Stop, Look, Listen Christmas specials – 3) An exclusive interview with George Michael's best friend about George's greatest Christmas songs (and not just that one)...

The inner sleeve of George Michael’s December Song (I Dreamed Of Christmas), first released online in 2008, and released as a physical single in 2009.

“Last Christmas is in our DNA. It's out there in the ether. It’s been there in its embryonic stages right up to now….and George was somebody who loved Christmas anyway, so he would be delighted to see what's happening with Last Christmas at the moment. He would just be absolutely delighted.”

It’s the last week before Christmas 2023, and a Christmas single from nearly forty years ago sits cosily at number one. It’s been a number one in three separate years already, famously not in the year of its release, when Band Aid quashed George Michael’s dream of having three chart-topping singles in 1984.

2021, 2023 and 2024 have been kinder, says George’s oldest, closest friend and frequent musical collaborator, David Austin, “but we’ve never had the Christmas number one. Maybe it’ll happen this year.” Like many people, I adore Last Christmas’ pure hit of wintry longing, fixed perfectly to those synthesisers and rhythms composed, programmed and arranged by Wham!’s lead singer.

But there is another song, a better song, about Christmas that George wrote, one which got into the top twenty a quarter of a century later. It got a little coverage at the time, but it remains strangely forgotten. When I mention it to people when they ask what my favourite Christmas track is, it often brings up blank or perplexed expressions.

December Song is another song about longing, but not for a partner who has let someone down. It’s about a longing for the Christmasses of our childhoods, written by two men who had known each other, as David Austin says, since they were in their prams, when their mothers first became best friends. It has the feel of the Great American Songbook in its warmth and piano chords, which land softly like snowflakes, moving in fascinating intervals. David Austin co-wrote a few other songs with George, including one of his greatest, You Have Been Loved, from his 1996 album, Older, about the death of George’s partner, Anselmo Feleppa.

It is an interesting song to consider before getting into a reappreciation of George. Its first two verses are written from the perspective of Anselmo’s mother, and they show a depth of feeling and grace that is almost unbearably moving:

She takes the back road and the lane
Past the school that has not changed in all this time
She thinks of when the boy was young
All the battles she had won just to give him life…

Hear the whole song here, and feel yourself get carried along by that trumpet. It’s five and a half minutes of your life that you’ll thank me for.

December Song came to me later. It came after my friend, Ian Wade, lent me a copy of Listen Without Prejudice on CD around 2012, convincing me to delve a little deeper into George’s album tracks. It came to me before George’s death in 2016, as my husband, Dan, a big jazz fan, adored it (he’s just picked it for the family Christmas playlist this year, rubbing shoulders with the kids’ choices: Ariana Grande, Shakin’ Stevens, Jose Feliciano).

It’s the track I turn to every year now before any others, its opening verse introducing the notes of sadness that to me feel like the foundations of this season, with the possibility of redemption tingling around the edges of the music:

Sweet December song
The melody that saved me
On those less than silent nights…

Then we’re flung into a child’s imagination, a rich fantasy world, snow falling on a bed, the Virgin Child smiling, wars ending for a while. Magic mixes with melancholy. Then comes that ultimate note of a miracle for a kid: being able to watch TV all day. Humour swirls within echoes of heartache in the lyrics and the chord progressions, every emotion becoming visual, surging and teeming.

George playing December Song on the X Factor in 2009
with his friend and co-writer David Austin on piano.

I knew that David Austin was hard to get hold of, partly because he helps run the George Michael Estate, and is as understandably protective of it as you’d imagine an old friend would be. I sent an email to George Michael’s long-term publicist and David’s PA, talking about my love of George and this track in particular, and how I wasn’t in the business of doom-mongering or muck-raking. It connected, and soon after, so did we.