Rule of Pop: never give your group an onomatopoeic name that sounds like a car crashing into a shop.
Like Wham! That’s just stupid. Because you’re inevitably going to grow up to be primarily known for crashing your car into a selection of inanimate objects, aren’t you, and that’d just be handing it to the headline writers on a plate. Instead, play it safe and go for a more abstract onomatopoeic name, like Snersh! or Mumph! or Ker-Blitch!
It’s advice that George Michael probably wishes that he’d listened to, because he’s been arrested for crashing into the Hampstead branch of Snappy Snaps. And almost immediately after getting his licence back following a two-year ban for crashing into something else, too. What are the chances? Oh, the chances are quite high because George Michael has a long and proven history of grossly irresponsible driving? Oh, OK.
When you’re a pop star, it’s good to have a hobby. That imp from Muse, for example, has his jet packs and Roger Daltrey has his trout farm. George Michael, on the other hand, has two hobbies – one is a burning desire to crash his car into every inanimate object on the face of the planet, and the other is a prodigious drug habit. The two may or may not be connected.
But still, George Michael has finally released the long-awaited follow-up to his hits such as Falling Asleep In His Car and Crashing Into Some Other Cars and Falling Asleep In His Car Again, entitled Crashing Into A Branch Of Snappy Snaps. And, what’s more, he’s been arrested for it. EW reports:
For the seventh time,?47-year-old former pop star George Michael was arrested for a driving-related wrong. After police got reports that his Range Rover had crashed into a Snappy Snaps shop in London following his attendance at London?s gay pride parade, he was taken into custody at a north London police station under suspicion of being unfit to drive.
This whole story is like an exercise in lovely nostalgia, isn’t it? We didn’t know that Snappy Snaps still existed. We didn’t know that George Michael still existed either, for that matter. If we don’t hear from him for a couple of months, we tend to assume that he’s crawled up his own bottom and suffocated as part of a bizarre drug-based dare.
George Michael will return to court in August to face charges, and we pray that the judge will be lenient. Ban him again, by all means, but make sure he’s free to drive again by the Olympic opening ceremony in 2012. We hear that the centrepiece of the whole thing will be a sequence where George Michael drives aimlessly around the inside of the stadium in his battered old Range Rover, running over countless important cultural artifacts before he gives up and falls asleep. Don’t that that from us.
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