Wham!’s Andrew Ridgeley Reflects on 40 Years of ‘Last Christmas’: It’s ‘Part of the Fabric of Christmas’
Wham! make chart history as Last Christmas takes festive number one spot for second time in a row
December 20, 2024
Wham! have made chart history, with Last Christmas becoming the first song to be crowned Christmas number one two years in a row.
Michael died unexpectedly at the age of 53 on Christmas Day 2016
By Ingrid Vasquez
Published on December 20, 2024
It’s a bittersweet time of the year as Wham!’s “Last Christmas” reaches the top of the UK charts for the second year in a row.
On Friday, Dec. 20, the Official Charts Company announced that the 1984 track, released by the duo made up of Andrew Ridgeley and the late George Michael, had become the first song in chart history ever to clinch two consecutive Christmas Number 1 victories.
The achievement makes the beloved track, written and produced by Michael, this week’s most streamed and physically purchased song.
by Chuck Arnold
Dec. 20, 2024
When Wham!’s Andrew Ridgeley first heard George Michael give up his heart on “Last Christmas,” he knew the beloved yule tune was something special. 
The magic moment happened when the holiday spirit hit his late bandmate in his childhood bedroom in London.
“We were killing time around his mom and dad’s house. It was a Sunday afternoon, and the soccer was on TV,” Ridgeley, 61, told The Post. “And George disappeared upstairs [where] he had a little Fostex four-track recording studio, which used a cassette tape to record four tracks onto. And [he] came back about an hour later and said, ‘Andy, Andy, you gotta come upstairs and listen to this!’”
What Ridgley heard “written on the spot” was the beginning of the “Last Christmas” journey to 40 years of festive feels.
“He’d written the bare-bones keyboard track, the basic drum track and a bit of the verse and the chorus,” he recalled. “And it was an amazing moment … I knew it was a hit record. We’d had a few by then, so we were able to recognize them when we heard them.”
Many music fans noticed a striking similarity of Lorde‘s new song “Solar Power”, to George Michael‘s “Freedom! ’90″.
No this isn’t just a careless whisper. British artist Dawn Mellor has been commissioned to paint a permanent public artwork in Kingsbury, celebrating the life of the singer, who grew up in the area.
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