For a brief period in the mid-1980s, Wham! was one of the biggest acts in the world. Having initially gained a teenage audience in Britain with their 1983 debut Fantastic, Wham! went global with the appropriately titled Make It Big in 1984. While synthpop was taking over the airwaves, Andrew Ridgeley and George Michael leaned heavily into the dancier elements of bubblegum music on tracks like ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ and ‘Freedom’.
When ‘Careless Whisper’ arrived as a single in 1984, it was promoted in some countries as a George Michael solo single. Even though Ridgeley co-wrote the song, it was clear that Michael was looking to make a name for himself outside of the group. After an eventful 1985, which found the pair becoming one of the first Western acts to play in China, Ridgeley and Michael agreed to end Wham! in the first few months of 1986.
When asked by Vulture why he and Michael never reunited in the subsequent years, Ridgeley pointed out that they did, in fact, get back together on a few occasions. “The fact is he and I did perform several times subsequently — when he toured for Faith and we performed together at Rock in Rio in 1991,” Ridgeley explained. “But we resisted the lure of a reunion with steadfastness, because we retired and brought Wham! to a close”.
“His artistic destiny lay beyond Wham! We understood quite early that one day the constraints that Wham! imposed upon his songwriting scope were too narrow,” Ridgeley added. “He wouldn’t be able to develop fully as an artist within the parameters that Wham! set. Wham! was that representation and manifestation of our youth. It was all about the vigour, experience, vitality, and exuberance of youth.”
“We were no longer young at 23. We had become young men,” he claimed. “If you look at photos of Yog around 1982, and he’s a wholly unremarkable and unprepossessing young chap. And then when you look at him at Wembley Stadium for our final concert in 1986, he looks God-like. The transformation was complete. He had become George Michael.”
For Ridgeley, the fun and goofy elements of Wham! were always going to be fleeting. Although they were both still very young by 1986 (23 years old, as Ridgley points out), the teenage audience had bored Ridgeley and stifled Michael. The only option was to move on, something that Ridgeley had no qualms about doing.
“It was so much of a temporal and nonphysical representation of our youth that it just couldn’t come with us,” he said. “We couldn’t drag Wham! into middle age. We couldn’t drag Wham! into performing ‘Young Guns (Go for It!)’ at the age of 60. It wasn’t ever going to work. Obviously, the temptation was there for both of us. Not so much the money, but we enjoyed being onstage together. That’s why he invited me to perform with him every now and again. But it wasn’t as Wham! Other people saw Wham! in it but it was never in an official capacity.”
“We wouldn’t do that to Wham! It pretty much became an unspoken rule,” Ridgeley concluded. “We discussed it one time: ‘We cannot reform and we can’t appear again as Wham!’ Because it would’ve been a betrayal of everything Wham! stood for, really. It wasn’t to be produced in that fashion. So we never raised our heads to reunite. I don’t think we were ever really approached to do so, because people knew we wouldn’t. But who knows. Maybe they just weren’t interested.”
