I want to make a pop album - something more upbeat than my stuff was in the '90s.

When Andrew [Ridgeley] first met my family, he heard my mom calling me "Yorgos." He just abbreviated it to Yog, and unfortunately it stuck. I hated it is a teenager. It was not the most glamorous-sounding name in the world.

My American gay audience have continued to dance and sing to the music I make in a way that straight Americans haven't. I am grateful to them for that.

By the time I was in my early teens, we were able to move into a much more middle-class area. I had a comfortable adolescence.

I was supposed to be a real Thatcherite. Just by dint of being a first-generation immigrant and having not had money, and then suddenly having it - and getting on planes and going to Ibiza and sitting around in thongs. But actually nothing I was writing or doing was even vaguely Thatcherite.

[My mother] pretty much used to go along with my dad in that she wanted me to get an education so that if this incredible dream I had didn't work out, I would have something to fall back on.

We always talked [with Andrew Ridgeley] about when it would happen - we always knew that I would go on to have a solo career.