Why the last big celebrity death of 2016 struck the darkest chord
Demons must have scripted this. Only a malevolent spirit could have decreed that the purveyor of such a massive Yuletide hit – one of the biggest ever to emerge from the festive fun factory – should perish on Christmas Day. Last Christmas indeed: for George Michael, there will be no more.
The untimely death of a pop star, veiled in mystery and accompanied by tales of past excess, is scarcely a novel event. But for us of a certain age – about 50, to be blunt – the slaying of Saint George by the dragon Death is a musical memento mori.
Other deities of the rock and pop pantheon to have made an early exit stage left – Lennon, Hendrix, Morrison, Bolan, even Freddie Mercury to an extent – were rooted in already churned soil. They got their start in another age and passed their zenith while our sun was still young.
George was different. Like ours, his star rose in the 80s, when hair was big, Dallas bigger and the Government and the miners were at war. When he stepped into that Last Christmas video, golden with youth, exuding tinselly glamour and – ironically, as it turned out – surrounded by gorgeous girls, our paths were on a similar trajectory. Less glamour, perhaps, and certainly fewer girls. But chronologically, at least, George Michael was one of our own.
Which is why the photos of him in later years, wheeled out in unsparing profusion in the days following his death, tugged so sharply on the line. In one, taken in Switzerland in 2015, he looks like a minor war criminal, blinking in surprise that the past has finally caught up with him. In another, on Highgate Hill, he has a muffled, shrouded air, as if looking down to London might curse him, like the Lady of Shalott.
In these sorry snaps, age has withered him and the years condemned. “Tell me, baby,” they seem to say, “do you recognize me? Well, it’s been 30 years, it doesn’t surprise me.”
As so often, however, it’s the trifling details that stick. The last time that anyone saw the singer alive, he was a figure at the window of his Oxfordshire home, watching a torchlight procession arrive at the church next door. It is Christmas Eve and a saviour is coming into the world. George Michael waits long enough to greet him, then slips quietly away, without so much as a careless whisper to mark his going.
At about the same time, I was doing something that I try to do every Christmas Eve: reread Thomas Hardy’s The Oxen. The poem recalls an old rural legend wherein animals would kneel at midnight to welcome the coming king. Hardy, the Victorian apostate, yields to imagination in spite of his wearier self. If someone asked him to go and see the oxen kneel, he says, “In the lonely barton by yonder coomb / Our childhood used to know, / I should go with him in the gloom, / Hoping it might be so.”
Did the lost singer envision something equally soothing in his very last Christmas dreams? The smart money says not. But imagination pleads a sweeter case – and hopes that it might be so.
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