Fame game

The summer is over, the Olympians have gone, and Lord Coe has been put back in his box for another year. But some memories will linger on, like a stubborn cold. Music fans, in particular, will struggle to forget George Michael’s performance in the closing ceremony. Other acts came out and played their most famous song for a TV audience of somewhere between nine and ten billion, according to industry insiders. George, wilful to the last, gave us his execrable new single. No one wanted to hear it, everyone was just waiting for it to end, but George wanted to play it, and afterwards he wanted us to buy it.

Maybe you need to be that famous to misjudge your audience so acutely. Anyone whose ego does not travel separately would realise that people only want to hear the hits. Remember Queen at Live Aid? They resuscitated their entire career that afternoon, because they knew instinctively that there was a time for crowd-pleasing, and that was it. Playing the new single, by contrast, suggests that you regard this gig as a purely promotional device. It’s not about London, it’s not about the Olympics, it’s about you, because everything always is. Self-absorption isn’t just a hobby for George, it’s a vocation. What might have come as a surprise to the casual viewer, who remembers the perkiness of the Wham! hits and the genuine promise of his early solo career, was just how vacant and tuneless the new song turned out to be. I have heard it once or twice on the radio since, and been dumbfounded that something so feeble could have found its way on to the playlist. It wouldn’t have done, if it hadn’t been by George Michael.