‘WHAM!’: Sheffield Review

Dir. Chris Smith. UK. 2023. 92mins

As peppy as Wham! at their poptastic best, Chris Smith’s WHAM! traces the four-year rise of George Michael’s bubblegum duo through his and band mate Andrew Ridgeley’s voiceover memories. What emerges is the story of an extremely close and profoundly charming boyhood friendship – but one where the junior partner couldn’t, or wouldn’t, put the genie of his extraordinary talent back in the bottle once his pal had coaxed it out of him.

 The quality is far above the norm for this type of memoir assemblage

Confining itself to the band’s teenage start and short lifespan, WHAM! is bouncy and dayglo and determined not to overstay its welcome – although, at 92 minutes, there’s still a sense that the origins of ‘Club Tropicana’ are getting a little too much airplay. WHAM! will certainly play to the nostalgia crowd and the fashions of the time are a delight to revisit. It breathes into the infectious joy of these two best friends (joined later by vocalists Pepsi and Shirlie) and doesn’t ever exhale, even when it becomes clear that Michael is outgrowing his childhood best friend – and that sadness awaits him, foreshadowed by his reluctance to come out as gay. (In retrospect, some of his outfits should have given rise to more suspicion..)

Benefitting from a small UK theatrical release on June 27 after a world premiere at Sheffield doc fest before airing globally on Netflix the following week, WHAM! will sit high on the streamer’s algorithm for 80s nostalgia and top of the sub-genre that is George Michael documentaries. The quality is far above the norm for this type of memoir assemblage, even if the substance is full of air bubbles, with experienced music doc producer Simon Halfon (Supersonic) a driving force.

Voice interview footage from Michael (archive tapes from extensive interviews conducted with BBC Radio 1 DJ, Mark Goodier) and Ridgeley (contemporaneous) accompany a scrapbook of imagery presented in a chronological order. In fact, Ridgeley has literally made volumes of his mother’s scrapbooks of her son and his best friend ‘Yog’ (a nickname for Michael’s birth name Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou) available to the production. Ridgeley, a true friend to the shy boy he met in school at the age of 12, has never really participated in the Michael memorial cottage industry, so WHAM! feels unique in that respect. He benefitted greatly from the partnership in many respects, and WHAM! also shows how close the duo were – although it strongly suggests that once they split, they never spent much time together again, which seems sad. Despite that, the film’s tone is breezily go-go — as in one of its most heavily featured songs, ‘Wake Me Up Before You…’ 

The perspectives of the two voiceovers don’t always chime, and they are on occasion joined by former producer Simon Napier Bell and a small, seemingly archival, contribution by George’s father (there’s no appearance from any other family member). Ridgeley views WHAM! flat-on: the hits, the good times, the booze and the girls and the needling from the tabloid press. Michael’s v.o. is tinged by melancholy, both personal and professional. He is, he admits, the kind of driven artist who couldn’t fully celebrate that the Live Aid single (on which he featured) was the Christmas number one in 1984, because it knocked ‘Last Christmas’ into number two — and denied him the triumph of four chart-topping singles in one year.

He is also, though, the kind of person who donated every penny Last Christmas made to charity, which goes a long way towards rehabilitating it both on screen here and in department stores from every October as his estate continues to donate. (What is not mentioned, however, is how Ridgeley literally played no part in the making of that song.)

There’s plenty of trivia in here for Wham! die-hards. Like how Michael wanted to come out as they made the Club Tropicana video, but didn’t because Andrew feared how his strict Greek father would react. (Would he really have become the first out gay pop star, though, if Andrew hadn’t cautioned his best friend? It’s a question that clearly troubled Michael during his life, and he paid a high price for not being his true self.) The pair seem so happy; contrasted with what happened to George Michael later on in his life, it’s hard not to play the game of what-might-have-been.

Michael kept most of the publishing from Wham! songs, so his estate has co-operated fully in the making of this documentary, with friends and contacts contributing some hilarious home movie footage. The band only made two albums, though, and the hits can feel stretched a bit thin given they’re mostly disposable pop confections. Luckily brisk beat-friendly editing by Gregor Lyon covers the cracks and pushes the film forward even when lengthy extracts from ’Careless Whisper’ threaten to stop it in its tracks.