Sathnam Sanghera still remembers his first experience of anti-Jewish racism. A Sikh schoolboy in Wolverhampton, he didn’t know any Jews but knew instinctively that what he had witnessed was antisemitism and that it was wrong. The feeling of disgust still lingers in his mind.
“Our history class had been taken to watch Schindler’s List, and several boys laughed all the way through it. I was appalled. It was one of the worst experiences of racism I ever witnessed as a child,” recalls the celebrated journalist and bestselling author of Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain, who has written movingly about his own experiences of racism growing up.
“I didn’t understand why the teacher didn’t do anything. Why they were allowed to make jokes while we were being taught the Holocaust. It was such a profoundly visceral experience of antisemitism, and I was traumatised by it. It affected me as much as the anti-black and anti-Asian racism around me at the time.”
Some four decades on, he understands that antisemitism is “a hatred that goes back centuries and centuries”.
Antisemitism isn’t the writer’s normal beat, but as a Sikh he has always felt a natural affinity to Jews, an ethnic group that, like his own, is also very much a minority in the UK and the world. More surprisingly, perhaps Sanghera’s sympathy for Jews also comes from his love of the late singer George Michael.
Sathnam Sanghera in his childhood bedroom in Wolverhampton with Wham! posters on the wall[Missing Credit]
Author Sathnam Sanghera[Missing Credit]
It was while researching a book on the East Finchley-born Wham! star – a project that was meant to be a break from his regular writing fare of race and empire – that he realised how much both antisemitism and empire had defined the singer who died on Christmas Day in 2016, aged 53.
His glorious non-fiction book Tonight The Music Seems So Loud: The Meaning of George Michael is a deeply personal story of a public star. A star he has loved for decades, which made him rather unusual among his peers in Wolverhampton.
“I have long felt that George isn’t treated as the serious cultural figure that he was,” says Sanghera. “He is, I would say, probably the most popular musician of our lifetime and yet everything that is written about him is so gossipy. There are hundreds of books about Elton John and Prince, and Taylor Swift has some 300 books written about her and there’s hardly anything about George, who was a cultural phenomenon. So I thought I should write it.”
And it was while researching the book that he discovered both George and his Wham! bandmate Andrew Ridgeley had hidden Jewish heritage.
“I think the information has been out there but no one has, as far as I know, ever put it in a book before now,” he says. “Certainly the fact they both had Jewish backgrounds surprised me. And part of the reason why it has taken so long to come out is precisely because it was hidden. George’s grandmother Daisy didn’t even tell her daughter, Lesley. There were multiple reasons for this. Apparently, she had been disowned for marrying a gentile, and in the 1940s, being Jewish was dangerous. She even sent her daughter to a convent.
“This only came out when Daisy died. Her daughter, who was brought up as Christian, didn’t know anything until then. Their Jewish heritage wasn’t only not discussed, it was wiped out.”
Meanwhile, Ridgeley knew his father was Jewish but his ethnicity was barely mentioned in the family. Alberto Mario Zacharia had Italian, Yemeni and Egyptian roots, and was born in Egypt from where many of the country’s Jews were pressured to leave and were persecuted if they did not, during the Suez Crisis, in 1956.
“Andrew always talked about how his father left Egypt during Suez, but you need to examine the history to understand why – that the expulsion of the Jews was a punishment for Israel,” says Sanghera. “His father came to Britain, saw a road sign for Ridgeley Gardens, presumably realised being Jewish hadn’t worked out that well for their family, and changed his name and his identity. When they met Andrew in his teens, people would say he was the most posh and English person they’d ever come across. And they said similar things about his father. A lot of work had been done in both families to wilfully delete their Jewishness. It’s all pretty depressing, and tells us about then and maybe also today.”
As the writer of a book about empire, he was surprised to see the effects of empire on these two men of immigrant stock who would become among the biggest pop icons of the Eighties.
George’s father, Kyriacos Panayiotou, came to the UK from Cyprus as the British colony struggled for independence amid inter-communal tensions. Like Ridgeley’s father, he too changed his name and became known as Jack Panos.
“Neither George nor Andrew would have been born here if it weren’t for the British Empire. It’s not well understood that Cypriots came over as imperial immigrants. And it is even less understood that Jews were evicted from Egypt over Suez – it’s such a niche story that I didn’t even understand it until very recently.”
Sanghera had been thinking about contemporary antisemitism in Britain when he promoted his new book on social media with a video in which he discussed George and Andrew’s hidden Jewish parentage.
With Andrew Ridgeley in Wham! in 1983Getty Images
“It was one of the first videos I did about the book and there were so many crazy and disgusting comments I ended up deleting the video and posted again with the comments turned off. I didn’t want that stuff on my page.
