The years between leaving school and actually becoming an adult are very important years. You make a lot of choices as to the type of life you want to lead and what type of person you want to be. There were so many people who had opinions of me, a lot of them very unflattering, that it was hard to make up my mind about who I was supposed to be.

Everything was meant to wind people up [in Make It Big ]. I don't know why we had this great pleasure in winding people up, but we really did think they would get the joke. And it backfired on us.

I'm basically a control freak. It's not because I want to be. I'm not at all into the power play that's involved in it.

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 mother] is much more musical, and by the time I started writing songs - by the time I was about 17 - she started to believe in me, musically.

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.

People have speculated about my sexuality for years and years. They are obviously interested in my sex life. Fine. Let them speculate. I'm not going to put them right one way or the other.