Wham! review – Netflix study of 80s pop legends is entertaining but weirdly incurious

”Wise guys realise / There’s danger in emotional ties …” Here was one of the most artlessly, chillingly brilliant pop lyrics of the 80s, from Wham!’s Young Guns (Go For It), something to compare with the triumph of Madonna being a material girl in a material world. You can’t help thinking again about its relevance to Andrew Ridgeley and George Michael’s emotional ties to each other as you watch this entertaining but weirdly incurious documentary, composed of existing footage and voiceover commentary, apparently salvaged from earlier unidentified programmes.

Wham! was a pop band which lasted for four years, from 1982 to 1986, a meteoric fame ride which saw them devastate the music scene like Roy Lichtenstein’s fighter plane, clocking up a string of hits and getting canonised as pop A-listers alongside David Bowie, Bono, Elton John and Paul McCartney at the 1985 Live Aid concert; two grinning guys, still palpably overwhelmed with astonishment at their own success. They’d been inseparable friends since they were 11 at school in Bushey, Hertfordshire and still only in their early 20s when the band split up. (They also worked with, at different times, backing singers Dee C Lee, Helen “Pepsi” DeMacque and Shirlie Holliman, whose own opinions and inner lives are, sadly, of zero interest to this film.)

Within this short span, it became reasonably clear that George was the songwriting and producing talent and future solo megastar, and the film shows many interview clips in which Andrew good-naturedly and generously says that he’s fine with it. And despite the snippy and mean-minded press comments from that day to this, there’s no evidence that Ridgeley’s attitude was anything other than sincere. But how and what Andrew Ridgeley feels now about his own post-Wham! destiny, about celebrity, about the pop world and about George himself, remain untouched by this film. He is not interviewed on camera in the present day: the only interviews are from archive material.

And to return to that song; it is about a single man furious to see his best mate now clinging to a fiancee, who in turn wants to know who this “creepy guy” is, and who gets brutally put down in the infamous bros-before-hos line which this film doesn’t comment on: “Hey shut up chick, that’s a friend of mine / Just watch your mouth babe, you’re out of line!” Young Guns appears to culminate in and celebrate the rejection of this woman in favour of two guys reunited and out on the town: “Get back / Hands off / Go for it.” The complex emotional dynamic of Andrew and George, straight and gay, is in there somewhere.

This documentary, wittily structured around the fan scrapbooks that Andrew’s mum created, does remind you how joyful Wham!’s music was: pure pop hedonism, which swallowed up rap and political comment. They also had a proto-boyband energy that was happening naturally but which the industry later tried to package. There is something touching and moving in the way George and Andrew conceived the song Careless Whisper when they were at school – utterly (and rightly) convinced that they’d written a No 1 classic – and in their larky and ridiculous après-ski video for Last Christmas. It’s an enjoyable spectacle, and a madeleine for the 1980s: but there was something more to say about friendship, sexuality and the music itself.

• Wham! screened at the Sheffield documentary film festival, and is released on 27 June in cinemas and on 5 July on Netflix.