In a year that saw the loss of some of the biggest names in popular music, 2016 dealt a late, cruel blow with the death of George Michael, a British pop icon who dominated the charts – and the headlines – through much of the 1980s and ‘90s. Michael – born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou in Finchley, north London – developed an early passion for music and a prodigious song-writing talent (he wrote Careless Whisper at the age of 17), forming the duo Wham! with his school friend Andrew Ridgeley. Signed at 18, the pair had a string of early hits, including Wham Rap!, Young Guns (Go For It) and Club Tropicana, before their second album, Make it Big (1984), which included Freedom and Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go along with Careless Whisper, turned them into global stars. Waving goodbye to Wham! in 1986, Michael went on to enjoy worldwide solo success with albums such as Faith, Listen without Prejudice Vol 1 and Older, hit duets with Elton John and Aretha Franklin and sold-out stadium tours. Along with professional success however were crashing lows: in the early ‘90s Michael lost a highly publicised battle with his record company Sony (he accused them of ‘professional slavery’) and suffered debilitating bereavements. For many years Michael’s sexuality was in question before he was spectacularly ‘outed’, in 1998, by an undercover policeman in an LA public toilet. He transformed the fiasco into a triumph with the single Outside; its video featured disco-dancing, kissing cops. Living much of his adult life under the intense glare of the British press, Michael maintained an ambivalent relationship with the tabloids, who relentlessly reported his clashes with the law and issues with drug dependency. In later years, Michael suffered from creative block, although a new album was reportedly underway, along with a documentary due in 2017. “I genuinely believe that most of my songs are life-affirming in some way”, he told Kirsty Young on [his 2007 Desert Island Discs](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b008006s). And from the many tributes that flooded social media on Christmas Day, it’s clear that it’s Michael’s often underestimated song-writing genius for which he’ll be remembered. He died on 25 December, at the age of 53.