George Michael, pop star who bleached his hair blonde, wore tiny shorts and at the same time, critiqued his own image mercilessly, wrote one of the biggest hits of our age in “about an hour” in his childhood bedroom and would go on to collaborate with some of the greatest musicians of all time from Aretha Franklin to Stevie Wonder.

He lived through the AIDS crisis and one of the most homophobic periods of British history and yet when he finally came out, he did so boldly and unapologetically. Wham! Were the first Western pop group to play in Communist China and he repeatedly broke boundaries in music too. Ten years after his death, George Michael is still omnipresent: the annual success of “Last Christmas”, new covers of his songs, and endless memes on social media.

Tonight The Music Seems So Loud is at once a Kaleidoscopic portrait of one of the Britain’s most beloved musicians and an account of a strange and turbulent period of British history. In his unconventional and enthralling book, bestselling author of Empireland, Sathnam Sanghera, explores the connection between music and politics, exposes what secrecy does to the soul, and reveals how fame rots the sense of self.

Michael began his career as a the singer and main writer in the pop group Wham, with his bandmate Andrew Ridgeley were just 18 in 1981. The duo with string of platinum singles and albums on both sides of the Atlantic. Michael went solo in 1986 and racked up over 100million further sales, from his rebranding hit “Faith” (1987) to the 1996 “Fastlove”.

George Michael’s career spanning 35 years, from pop idol to song craftsman, LGBT + icon and treasured veteran of British pop music. Journalist and author, Sanghera, born to Punjabi Sikh parents  who gives us enough of his own life, reveals with forensic scrutiny George Michael’s parents a Greek Cypriot father and English mother.  Both were torn by the push and pull of their patriarchal diaspora, trapped in orthodox home life and lured by the freedom of being English. Michael’s lyrics struck a note expressing actual feelings and hinted at an enigmatic world beyond my parents and closed community”. Both went to great lengths to hide their true selves. Shy Georgios Kryriacos Panayiotou may have reinvented himself as the intentionally less Greek and highly flamboyant George Michael, but he continued to lead a secret life. 

Michael’s battle with his sexuality is given much-needed background up to and beyond that glorious point where he had no recourse but to click the closet doors wide open and give us arguably the best pop song of all time.

At 53, his death at home on Christmas Day 2016, the book isn’t an eulogy, but a frank examination of the open wound of celebrity; an assessment of the man George Michael was and what he meant as a public, political, artistic figure, and what he meant to a fellow misfit who forged a life-long connection with him. 

Tonight the Music Seems So Loud: The Meaning of George Michael by Sathnam Sanghera, Picador £22, 288 pages.