He was just six years old when he penned a song, The Music Maker of the World, and lisped it into his tape recorder in a high-pitched childish singing voice.

The young George Michael could not have guessed how successful he would be, yet from a very early age he knew music was his heart and soul.

“The first sign of real obsession with music was with an old wind-up ­gramophone that mum had thrown out into the garage,” George said in his 1990 autobiography, Bare.

He continued: “My parents gave me three old 45s – two Supremes records and one Tom Jones record – and I used to come home from school literally every day, go out to the garage, wind this thing up and play them.”

(Image: mirror.co.uk) (Image: Collect)

George also gained a taste for entertainment from his mother, dancer Lesley Angold.

The budding star adored her, because she sacrificed her life to bring up him and his two sisters, a fact that he only appreciated as an adult.

“There are things about my mum that I only realised later, things that make me admire her,” he recalled.

“If there’s anything that I’ve got from her it’s that she’s like a rock. I’ve got that stability from her.”

The star’s father was Greek Cypriot restaurateur, Kyriacos Panayiotou, who came to the UK in 1953.

George was always more distant from him, because work kept him away from home.

“As a very, very young child I don’t suppose I saw him at all,” said George.

“I didn’t learn about hard work from him because I could never work as hard as he did. Just the idea of coming to a foreign country and working until your fingers bleed.

"When I look at my dad, that’s what I see. I see lots of other things too, lots of faults.”

(Image: Photoshot)

But as the only son in a Greek family, he still got special treatment compared to his sisters – Melanie, now 54, and Yioda, now 58 – which he later revealed gave him with a lifelong guilt complex.

George was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou in Finchley, North London, on June 25, 1963.

The family lived above a launderette but as his father’s ­restaurant grew, they moved to a semi in Edgware.

George’s earliest pal was David Austin, later a 1980s singer himself who also wrote and produced with the pop star.

“We grew up in the same street and met because our mothers were pushing us up the road in our prams and stopped to have a chat,” David once recalled.

“As children we played together all the time. We’d write songs and record them on a tape recorder.

(Image: Scope Features)

“When we were about six we did one called The Music Maker of the World. How prophetic was that?”

According to George, his real ­determination to become a musician came two years later.

He said: “At the age of about eight I had a head injury and I know it sounds bizarre and unlikely, but it was quite a bad bang, and I had it stitched up and stuff.

(Image: London Features International)

“But all my interests changed, ­everything changed in six months.

“I had been obsessed with insects and creepy-crawlies, I used to get up at five o’clock in the morning and go out into this field behind our garden and collect insects before everyone else got up and, suddenly, all I wanted to know about was music, it just seemed a very, very strange thing.

“And I have a theory that maybe it was something to do with this accident, this whole left-brain right-brain thing.

(Image: London Features International)

"Nobody in my family seemed to notice but I became absolutely obsessed with music and everything changed after that.

“I never really told my parents that I wanted to be a pop star or anything.

"They just knew that I was totally obsessed with music. Funnily enough, my father always used to say that he didn’t think I could sing.”

(Image: London Features International)

But this lack of encouragement seems to have been par for the course in George’s home.

“I was never praised, never held,” George later said. “It wasn’t exactly the Little House on the Prairie.”

When the family moved from London to Hertfordshire, George’s ambitions really began to take ­practical shape.

(Image: TV Grab)

At Bushey Meads School he sat next to fellow pupil Andrew Ridgeley on his first day, and found the friend with whom he would step into the spotlight – and a life of fame.

Andrew was the son of an ­Egyptian, and it was perhaps their shared status as second-generation ­immigrants, as well as a shared love of music, which forged their instant connection.

Recalling the day they met, Andrew said: “The teacher says, ‘We’ve got a new boy, who’s going to look after him?’

(Image: Daily Mirror)

"They allot the new kid to someone they feel might be ­responsible enough to have a new kid in their charge – so I was dying to have a go. He was introduced, I put my hand up – and I got him.”

Andrew was initially far more confident than shy George, and at that stage the more handsome and gregarious of the pair.

“Andrew loved camp clothes,” recalled George.

(Image: CHRIS CRAYMER/SCOPE FEATURES.COM)

“He’d go to school in cherry silk trousers and have three little Adam Ant braids. Everyone spent their time going, ‘Is he gay?’ And I’d go, ‘He’s really not!’”

Andrew introduced his new pal to parties and girls and the pair formed their first group, a ska band called The Executive.

The immature ensemble was short-lived, but it allowed the boys to cut their teeth and begin to spread their wings.

(Image: Mirrorpix)

George undoubtedly had the talent but Andrew was teaching him ­confidence and charisma to go with it.

He admitted: “I had no physical­ confidence whatsoever. I looked up to Andrew because he oozed confidence from every pore.”

But their partnership was strong because they were different.

Video Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play now

There was no ­competition and they had a mutual exchange of qualities.

George said: “We used to have a laugh, we had the same sense of humour.

"I think one of the reasons he liked me was because I knew a lot about music.

(Image: The Picture Library Ltd.)

“You see, all he knew at that age was that he wanted to be famous. And as we grew up together, I encouraged him musically.

"And what I got from him were the aspirations to become the type of person I wanted to be seen as. It was a good exchange.”

And it produced the 80s pop ­phenomenon Wham!