The thing that's weird is that we thought it was funny. We expected people to get the joke - that we [with Andrew Ridgeley] were two guys really making asses of ourselves.

I have been taken for a ride a couple of times. I've been hurt by people who I've had a 90 percent possibility of being hurt by.

Things that I was writing for Wham! were a strong indication of what my future album would be like. But most people got so lost in our image and found it pretty repulsive.

I have to believe that somebody up there thinks I've still got some work to do.

We [with Andrew Ridgeley] didn't expect people to take it seriously. But naturally they did, and they thought we were a couple of wankers.

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.