An interview with George Michael was featured on BBC4 Friday night. I saw it at Gary Spencer's house. It is a measure of George Michael's importance as a cultural phenomenon that the interview was also featured in a sizeable chunk of Monday's Newsnight, where it shared billing with the political angst of President Bush and the comic antics of David Blunkett (David Blunkett had to resign later in the week in confused circumstances that strained credulity and resembled an episode of the political satire The Thick Of It - a parody of a parody).
I arrived at the Spencer's house at nine. Gary hadn't got back yet, but his wife Carol was there and gave me a glass of beer. She was listening to the Abba song Gimmee Gimmee Gimmee, played continuously on a loop (she apologised for this, saying she couldn't yet buy the new Madonna song Hung Up, which features the same melody, playing on the continuous loop inside her mind).
She appeared to be suffering from a cold, and inflated this into 'flu.
"Not bird 'flu?" I asked.
"Well I am a bird, and I have got 'flu" she said cheerfully.
Gary came in with his brother, Adrian. They were both in an excitable mood. Gary explained how he had been delayed helping Adrian clear out his house following a relationship breakdown.
"When Jo and Adrian split up there were lots of things left over that she didn't want" Gary said. "Her soft toys and some clothes and a lot of coursework from her nursing degree. She didn't want any of it so we decided to make a bonfire of it all. So we piled it up in the garden and he poured petrol over it all - a whole jerry can, with a trail leading back to where we were standing. He then rolled up a bit of newspaper and lit it. The fireball that came out of it was unbelievable. We literally jumped into the air and flew backwards."
While Carol got the dinner ready Gary joined me in the lounge and we switched the television on. George Michael appeared on the screen, dressed in black, in a room that was completely white (white walls, white furniture, sprays of what looked like white orchids - anything that wasn't white appeared to be transparent, including some odd-looking plastic cubes). The interview included questions on his status as a second generation immigrant (a subject the singer didn't seem keen to talk about), his increasingly political stance (he admitted to being duped by Tony Blair), his growing maturity as an artist.
Film came on of the early days of Wham, and this provoked Gary to talk about seeing himself in a home movie made in his early teens (a period coexistent with the Wham video).
"It was really painful to watch" he said. "I really didn't like myself. In those days I was really cocky and arrogant."
"You havn't changed that much" I told him.
Gary's reaction to the brief Wham clip helps to explain why George Michael should have such significance. His music acts as a Proustian device transferring the later members of Generation X in an almost involuntary basis back to their teenage years (I am using the definition of Generation X as those born between 1961 and 1981). It is a mechanism referred to by Tony Parsons in his 1991 enigmatic biography of George Michael.
Adrian came into the room and sat down, talking on his mobile, oblivious to the television: "It wasn't as simple as that. I wasn't unfaithful. It was eating me up inside. I wanted her to have no-one..."
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