Rock & Roll Hall of Fame 2023 Inductee George Michael Has a Sweet Connection to James Kennedy From ‘Vanderpump Rules’
George Michael will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on the 40th anniversary of Wham’s first album. Michael burst onto the music scene in the early 1980s – years before his godson, James Kennedy from Vanderpump Rules was born.
Michael and Kennedy’s father Andros Georgiou were close friends and later business partners. While Michael was still with Wham, Georgiou was building his own music label. Eventually, Michael launched Aegean Records and made Georgiou his managing director.
James Kennedy knew George Michael as ‘Uncle George’
Georgiou recounted how close Michael was with his family and Kennedy from birth. “When I married Jackie [Andros’ wife and James’ mom], I told her, ‘[George] comes first. My kids are his kids and he’ll be in the delivery room with us’ and he was,” Georgiou told The Sun. “When my son James was born in January 1992, Yog [ a nickname he gave George Michael] and I gave him his first bath.”
Even though Michael was a huge pop star, Kennedy just knew him as “Uncle George.” Kennedy went on to launch a successful career as a DJ and recording artist but said Michael never really gave him music advice.
“You know he was just Uncle George, really,” he said on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen shortly after Michael’s death. “He didn’t really give me advice. I was very young. I wasn’t into music yet.”
Kennedy added, “I was like a baby. He was just Uncle George and [he’d] pop me on his lap and stuff like that. I knew he was a singer like, ‘Uncle George is a singer.’ It’s not like I didn’t [know] who he was at the time.”
Lisa Vanderpump had a ‘6 degrees’ connection to George Michael
Kennedy began his stateside career as a busboy at Lisa Vanderpump’s restaurant SUR. He worked his way up to being a DJ at the restaurant but often got in trouble for his extremely messy behavior. Vanderpump fired Kennedy (more than once) but always gave him another chance to redeem himself.
She has a soft spot in her heart for Kennedy because she has a connection to his parents, meeting them along with Michael. “I met James’ parents through Bruno Tonioli a few years ago just before he started to work for us. [Tonioli is] the judge on Dancing with the Stars, who’s an old friend of mine,” she recounted on Bravo’s The Daily Dish podcast. “Prior to that, I had met Andros, and Ken knew Andros vaguely. I’d met Andros with George Michael, and Andros had been around the scene in London, so we knew him a little bit.”
Vanderpump revealed how Kennedy ended up working at SUR. “But then we had dinner that night, and they both said, you know, could you give one of my songs, James, a job, maybe as a busser or a barback?” she said. “He probably, because we’d started Vanderpump Rules by then, I think maybe we were in the first season, thought, ‘OK, I want to get involved in this.’ And, obviously, then he started sleeping with Kristen Doute, and he was well in there like a rat up a drain pipe.”
George Michael is posthumously inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
Michael died on December 25, 2016, at age 53. The cause of death was due to dilated cardiomyopathy with myocarditis and fatty liver, but was listed as “natural causes.”
Along with six other performers, Michael will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in November 2023.
