Shirlie Kemp recalls the moment she met Andrew Ridgeley and George Michael
She chatted to Ken Bruce
Last updated 20th Jul 2023
Shirlie Kemp joined Ken Bruce on Greatest Hits Radio for Golden Years, where she talked about growing up with Andrew Ridgeley and George Michael from Wham! and the music she loved as a youngster.
Choosing 1977 as her Golden Year, Shirlie's musical picks included Fleetwood Mac, Rose Royce and Rod Stewart. For Shirlie, music has been a big part of her life since she was a child. She said: "Music has a huge impact on you when you’re younger, I grew up with older brothers and sisters so I’d be listening to Bowie, the Stylistics, my dad was a huge Beatles fan.
"So I had so much music around me, and then what happens is when you’re younger you connect to a song and you identify and it’s singing all the emotions that you’re going through. So I just used to get so lost in music, it just expressed so much for me."
In addition to music, Shirlie had another love growing up - horses. She had initially set her sights on a career at the riding stables, until severe hayfever meant she could no longer be around horses.
Shirlie explained: "I was a horsey girl, my passion when I was younger was horses, so all I thought was I'm just going to work at the riding stables so I can be with my horse. It was either music or horses. And I didn’t have any hope of being in the music business, I didn’t know anyone in the music business or have any idea how you get into the music business.
"When I was about 18, I got hayfever and it was so bad I couldn’t be around horses anymore. It was such a transition in my life because everything I’d known and that I was confident about was taken away from me, and it left me really, really depressed. Really lost as a teenager, no hope, no qualifications for anything because I wasn’t very good at school, didn’t enjoy school."
Luckily for Shirlie, this was around the time she had reconnected with Andrew Ridgeley and George Michael, who both went to the same school as her. She later went on to join them in Wham! alongside her friend Helen 'Pepsi' DeMacque.
She said: "Fate had plans. I was so low, my brother actually said, 'Let’s go to the pub' and I said, 'That’s not going to help, is it?' I hear 'Hello Shirlie', and it was a boy from school. I asked him how he remembered my name, because he was in the year below.
"He said, 'You were the punky girl, you were so cool. You had all the earrings in, I just used to really look up to you.' And it was Andrew Ridgeley, Then we started talking about our favourite bands, about music, we swapped phone numbers. We drive to George's {Michael} house, which isn't far from ours.
"My form room was the music room, which was on stage. George was standing outside - not that I knew him, I didn't know his name. He was the curly haired boy with the violin case. That was my meeting with the boys."
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