Wham! said goodbye to fans with one show, dubbed The Final, at London’s Wembley Stadium 36 years ago on June 28, 1986, but Andrew Ridgeley now says he wishes he and bandmate George Michael had more time to say farewell.
“I would have liked to tour The Final to be honest,” he tells BBC. “I felt a final tour to say goodbye to our fans around the world would have been a generous gesture. I felt it was a courtesy to them to have done that. The least we could have done, to be honest with you. But I also understood [Michael’s] essential ideology behind having just one show.”
The new documentary Wham! — about the band’s journey to superstardom — is set to premiere July 5 on Netflix. While the group was still loved when they said goodbye, Ridgeley says he always knew they wouldn’t last forever.
“It was so much about us as friends and our lives together as youngsters [that] it would have restricted George’s growth as a songwriter to keep writing within the parameters that Wham! set,” he says. “We’d both outgrown Wham!.”
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