‘The greatest album never made’: the untold story of George Michael’s secret, star-packed duets project
The George Michael album that never was began in defiance and ended in grief. It was 1992. Mired in a toxic dispute with Sony Records, Michael chose to keep busy and declare his independence by making an album of songs to be sung by several of his musical heroes, including Aretha Franklin, Janet Jackson and Sade Adu, under the alias the Trojan Souls. Michael worked on the album for months until his Brazilian boyfriend Anselmo Feleppa died of Aids in March 1993 and he lost interest in music. It was never revived.
Tracks from the sessions have since leaked, along with some of the fly-on-the-wall footage filmed by Michael’s close friend and informal adviser Andros Georgiou, who has spent years trying to get unauthorised clips removed from YouTube and TikTok. Now, months before the 10th anniversary of Michael’s death, he is releasing 90 minutes of unedited video as Trojan Souls – not exactly a film but an unfiltered view of Michael in his creative prime. “I thought these fans were making money from my rights so I decided to stop fighting and get it out there,” Georgiou says. He hopes it will open a door on what he calls, with characteristic hyperbole, “the greatest album never made”.
Georgiou called his self-published 2012 memoir Rock: The Luckiest Man in Pop, the luck being that his father and Michael’s father were cousins who emigrated to England from Cyprus together in 1953, so he grew up alongside one of the greatest artists of his generation. They remained close until a bitter falling out in 1998, of which more later.
Ever loyal to his childhood friends (another, David Austin, now runs his estate), Michael gave Georgiou creative opportunities. They first collaborated as Boogie Box High, whose cover of the Bee Gees’ Jive Talkin’ was a Top 10 hit in 1987, and co-founded Aegean Records in 1996. Georgiou was also a regular on-the-road companion. When they were in Tokyo during the Faith tour, Sony gave Georgiou a state-of-the-art Hi8 video camera which enabled him to make high-quality home movies.
Georgiou makes the origins of the Trojan Souls sound as a dramatic as a heist. When Michael released Listen Without Prejudice Vol 1 in 1990, he was so sick of his sex-symbol image that he disappeared from view: no appearances in videos or on record sleeves, no interviews, no concerts. “He wanted to make music but he didn’t want to play the lying game any more,” says Georgiou. Michael believed that Sony then punished him by underpromoting the album. The singer felt trapped.
In January 1992, he and Georgiou flew to LA for some winter sun but Michael soon got bored and suggested going to Dave Stewart’s Chapel Studios in Encino to bang out a quick cover in the spirit of Boogie Box High. The 1979 disco hit Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now was a symbolic choice because Gene McFadden and John Whitehead originally wrote it to rebuke their own label, Philadelphia International. Michael decided they should return in July to start an album, recruiting vocalists he had loved growing up. According to Georgiou, only David Bowie politely declined. He says the name came to him in a dream: The Voice of Reason by the Trojan Souls. “From the Trojan horse,” he says. “The soldiers came in and then came down fighting.”
Back in London, Georgiou was contractually obliged to offer it to Sony first, despite the bad blood. “Of course they said no. I called George and he said, ‘Fuck Sony!’ I went, ‘I’ll be home in two hours with a deal, trust me.’” Georgiou called an A&R at Warner and dashed over. “Rob Dickins, the chair, was there. He said, ‘What do you want?’ I said a million pounds. He goes, done.” In October, Michael filed a lawsuit against Sony, alleging that his contract was unreasonable restraint of trade. “He wanted to get back at Sony any which way he could,” says Georgiou.
Despite the project’s bitter origins, the three songs in the film have a sunny, funky dynamism. “He was so happy,” Georgiou says. “For the first couple of months we probably had the best time of our lives making this record.” The lush ballad One Day I’ll Know was destined for Stevie Wonder and the shimmering Maybe It’s Not Your Time for Bryan Ferry. The instrumental track Wendy Melvoin’s Song featured virtuosic rhythm guitar by one half of Wendy and Lisa, in the hope that she would lure her former employer Prince on board.
Obsessed with protecting his mystique, Michael was never officially filmed handling an instrument or building a track. “If you’re a fan,” says Georgiou, “this is your first chance to see how he directs everyone in the studio.” It’s fascinating to watch how precisely Michael drills his world-class musicians – Melvoin, keyboardist Chris Cameron, bassist Deon Estus and Lynn Mabry’s backing singers – through take after take, even grabbing Estus’s bass guitar at one point to show him what he means. To the viewer the takes may sound identical but Michael was always chasing the perfect sound he heard in his head.
