Sathnam Sanghera
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Satnam, welcome to Waterstones first of all. Thanks for having me. If we had gone to the same school, I would have been the Prince fan in the year above you. And I know why I became a Prince fan. I want to know why you became a George Michael fan first of all. What was it that got you into his music and made you fall in love with it?
Prince, I would have also loved. Great. There was no Prince fans in my school either. Okay. We could have been friends. George Michael... First of all, my sisters were really into Andrew and George when I was young, and I was the youngest in the family. So I kind of contracted it like COVID, you know?
Why did Sathnam Sanghera become a George Michael fan?
But they lost interest in him, and I carried on. And I think it was... He's very sensitive lyrics. He was like... He was clearly depressed. Yeah. But not as depressed as Morrissey, which is where my mood was. Yeah. And also, I just had a... I've got a thing for anyone who could do something that I can't, and I cannot sing. I just... I've always thought he had the most beautiful voice, one of the best pop voices of all time. I would think Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye were probably better. But I think he's one of the top five best vocalists ever.
In the pantheon, that's where you're putting him. I was actually talking to a bookseller earlier, and I asked whether he was a George Michael fan, and he absolutely was. And I asked what it was, and he again said it was about the voice. just the most incredible voice. And he said that he didn't really feel like he'd died because he just listens to the music all the time and it's sort of always there.
Yeah, and his voice carried this kind of simultaneous happiness and sadness. Like, Last Christmas has been covered hundreds of times. I've listened to almost every cover in the middle of August for the book. And almost every cover is crap. Even Taylor Swift's version, even though she's famous at sad songs. And it's because they all lack his vocal. which is kind of so melancholic over a happy tune. And actually an overtly positive sentiment. It's actually really sad. He's actually saying something quite complicated. He's saying, I found someone great, but actually I still got a thing for you. That's quite a complex thing. And he conveys it all through his voice.
We will touch on his voice later. I was sort of intrigued by a sort of passing anecdote in the book, which is to do with his own school days. At the age of eight, he apparently fell down some stairs at school, banged his head on a metal radiator and sort of woke up literally a changed person, no longer interested in all the sort of fripperies of childhood, obsessed with music and with singing. Is that right?
Yeah, he went from being obsessed with insects to being obsessed with music.
Yeah.
Yeah, brain injury.
LAUGHTER
I mean, I don't know. Yeah, it happens, I guess.
But he sort of doesn't apply himself, I suppose, in school to become a great player of any particular instrument or anything like that. He sort of lacked the discipline to do that. And that does have an impact on him for the rest of his musical life, doesn't it?
Creativity and the way he made music was so strange because he went around saying, I'm not a trained musician. And I guess he wasn't, except he was. He did the violin, I think, for six years. He played the drums. He could play the bass. But he told everyone he couldn't play anything. And sometimes he made out he was more talented than he was, and often he undermined his own talent. And I think this is all about the fact that he wanted to protect the magic of how he wrote songs. It couldn't make sense of how these songs came to him. And he worried that if he analyzed it, the magic would go. And it's been a studied thing in that the more people know about things, often it doesn't translate to success. And I know that as a writer, in that I cannot tell you the first thing about grammar.
But I write through sound. And I know friends of mine who know lots about grammar, and they can't write for shit. And I think that is what he was trying to protect.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:40
2
Why did Sathnam Sanghera become a George Michael fan?
0:40–5:30
3
What makes George Michael's voice unique?
5:30–8:54
4
How did George Michael's childhood influence his music?
8:54–23:15
5
What role did control play in George Michael's music creation?
23:15–25:04