WAKE ME UP BEFORE I GO SLOW: George Michael

If George Michael was seeking to construct a metaphor for his own career, then he couldn’t have come up with a better one than the scenario which greeted police in the early hours of Saturday morning.

The sight of a 42-year-old man asleep at the wheel of a stationary car summed up Michael’s two-decade deceleration from global teen-pop ubiquity to an altogether more sedate existence. With just one album of original material recorded in the past decade, he’s a pop star in semi-retirement. The cannabis, presumably, doesn’t help. It’s a symptom of the luxurious, no-pressure life for which he’s forsaken the pop treadmill.

It’s unfortunate, because urgency always suited George Michael. He’s always been at his best when he’s had something to prove. When Wham! made their all-important debut Top of The Pops appearance, Michael meticulously choreographed and rehearsed the band’s dance routine — immediately catapulting Wham! over the heads of peers who just turned up on the day and half-heartedly bopped on the spot.

Michael then used the same drive to reinvent himself as a grown-up pop polymath for his solo debut, Faith — eventually selling more than 45 million records on his own, and setting the benchmark for post teen-pop solo careers that everyone, from Robbie Williams to Geri Halliwell, tried to follow. And urgency again did him a service after he turned seemingly irreversible disaster into a moment of pop genius, when he re-enacted his infamous LA public lavatory arrest for the video of Outside.

But that was seven years ago. And since coming out — in every sense — to save his career, nothing seems to have mattered that much again for Michael. Perhaps personal tragedies — the loss of his boyfriend Anselmo Feleppa to Aids, the death of his mother — have taken the fight out of him. These days, he seems to live a life of stoned, cosseted indolence, as if perpetually comforting himself from a lingering unhappiness. He plans to give his music away free on the internet and seems to regard fame as an ultimately disposable bore.

In 2001 he broke a year-long media silence not with an interview, or a concert, but by ringing in live on ITV1’s This Morning, to wish “all the best” to the departing presenters Richard and Judy. At the time, the joke was that he was merely billed as “George from North London”. In another couple of years, however, he may well be. And that is, perhaps, the way he wants it.