“He had a 48-track studio in his mind,” says Georgiou. He recalls how, even when they were kids, Michael used to deconstruct songs by their favourite artists and explain how he would have changed this or that. Or how, when they were working at Sarm West in Notting Hill, Michael would get in the car with a cassette of a skeletal backing track and have a melody written by the time he got home to Hampstead.
“He was quite a frustrating person to work with because he had quite a strange creative process,” says Sathnam Sanghera, author of Tonight the Music Seems So Loud: The Meaning of George Michael. “He would often sing at musicians and say, ‘This is what I want it to sound like.’ I’ve talked to a lot of musicians who worked with him and almost all of them said the same thing: ‘At the time it drove us fucking mad.’ But looking back they can see that of all the people they’d worked with he was the most talented. He just had these amazing ears.”
The fragments heard in Trojan Souls are tantalising but only the Elton John collaboration This Kind of Love was ever completed. By the start of 1993, Feleppa was fading fast. “It was terribly difficult for him to finish anything so we went from track to track,” Georgiou says. “And then it got too much for him.” Leaving work unfinished was not unusual for Michael, though. “George had a history of losing interest,” says Sanghera. “A lot of projects never came to fruition: Listen Without Prejudice Vol 2, the Daft Punk collaboration, the duets album …”
A few years later, Georgiou’s friendship with Michael ended, too. On 7 April 1998, Michael was arrested for “engaging in lewd conduct” in a public toilet in LA’s Will Rogers Memorial Park and the closeted star was outed to the world. “Basically it all went wrong when he was arrested,” Georgiou says. “He laughed it off but it seriously affected him mentally and that was the beginning of the end.”
When I interviewed Michael in 2004, he connected the incident to losing his mother to cancer a year earlier. Having finally worked through the creative drought occasioned by Feleppa’s death to make 1996’s Older, he was poleaxed by grief once again. “Really since 1991, when I found out [Feleppa] was HIV positive, all I’d done was either wait for someone to die or grieve,” he told me. “It was just so easy to feel picked on and angry and nihilistic.”
Michael’s compulsive cruising on Hampstead Heath created a rift. Georgiou thought it was self-destructive; Michael resented his friend’s judgment. “I couldn’t understand the risks he was taking,” Georgiou says. “He was loud and proud, which I absolutely respected, but you can’t carry on doing what you’re doing.” He claims that the final straw was Michael suddenly ordering him to drop Aegean’s entire roster. “The next day I was just like, you know what? Fuck you. And I walked out.”
An alternative account is that Georgiou crossed a line by telling his story, and giving family photographs, to Hello! magazine. Either way, Michael told me, “losing that relationship absolutely devastated me. Everything I took for granted in my 20s I lost.” Georgiou says that they tentatively reconnected in 2016 and planned to meet up in the new year. “It took a lot. We’re both Greeks at heart and have our arrogance and pride. And then he died. Even talking about it now, I can’t believe it.”
The Trojan Souls material wasn’t mothballed entirely. Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now was released on Aegean Records in 1998, as one of the first ever commercially available MP3s, and Michael rerecorded This Kind of Love, sans Elton, not long before his death – Sanghera calls it “his one great unreleased song”. As for the rest, we can only imagine. Could The Voice of Reason ultimately have been a triumph?
“I think it could have worked as a duets album, because 90% of George was his voice,” Sanghera says. “He was at his creative peak. This could have been Listen Without Prejudice Vol 2 if his lover wasn’t dying, if he hadn’t sued Sony. But I think he would have needed another two years for a fully realised album. This is just the beginning of something that could have been amazing.”
Georgiou has often been regarded with suspicion by Michael’s fans for monetising his proximity to pop genius. Now he is preparing a rewritten memoir, an accompanying film, the release of more footage on his website, and even a duet version of This Kind of Love if he can get Elton John’s blessing. Then again, these are his videos and Trojan Souls was his project, too. Given his long estrangement from Michael, the home movies document not just an unfinished album but a much-missed friendship. “It’s my legacy in a way,” he says. “I was there for nearly 40 years. What a time!”