Punk was very dead, Thatcherism was in full swing, and if you happened to be an ostentatiously pissed-off teenager in England in the summer of ’84, “Careless Whisper” symbolized everything that was wrong. The frosty-tipped and blow-waved man-kebab known to his mother as Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou had taken his group Wham! from promising (“Wham Rap!”) to loathsome (“Club Tropicana”), and that first wimpy solo single was the last straw. We had seen the enemy, and he stood for conspicuous success and glow-in-the-dark teeth. A quarter of a century later, “Careless Whisper” has proven to be an enduringly brilliant piece of blue-eyed pop craft, while the tribulations that have beset George Michael since his arrest in ’98 have put a human face on the megastar.

It’s actually inspiring how well Michael has weathered his treatment at the hands of the homophobic tabloid-pundit gallery. Watching him cheerfully take the piss out of himself on Ricky Gervais’s Extras last Christmas deserved a “Fuck, yeah!”, and so did Friday’s sparkling performance at GM Place, before an exultant (and mostly female) crowd of 12,000. The night was billed “An Evening With George Michael”, which was indeed accurate. Including an intermission, we were treated to three hours of the guy. With so much time to fill, Michael and his band laid out a greatest-hits package that admittedly felt glacially paced at times— understandable considering the 45-year-old looked content to move a little more slowly than he used to.

Naturally, there were strategically placed dance numbers, like the early “I’m Your Man” and the set-closing “Fantasy” (played live on this tour for the first time in 20 years), but the emphasis was on smooth over explosive, and Michael was at his best for the smoky and extensive balladeering. Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” (complete with a luscious Dita Von Teese video), the Police’s “Roxanne”, and his own “Kissing a Fool” made for an enthralling torch-song trilogy in Set 2, while a reading of Roberta Flack’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” benefited from the performer’s seemingly indefatigable sincerity. It was during that number that tendrils of light seemingly sprouted from Michael’s feet and crept into the rafters, which might sound a little cheesy but wasn’t. It worked, as did the rest of the impressive visual package. Often, Michael was all alone out there, literally at sea for “A Different Corner”, with the seated vocalist dropped into a beautifully rendered ocean thanks to a video screen that stretched from the lip of the stage to infinity. The ocean returned to even better effect, with the addition of a furious setting sun, for “Praying for Time”.

In the end, even if it was only pop music from an atypically likable source, there was a sense of triumph in the air. By the time Michael encored with “Freedom! ’90”, the tyranny of media hypocrisy and trumped-up moral outrage—sadly, a permanent aspect of the man’s biography—had been vanquished by the persistence of talent and decency. How appropriate that we should all come home to the news of America’s preeminent fag-basher Jesse Helms at long last boarding the elevator to hell.

Georgia Straight, July 2008