the mid-1980s.
Tonight the Music Seems So Loud is a portrait of George Michael that doubles as an account of a turbulent period in British history, and this conversation covers most of it. Sathnam explains why Wham! was essentially a solo act, why George's perfectionism mattered (twelve hours on the vocal for 'Kissing a Fool', six months producing 'Fastlove', gaps of up to five years between albums), and how 'Last Christmas' was written in an afternoon while Andrew Ridgeley watched Match of the Day downstairs.
The conversation goes well beyond standard fan-book territory. Sathnam makes the case that George Michael's activism has dated better than almost any British pop star of his era: he was publicly opposing the Iraq war before the marches, campaigning on AIDS while the tabloids used every appearance as an opportunity to out him, and he split up Wham! partly in protest at the management's involvement with an apartheid-era South African company. The Sony lawsuit, which cost him five years and millions of pounds, was fought on behalf of all artists, not just himself.
The immigrant angle runs throughout: both George's Greek-Cypriot father and Andrew Ridgeley's Egyptian father came to Britain as a direct consequence of the British Empire, the faith-era aesthetic owes as much to immigrant overdressing as anything else, and Sathnam traces surprising parallel lives between a Greek-Cypriot boy from Finchley and a Punjabi boy from Wolverhampton.
The episode also asks what George would do with £500 million extracted from the music industry, whether his 1998 outing was a turning point for press homophobia, and why a musician playing in every shopping mall on earth still has no statue.
Visit https://drownedinsound.org/playlists/ to hear our podcast companion playlist and discover new music in rich Hi-Res lossless quality. To start your 30-day free trial of Qobuz head to https://qobuz.com/dis.
Edited by: tell.studio (Phil, Louisa, Owen, Matt)
Co-hosted by Helena Wadia, who also co-hosts the Media Storm podcast: https://mediastormpodcast.com/about-us/
Sathnam Sanghera / Tonight the Music Seems So Loud
https://www.sathnam.com/
instagram.com/sathnamsanghera
Further reading
Sathnam Sanghera: Empireland and other books
Recorded at The Shure Experience Centre, London.
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