A candid documentary that George Michael made about his own life comes to Channel 4 next week. Neil McCormick takes a look

It is remembered as perhaps his greatest performance. In trademark sunglasses and earring, wearing a boxy orange jacket, George Michael stormed the stage of Wembley Stadium in April 1992, backed by the surviving members of Queen, and tore out an absolutely show-stopping version of Somebody To Love in front of 80,000 fans.

The concert was a tribute to Freddie Mercury, who had died of an Aids-related condition the year before. But Michael was singing to one special person in the crowd, his own terminally ill boyfriend, Brazilian Anselmo Feleppa. “I just wanted to die inside, I was so overwhelmed by the sadness,” he says, brokenly, in the voice-over to his powerful new documentary, Freedom, which he finished two days before his sudden death on Christmas Day last year. “It’s not an accident that the performance probably most well known in my career was sung to my lover who was dying.”

The film, billed as George Michael’s “final work” traces his journey from teenage innocent in Wham! to isolated and unhappy solo star. A portrait emerges of someone torn between ambition and insecurity, a closeted gay man overwhelmed by fame and desperate for real human contact. “I can’t really explain how overwhelming that kind of hysteria can be if there is only one person to absorb it,” Michael admits. He suggests few human beings could handle that attention without finding it “frightening enough to self-destruct”.