I'm surprised by the affection for Wham!'

With a new Netflix documentary coming out on the Eighties pop duo, Andrew Ridgeley talks to Dylan Jones about revisiting their sharp rise to fame, the depth of feeling still out there among fans, and his deep bond with his much-missed bandmate George Michael

- 

THE world is currently awash with music documentaries. One week it's the saintly David Bowie, the next it's the troubled Ed Sheeran. Blink and you'll miss the one about accordion players, an esoteric death metal band you almost certainly won't have heard of, or a Rolling Stone journalist from the early Seventies only remembered by pop-cultural obsessives like myself.

Which makes it even stranger that it took so long to make one about Wham!, one of the biggest British acts of the Eighties. "It took so long to do because while Yog [his pet name for his childhood pal George] was pursuing his own career, there was no great desire to explore the Wham! legacy," says Andrew Ridgeley, sitting upstairs in The Groucho Club. "He wasn't going to have Wham! overshadow the GM brand, but obviously that changed when he died. Initially the George Michael estate weren't that receptive, but after the success of the Last Christmas film [in 2019] they realised there was a big fanbase out there. With the 40th anniversary looming, there was suddenly a focus for it. The fanbase was much bigger than anyone expected!"