Have you heard the story about the time that Andrew Ridgeley, the 1980s heart-throb, refused to answer the door to Andy Warhol after John Lennon hissed at him: ‘Do you want him coming in here taking photos when you’ve got icicles of coke hanging out of your nose?’? How about Ridgeley’s fondness for orgies, during which he used to watch couples having sex on his snooker table while yelling: ‘Make sure you don’t come on the baize!’? No? Well, that’s probably because these are taken from Elton John’s gloriously filthy memoir Me, in which he describes the many successes and wild excesses of his life in eye-popping, thigh-clenching detail.
Even at the height of his fame, between 1983 and 1986, Ridgeley (the one with puppy-dog eyes and a rich teak tan) was never that kind of pop star. The worst incident he can recall in this good-humoured memoir is an occasion when the other member of Wham!, George Michael (the one with a Princess Diana quiff and a voice that could melt ice at 100 paces), spotted Joan Collins’s yacht moored off Saint-Tropez and yelled out: ‘Joan! Show us your knickers!’ It’s not exactly 18-certificate stuff. And that’s hardly surprising. Although Wham! may have sung about teenage rebellion (‘Easy girls,/ And late nights,/ Cigarettes, and love bites’), with their unthreatening good looks and crisp white Katharine Hamnett T-shirts (‘CHOOSE LIFE’) they were more like half a boyband waiting for the others to show up.
Actually, Elton John has a walk-on part in the Joan Collins story, as it was after drunkenly leaving a nightclub as his guests that the boys from Wham! saw her boat bobbing around in the harbour. They were no less self-made than he was.
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