Older: Unauthorized Biography of George Michael (Paperback)

So why read this instead of George Michael's autobiography Bare? Well, aside from the fact that this book lifts a number of the more interesting quotes from the aforementioned autobiography anyway, Older takes us through the years beyond Bare, namely, 1990-9. These cover the lengthy legal wrangles with his former record company Sony and the "toilet incident" of April 1998, which resulted in Michael's "outing" as a gay man. With hindsight, Bare was hardly brutally honest and provided a not altogether balanced view of his life, a criticism that cannot be levelled at Older. Thankfully, Michael's sexuality and relationship with Anselmo Feleppa are sensitively handled, as are the deaths of both his mother and Felappa. In contrast, Michael's arrest for "lewd conduct in a public place" and feud with Boy George are recounted, as they only can be, with tongue firmly in cheek.

Remarkably, for a biography of an established songwriter there's a distinct lack of musical criticism with little more than a couple of sentences of analysis about each song. Music aside, such an intensely private individual has led to a lack of quality information on the enigma that is George Michael, making Older a recommended choice out of necessity rather than of merit. --Robert Brookes

Synopsis
The whole, complicated, troubled and triumphant story of a man who was once a Greek Cypriot fat boy, became an Eighties pin-up as the driving partner of WHAM!, danced with Princess Diana, perfected the art of designer stubble-culture and, incidentally, became a singer along the way. By painfully and expansively insisting upon his rights as a performer and taking Sony to and through the courts to establish this, Michael not only fought for his own artistic freedom but set an important precedent for every other recording artist in the world. His musical renaissance is a personal and cultural landmark. Always personally evasive, he has endured wilfully mischievous speculations about his private life. In this book the Wapshott brothers go far towards clarifying the importance of his relationship with mercurial South American playboy who died, after which Michael publicly supported AIDS charities. Private grief, coupled with professional frustrations has lead to both silences and scores of unanswered questions about this complicated, feisty and much-misunderstood man.