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.

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 spent years growing up being told what my sexuality was.

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

I just hope that I'll stay around musically for as long as I can. I love to think that I will still be satisfying myself and other people as a musician until the day I die.

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.

The main downside was that it [fame] happened so quickly and I didn't have time to establish what kind of person I wanted to be.