Fact #163827

Mel Brown (fan) : I was seventeen, and it was one of the most emotional days of my life. Me and a bunch of friends from Chelmsford went up and spent the night before at a friend’s house in London. We got up at four am and were outside Wembley at five am, with our packed lunches.

Pepsi de Manque (Wham! backing singer) : I got up about 11.00 that morning to get to the stadium by mid-day. When I got there, Elton John was already installed backstage with this huge Winnebago, and he was dispensing champagne to everybody. The Frankies were there, Rod Stewart, Simon Le Bon, just loads of people.

Mel Brown : The gates opened about noon and we ran in. I managed to get about ten rows from the front, and it was a blistering hot day.

Gary Farrow (Wham! media consultant) : The Wham! boys had a small backstage area, fairly discreet. George’s only luxury was that he always had a massage to relax before he went on. But Elton John had a huge backstage area with a sort of astro-turf lawn and an inflatable swimming pool surrounded by a white pickett fence.

Pepsi de Manque : The strangest thing was that Elton had bought the boys a Robin Reliant, a three-wheeler, with furry dice in the window and their names on the windscreen. I never did work out what that was about.

Gary Farrow : I had to send one of my guys to collect the Reliant before the show. We had to tax and insure it, because it had to be driven four miles on public roads to get to Wembley, which I suspect cost us more than it cost Elton to buy. It had 127,000 miles on the clock and was a complete rust bucket.

Pepsi de Manque : George and Andrew had very distinct personalities backstage. George never liked touring anyway, and he was always the complete professional, keeping an eye on everything that was going on. Andrew, on the other hand, played the host. He was the one who kept everybody happy.

Paul Simper (journalist) : I went with a group of friends and we timed our arrival to miss the opening acts. Our biggest decision was when we should take our first Es of the day. Before Wham! came on, they showed the film of them in China and they were singing Blue just as the sky was getting dark. That’s when I took my first E.

Gary Farrow : The opening, when they came out for Everything She Wants and George came down one flight of stairs and Andrew came down another at the opposite side of the stage, was magic. One of the all time classic pop moments.

William Leith (journalist) : By the time the first chords jingled out, the noise was feedbacked by so much screaming it might as well have been the Mary Chain playing it.

John Blake (journalist) : It was the most gloriously glamourous crowd I’d seen at a rock concert in my entire life. Beautiful golden-skinned girls, boys with sun-streaked hair, they looked like the most exotic young people in Europe.

George Michael : I have never seen a crowd like that in my life. For anyone. It was so important for me that I don’t think it was possible to enjoy it enough.

Paul Simper : My most vivid memory is about the concert programmes which had been made up bright orange on one side and bright green on the other. During Edge Of Heaven, George got everyone to hold up the programmes and flip them over so the whole of Wembley suddenly went from orange to green.

Pepsi de Manque : Shirley and I had six or seven dress changes during the show, and it took quite a bit of rehearsing to get into those rubber dresses. You had to be covered from head to toe in Johnson’s baby powder and even then you had to wriggle like mad to get into them. Even so, we usually had time for a Mars Bar each between songs. We were always stuffing our faces Shirley and me.

Paul Simper : The atmosphere during Careless Whisper was very calm and tranquil, which is when I decided to have another E. Just at that moment one of my friends came back from the toilets and revealed that there had been a fire in the ladies and she’d helped put it out. That seemed pretty cool.

Gary Farrow : The audience must have been completely baffled at one point, 72,000 people all wondering why Ronald McDonald had walked on stage and sat down at the piano. George was wrapped up in something else and was totally ignoring this bizarre figure. It was actually Elton John. I was watching from the wings, and Elton kept looking at me, totally perplexed, for about ten minutes before George finally decided to introduce him.

John Blake (journalist) : What sticks most in my mind is that when I had first met George and Andrew, at the start of their career, they had been vibrant, happy-go-lucky young men. By the time of Wembley, they seemed to have aged terribly quickly and they had become wretched, miserable and unhappy.

George Michael : I was drinking a lot and feeling generally run-down… I don’t think I rose above it, even on the day of The Final. With a genuine depression it doesn’t matter how good the highs are, there’s an undercurrent of depression that doesn’t go away.

I really did enjoy the day and the concert very much but, looking at pictures of it now, I can see that something was wrong. Even with Andrew. I think we were both worried. He looks much more drawn than he did in pictures only a year before. He was doing a lot of drink and stuff as well and there were worries on his mind, I suppose.

Gary Farrow : Simon le Bon came on in a bomber jacket to sing along on I’m Your Man and again, nobody knew who he was. It wasn’t until there was a close-up of his face on the huge tv monitor screens that people realised and started cheering.

George Michael : I tore a tendon towards the end of the show, which ruined the end of the gig.

Gary Farrow : What amazed me was that the audience wasn’t just teenage girls. I remember, near the end, spotting all these outsize men with beer guts and party sevens dancing like mad to Wake Me Up Before You Go Go.

Mel Brown : I’d seen them five times before, but The Final was different. It was far more emotional than any of their other concerts. My strongest memory is of girls all around me in floods of tears.

Paul Simper : As we all left Wembley, we had to go through an underpass to get to the tube station, and I’ll never forget the sound of hundreds of girls in there singing Edge Of Heaven with their voices echoing all around.

Mel Brown : I cried my eyes out all the way home at the thought that I’d never see them again.

Paul Simper : I had to go on to The Hippodrome to cover the after-show party for No1, the magazine I was writing for then, but I’d given my ticket away to a fan on the assumption that I’d be able to blag my way in. The first person we met outside was Nick Heyward and one of my friends asked if he had a spare ticket. He had one, but when he learned it was for me, he refused to give her it. He must have read one of my reviews.

They’d apparently spent over £60,000 on the party. The Hippodrome was decorated with gigantic inflatable giraffes and other animals, and there was a huge netball net strung up inside with giant beach balls. Jacqui from Bananarama got severely told off for rolling around on top of the balls instead of playing with them in the approved fashion.

Pepsi de Manque : Wham! really knew how to throw a party. We literally danced the night away. It could have been sad, but it wasn’t. I think we all knew it was the best way - to end something that had been brilliant before it went downhill.

George Michael : I remember going up to Andrew at the party and giving him a big hug. And I remember looking at each other and … knowing really… it was sad. We knew that whatever happened, no matter how much we kept in touch, from then on it was a totally different thing.

Garry Farrow : Four weeks later, when Bon Jovi played Wembley, the Robin Reliant was still lying there. Nobody had dared drive it.

George Michael : The final appearance of Wham! at Wembley was incredible but, strangely, it was so important to me that it didn’t register immediately. I don’t think I enjoyed it enough, but watching the video now is absolutely stunning. I have never seen a crowd like that, for anyone at a concert, apart perhaps for Live Aid. In retrospect, I know that it was really perfect. The weather was perfect, the people were perfect and the band was great. Everything in the whole series of Wham! events seemed so blessed that it was just the cherry on the cake.