“If you post about Judaism, everyone instantly wants to talk about Israel. George spoke up for Palestinians, and his Jewish heritage has nothing to do with what is happening today. But some people won’t accept that.
“I think, like a lot of people, I thought antisemitism had gone away. It’s been very bleak to see it re-emerge on the left and the right.”
In many ways, George was the archetypal Jewish boy; striving to impress his father, adored by his mother, obsessed with controlling the frizz in his hair.
The book traces his journey from an unconfident and slightly chubby teen who first found fame to a perfectionist heartthrob. The hair obsession is a through line.
“There was a famous £10,000 airline trip to get his sister Melanie over to sort out his hair for the Careless Whisper video. After she’d done it, his hair looked different so they had to scrap all the scenes they’d filmed and start again. When Andrew talks about George, one of the first things that comes up is the insane amount of time that George spent doing his hair. It was almost a psychological disorder. It went back to his childhood when he felt like an ugly duckling. He never quite lost the feeling.”
Another constant in the singer’s life was his need for control. He had a reputation for driving producers, directors and fellow musicians to distraction.
“George was barely out of his teens when he fired Jerry Wexler, a famous Jewish producer who had worked on Careless Whisper. This was a guy who had produced Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles and Dusty Springfield, but this young guy said, ‘No, I don’t like that. I am going to do it myself.’”
In fact, many George Michael videos were never released because George just didn’t like them. Sanghera says he even spiked a Pepsi ad, which would have earned him and Ridgeley a considerable amount.
“Some of it is insane. There was a documentary crew following them around China. George wasn’t happy with their work so someone else made a film with the crew’s footage. But because he didn’t like the way the concerts had been filmed, they were re-filmed. He spent six months making Fast Love, I think he drove everyone mad, but in the end – I’ve heard an earlier version of the song – he was right to persist. And then there was the time that he announced Wham! had broken up without consulting Andrew. He could have been kinder.”
For his part, Sanghera relishes the contradictions in George’s character: he dislikes intensely the way today’s pop stars are sanitised. But he admits to being worried about how George’s fandom will react to a book which is in many ways a love letter to him but which doesn’t shrink from showing his many flaws.
“He’s a bunch of wild contradictions. Disposable pop, but critically acclaimed. Was in the closet, but then revealed every detail of his sex life to an extreme degree. Self-deprecating, but pretty egotistical as well. Sued Sony, then went back to Sony. Railed against Rupert Murdoch, then signed a book deal with Rupert Murdoch. Philanthropist, but then a member of tax-avoidance schemes.”
The book also shows how George was a pioneer – sometimes unwillingly. A chapter on Wham!’s trip to China is especially amusing. They were the first big Western pop band to appear in the communist country but when they returned to London, George told reporters: “I’d never go there again.”
He was one of the first pop stars to speak up against the Iraq War and was “pilloried for it”, says Sanghera. “He was called a coward by Simon Cowell. Noel Gallagher had a go at him. It was a personal risk, but he did it. He was really his own person in a way that almost no one is now. Everyone is too scared and careful to say what they think.
“But he wasn’t frightened about saying what he thought, ever. That made him complicated. Perhaps he was too free at times, but I’m just full of admiration for him. I thought that writing about him for two years would put me off him, but actually he’s gone up in my estimation.”
Sanghera revisits the end of the singer’s life in painful detail, describing how despite his talent, his voice and his fame George spiralled into desperate drug addiction.
Scandal followed scandal. In 2006, he was arrested for drug possession and a year later he pleaded guilty to drug-impaired driving for obstructing the road in Cricklewood. In 2008, he was again arrested for drug possession. In 2010, he received an eight-week prison sentence for drug driving after crashing his car into Snappy Snaps in Hampstead. He served four weeks.
Three years later, he mysteriously fell out of a moving Range Rover on the M1. In 2015, he went to rehab in Switzerland after admitting to heavy cannabis use. He could not shake the habit.
“He kind of died in plain sight. Sometimes people go, ‘Oh, what happened?’ They act like it’s a mystery but he killed himself in front of us for over a decade. He was an addict, and addiction is an illness. We watched him die.
“But for those who didn’t quite realise what was happening, this was, I think, for two reasons. Firstly, he was always articulate – stick a microphone in front of George Michael and he could talk and was funny with it.
“Secondly, because he’d got over massive controversies in the past he had a cover story for the possibility of always coming back.”
Sanghera hopes his tender, loving book will remind people of George’s genius. It will certainly take them back to his music.
“I’ve had so many people message me saying they were very anti-Wham! in the Eighties but who now realise that the music has dated really well.
“I look back and I am proud to have always been a George fan. It was a weird thing to be in Wolverhampton in 1994. But a great voice is a voice for all time.”
Tonight The Music Seems So Loud: The Meaning of George Michael, published by Picador, is out now
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