Indeed, Michael refused to appear not only in Listen without Prejudice Vol 1’s music videos, but even on its album cover. As singer-songwriter Leo Kalyan notes wryly, Freedom! ‘90 has “one of the most iconic music videos of all time – despite George Michael’s absence from it”. However, in a typically contradictory artistic statement, the video in which he asked us to embrace the new, more authentic him featured five huge supermodels of the era – Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz, Christy Turlington and Cindy Crawford – but not a single glimpse of the artist himself. In the same song, Michael delivered the rather pleading refrain “I just hope you understand – sometimes the clothes do not make the man”, then drove home his message in the accompanying music video by torching his signature leather jacket from the Faith album campaign three years earlier. – Dusty Springfield’s remarkable comeback – How Bjork helped me heal from heartbreak

“Today the way I play the game has got to change,” he sang on the album’s astonishing second single Freedom! ‘90, a song the producer Mark Ronson has described as a “funk groove masterpiece” and “the Mona Lisa”. Now he wanted to show the world more, though not yet all, of who he really was. But in a way, he was attempting something just as audacious: he wanted to shed the misleading image he had created for himself as one of the most recognisable stars of the 1980s. When George Michael released his second solo album Listen without Prejudice Vol 1 in September 1990, he wasn’t asking fans to embrace a captivating new persona as equivalent pop giants like Madonna and David Bowie did during their imperial phases.

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