For those who weren’t a teen in 1984, it may be arduous to know this, however right here goes: There are Gen X-ers who keep in mind the place they had been the primary time they noticed the video for the Wham! clap-along pop anthem “Wake Me Up Earlier than You Go-Go.”

In it, George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, the heartthrob frontmen of Wham!, put on massive smiles and beachy brief shorts as they carry out their infectious bop — titled after a observe Ridgeley had as soon as left on his household’s fridge — for a small crowd of adoring followers. There have been fingerless gloves, neon face paint, white “Select Life” T-shirts that had nothing to do with abortion: It was a new-wave dance get together for cool children who thought Mötley Crüe sucked.

Ridgeley, who turned 60 in January, remembers making it as nice enjoyable.

“It was our first video with an viewers,” he mentioned throughout a latest video interview from his house in London. “The ambiance was actually fairly excitable and thrilling.”

Ridgeley and his bandmate are the topic of “Wham!,” a brand new documentary that premieres on Wednesday on Netflix. Directed by Chris Smith, it charts the British group’s climb to pop stardom, starting with its ferocious look on the music present “Prime of the Pops” in 1982, by way of the worldwide success that adopted the albums “Improbable” (1983) and “Make It Massive” (1984), and ending with the 1986 farewell live performance in London.

The movie, which is itself directed like a power-pop video, explains how the duo’s fashionable mixture of disco, funk, pop and soul, in songs like “Younger Weapons (Go for It),” “Careless Whisper” and “Freedom,” helped make Wham! one of many largest pop teams of the late twentieth century, regardless that it lasted simply 4 years. In contrast to bands that cut up over creative or private disagreements, Wham! didn’t have an increase and fall. “It was only a rise they usually known as it a day,” Smith mentioned.

They didn’t break up both, mentioned Ridgeley, however relatively “introduced Wham! to a detailed in a fashion of our personal selecting.”

Followers may be dissatisfied to be taught that within the documentary Ridgeley is heard however not seen as he seems in the present day: debonair and patrician, with silver hair and a still-cheeky smile. Smith mentioned it will have thrown the movie’s mythic aspirations off stability if Ridgeley had been on digicam however not Michael, who died seven years in the past at 53.

After Wham!, Ridgeley advised me, he and Michael had been “not residing in one another’s pockets” as that they had performed since they had been children. However their bond was mounted.

If Ridgeley is bored with being identified principally for his friendship with Michael, he didn’t present it. He brightened when chatting about Michael, whose loss left Ridgeley feeling “just like the sky had fallen in,” as he mentioned in 2017. However he didn’t appear into speaking a lot about his life now, apart from to say he loved biking.

The documentary contains archival media protection and tons of live performance footage, together with scenes of groundbreaking reveals in 1985, when Wham! turned the primary Western pop group to carry out in China.

But it surely’s Ridgeley’s mom who equipped probably the most private treasures. Since her son’s grade-school days making music with Michael, she saved about 50 meticulously organized scrapbooks full of pictures, critiques and different ephemera. They embrace snapshots from the mid-Nineteen Seventies when Ridgeley first received to know Michael as Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, the son of a Cypriot father and a British mom.

Ridgeley was additionally the son of an immigrant father — his dad was Egyptian — and a British mom, and he hit it off instantly with the boy he known as Yog, a nickname he used usually in our interview. The scrapbooks paint a vivid portrait of boys who cherished Queen and “Saturday Night time Fever” and desired to make music a profession.

“The one factor I ever needed to do from the age of 14 was to be in a band, write songs and carry out,” Ridgeley mentioned with a 14-year-old’s enthusiasm in his voice, including that fame and celeb “had been by no means a motivating issue for both of us.”

Ridgeley mentioned he and Michael knew Wham! would have a finite life span as a result of Michael’s songwriting started “creating and evolving in a method and at a velocity” that Wham! couldn’t accommodate. In November, Michael can be inducted into the Rock & Roll Corridor of Fame.

Since Wham!’s heyday, Ridgeley has battled the notion that he’s well-known solely as a result of he was in a duo with a extra proficient artist. The documentary makes a case in his favor although, tracing how Ridgeley, a guitarist, collaborated with the composer and performer Michael.

Nonetheless, Ridgeley acknowledged that his musicianship wasn’t in the identical league as Michael’s, “one of many best, if not the best, singing voices of his era,” he mentioned, sounding like a proud brother.

When Michael got here out to him after they filmed the video for “Membership Tropicana” (1983), 15 years earlier than he did so publicly, Ridgeley mentioned he supported him with love and a shrug. Michael was extra freaked out by how his father would possibly react than how the general public would, Ridgeley mentioned; had Michael come out in the course of the Wham! years, Ridgeley mentioned he and followers would have had his again.

“I didn’t suppose it was going to have an effect on our success, and in the long run it in all probability wouldn’t,” he mentioned. “It could have been tough for some time for him, there’s little doubt about that. It could have required administration by us all. However after the preliminary sensationalism, it’s on the desk isn’t it?”

After Wham!, Ridgeley launched a 1990 solo album that flatlined and he did a brief stint as a System 3 driver, however he has in any other case stayed out of the limelight. The British tabloids have saved breathless tabs on his love life — together with his 25-year relationship with Keren Woodward, a former member of one other ’80s pop group, Bananarama — a lot as they did once they gave him the Wham!-era nickname Randy Andy.

Ridgeley didn’t pursue fame additional as a result of being in Wham! gave him “the whole lot he needed,” mentioned Shirlie Kemp, a pal from faculty and a Wham! backup singer. Not simply professionally.

“I don’t suppose I ever met anybody else who was on par with George the best way Andrew was, intellectually and with a humorousness,” mentioned Kemp, whose husband is Martin Kemp of the ’80s band Spandau Ballet. “It was one of the best relationship I’d ever seen George have with anybody.”

Ridgeley mentioned “few stones stay unturned” as he’s labored the previous 5 years on initiatives which are all-things-Wham! In 2019, he revealed a memoir, “Wham! George Michael & Me,” and had a cameo that 12 months within the romantic-comedy “Final Christmas,” which was impressed by the group’s eponymous chart-topping vacation single. Later this month comes “Echoes From the Fringe of Heaven,” a Wham! singles assortment.

He nonetheless appears to be in awe of what he and his greatest pal made collectively.

“I may by no means fairly actually get that we had achieved the identical form of success because the artists that we revered like gods after we had been rising up,” he mentioned. “We had been taking part in Wembley Stadium, the identical place Elton John performed. You’ll be able to say, ‘I am the identical.’ However in your personal thoughts, you’re by no means the identical.”