This article below about George Michael’s press conference in Rotterdam was published in the Record Mirror on April 30, 1988, and written by Matthew Collin.
George Michael thinks pop gods like himself are overpaid. This is one of the few pearls of wisdom he dropped before the Fleet Street swine at his press conference in Rotterdam last week. Matthew Collin listens as the hack pack attempt to put words into George’s mouth
The Rotterdam air is thick with odours. From the tiny airport to the city centre’s concrete expanse, o corner turned is a new pong encountered. And all these smells, as Edmund Blackadder might say, come straight from Satan’s bottom.
This is the place where, on days of national celebration, kids stick firecrackers into the city’s bountiful doggie dirts with explosively decorative results.
Outside Central Station, beetrootnosed winos hang out with the taxi drivers and scar-faced criminals prowl the subway. It’s a world away from the plush foyer of the Hilton Hotel and its international smart set of guests where the European press entourage are gathered for a smooth bus ride to George Michael’s press conference.
George Michael … What will he be wearing? Random sartorial fantasies invade my mind. A tinfoil tuxedo with matching halo? Dayglow green dungarees? Naked but for sequined scants and a saucily-placed peacock feather?
Not a chance! George – being George – is black-clad in dinner jacket and t-shirt, his hair glowing on unreal orange and his teeth gleaming with the sweat of expensive dentists. His bum, contrary to certain low-life speculations, is well-rounded but far from gross.
CAREFUL WHISPERS
The performance begins when he enters the room.
“George! Please!”
“Down here, George!”
“To your left, please!”
“George!”
As George takes his seat, the photo hustlers jostle for position and 15 blinding flash-guns go off in unison. No wonder he’s wearing sunglasses; he’s obviously been through this before. This is what it must be like for the Royals, for film stars, for anyone whose life con be milked for a human-interest story. Makes you feel kind of sorry for him, doesn’t it?
“I decided to do this and I’m perfectly happy,” he says, so no sympathy. Mr. Michael doesn’t want to go back to being ordinary Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou again.
“I don’t remember what it was like, to tell you the truth. Maybe I’ll never be an ordinary person, but I have my place. I’m sure if somebody pulled this all away from under my feet I would want it back again.”
And he’s perfectly in control of the situation. Nobody’s going to twist his words, now are they?
“There’s nothing really to be dreaded about a press conference and there’s no way anyone can twist your arm to say anything that you haven’t said.
“Nothing I could say could come out sounding any worse than some of the manufactured quotes that have been heard over the years.”
He won’t take off his shades either, not even for the most wheedling member of the photo-horde.
“If I took off my sunglasses, everybody would know I was lying through my teeth about everything!”
FAME? SUCCESS? LOADSAMONEY!!
“The music business pays individuals an awful lot of money for doing something which is basically a pleasure to do.
“I think all musicians that reach my level of success are vastly overpaid. If life was fair then the people that would get this much money are the ones who spend their life doing things for other people.”
Sounds great, doesn’t it? A man with a social conscience. It’d fit in brilliantly alongside certain daily tabloid newspapers’ campaigns for increased nurses’ pay and NHS funding, wouldn’t it? But are they interested?
ARE THEY HELL!
“ … have you had an AIDS test??”
Ah! At last it’s out in the open. This is what they really want to know about – forget the man, forget the music, forget the prickly pleasures of those sensuous stubble-chops — this is the stuff that’s going to make page three in tomorrow’s papers.
“George, you smiled when asked if you’d had an AIDS test. Have you or not?”
“I’ve answered that one before,” he counters. “I haven’t, no.”
Headline!! MY FEAR OF AIDS, By George Michael’; ‘SEX IS OUT, BY GEORGE’. Perhaps it’s time to get the hell out of here …
Outside the hall, groups of hopeful teenies are milling around, desperate for even the briefest sighting of the Greek God of pop. I’ve just spent half an hour in the company of the man they’d die to squint at. Feeling like a fraud, I give one of them my free ‘All Areas’ media poss.
At first she doesn’t understand what it is, but soon realises and descends the stone steps after me screaming gratitude in garbled Dutch … and at the bottom of the staircase runs right into a hatchet-faced security type. He wrestles the pass, her hopes and dreams, from her trembling hands. She dissolves into tears.
Sad, life, isn’t it?
Similar Posts:
- George Michael Interview with Capital FM Radio with Dr. Fox (Dec 1998)
- George Michael: The Lone Star State Interview on Q Magazine (June 1988)
- An Audience with George Michael: Interview with Chris Evans (1996)
- George Michael: Red Line Radio Interview (Part 1)
- George Michael Interview in Blitz Magazine (June 1988)
