How George Michael wrote Last Christmas: "He knew he'd nailed it”
The iconic song turns 40 this year.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
With its group of telegenic young adults crossing the mountains via cable car to throw snowballs, swap poignant gazes across the turkey and remember the previous Christmas, when hearts were given before being given away the very next day, the video for Wham!'s Last Christmas is more redolent of films like The Big Chill and St Elmo’s Fire than standard pop footage.
But then, 1984 was, for the boys from Bushey, anything but ordinary.
In a new documentary to mark the song’s 40th birthday, George Michael’s childhood pal and musical partner Andrew Ridgeley, along with Wham!’s backing singers Pepsi DeMacque-Crockett and Shirlie Kemp – plus their gang of real-life friends, who also featured in the video – make what Ridgeley calls "something of a pilgrimage" back to the chalet in Saas-Fee in Switzerland, where it was filmed in 1984.
That year had seen them achieve three number one UK singles and a number one album (Make It Big) for Wham!, a solo hit for Michael with Careless Whisper, as well as success in America – but there was just one star yet to be placed on the tree. "We wanted to cap it all off with a Christmas number one," Ridgeley recalls. Fortunately, Michael, then only 21, had the talent to make it happen.
One day, at home in north London, he came up with the goods on a four-track mixer in his bedroom, while his best pal was downstairs watching football. Ridgeley remembers: "Yog [his nickname for Michael] dragged me upstairs to listen to the keyboard part of the Last Christmas chorus. It was palpably a brilliant melody – incredibly catchy, a little bit sorrowful but also uplifting. He knew he’d nailed it."
The documentary revisits how Michael then sat down in the studio and transferred what was in his mind to the recording equipment at his fingers. Then, recruiting respected director Andy Morahan for the video (see right), Michael wanted to fulfil his cinematic vision – to make something that looked like a Christmas movie.
It was off to Switzerland for the duo, where they joined their real-life pals, "Pat and Cheryl, John and Dave – we’d always knocked about together. Friends then, friends to this day," says Ridgeley.
The cameras rolled on the group playing in the snow – Michael keeping his hat on due to a bad-hair day – and sitting down to Christmas dinner, where the love interest of the story, played by model Kathy Hill, kissed Ridgeley while a morose Michael looked on.
The atmosphere is of an otherwise perfect festive meal, crackers being pulled, wine flowing, hearts breaking. It has always foxed me as to why Ridgeley disappears from the last scene of the video, when everyone else is seen snoozing together post-meal. The reason lies in the copious amounts of alcohol being poured over lunch.
"The production team, in their wisdom, had chosen to provide us with real wine, right to the brim," he reveals. "We were having great fun, but there were casualties, of which I was one. There was an ante-room I was sent away to. I’d laughed so much at the dinner table that my eyes had swollen up and I was unfilmable."
On its release, the song famously missed the festive number one spot due to Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas?, on which Michael also sang. "We realised that our hopes of a Christmas number one were disappearing before our eyes," Ridgeley recalls.
In the documentary, Bob Geldof says of Michael’s decision to donate all Last Christmas profits to the Band Aid charity, "It definitely would have been number one. Not only did he give that up, but he gave us all his cash."
In 2023, Last Christmas was finally propelled to its rightful place at the top of the festive chart. "For a long time, it was the one that got away, but it’s become a bigger part of Christmas than when it was released," says Ridgeley.
Michael always loved Christmas, annually gathering those same friends for a party, even as his solo star soared. Following his death on Christmas Day 2016, such a rich festive legacy both musical and personal remains bittersweet.
But Ridgeley is philosophical: "The song does have a special meaning. He wouldn’t wish to cast a shadow across his friends for all eternity. It’s less acute than it once was."
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