Keeping the faith

He’s a well-groomed, gracious man of means whose favourite topic of discussion is the domestic bliss he shares with his longtime partner, Kenny Goss, in mansions filled with fine art and Labradors.

Yet the 44-year-old star is, in his own way, a pop outlaw. At the very least, he’s complicated.

“It’s almost required with major artists that there’s some duality,” he says. “And I’ve got duality everywhere.”

Michael is now on tour for the first time in 17 years with the “Twenty Five Live” which he’s already taken through Europe.

“I’ve written a whole body of work that I’m incredibly proud of,” he said, “I’ve achieved what every artist wants, which is that some of their work will outlive them.”

“There’s very little you can do in pop music anymore,” he continued, saying that what music he makes next probably will be distributed freely on the Internet. “There are things that I think I see in society — the nature of being gay is that you are forced to challenge the general perception, otherwise you have to accept that something is wrong with you.”

One thing is certain: Michael is sick of having his foibles dissected. After a decade that began with his 1998 arrest for “lewd conduct” in a Beverly Hills park and ended with him getting busted for marijuana possession after he was found napping in his SUV, he’s mortified at being part of a celebrity culture that distracts from the real news.

“In England I’ve probably had about 20 or 30 front pages in the last two and a half years,” he said. “What interests me is what else happened on those same days. And what the Government got away with. It’s the perfect cover-up to every major story they don’t want us to hear! What did Britney Spears do today? Where did George Michael fall asleep?”

As the creative half of the gorgeously coiffed 1980s pop duo Wham!, Michael used to be derided as the anti-punk, a decadent purveyor of meaningless fluff. Yet even as Wham! profited from hedonistic hits such as Wake Me Up Before You Go Go, Michael practiced progressive politics: it was the first Western pop group to play in communist China.

This was the beginning of the public expression of a duality that can be traced to his family life. His maternal grandmother was Jewish but married a Gentile and raised her children with no knowledge of their Semitic heritage.

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