MOST COMPREHENSIVE BIOGRAPHY: Gavin is committed to creating the first full-scale biography of George Michael. He intends to tell the whole story, from Michael's youth in the UK with his Greek and English parents to his early days as the real engine behind Wham! and more. Gavin also honestly investigates and reports the artist's later, darker years filled with reckless behavior and substance abuse, which could have contributed to his early death.
LEGENDARY MUSICIAN: Over the course of his life, Michael sold more than 80 million records worldwide and achieved eight number-one songs on the US Billboard Hot 100 and seven number-one songs on the UK Singles Chart.
EXPERIENCED WRITER: Gavin has written several substantial and acclaimed volumes on important musicians such as Lena Horne, Chet Baker, and Peggy Lee.
In George Michael: A Life, "Gavin's engrossing biography of the singer takes the measure of a gifted, tragic, and infuriating man" (New York Times Book Review).
George Michael was an extravagantly gifted, openhearted soul singer whose work was both pained and smolderingly erotic. He was a songwriter of true craft and substance, and his music swept the world, starting in the mid-1980s. His fabricated image--that of a hypermacho sex god--loomed large in the pop culture of his day. It also hid--for a time--the secret he fought against revealing: Michael was gay. Soon his obsession with fame would start to backfire. As one of the industry's most privileged yet tortured men began to self-destruct, the press showed little sympathy. George Michael: A Life explores the compelling story of a superstar whose struggles, as well as his songs, continue to touch fans all over the world.
Acclaimed music biographer James Gavin traces Michael's metamorphosis from the shy and awkward Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou into the swaggering, dominant half of the leading British pop duo of the 1980s, Wham!; he then details Michael's sensational solo career and its subsequent unraveling. With deep analysis of the creative process behind Michael's albums, tours, and music videos, as well as interviews with hundreds of his friends and colleagues, George Michael: A Life is a probing, definitive portrait of a pop legend.
