If you ever wanted to know what the going rate for uptight self-important dull-as-dust singers who can't stay awake long enough to drive a car a short distance and seem to enjoy groping strange men in parks, you're looking at about £1.5 million an hour.
That's what George Michael has been asking for, anyway. According to reports, George Michael is now the highest-paid entertainer in modern Russian history after pocketing £1.5 million for a private New Year's concert for an unknown Russian billionaire that only lasted an hour. While we're sure that the money will be enough to keep George Michael in Complain Yourself Thin self-help tapes for a lifetime, the concert doesn't really represent the best value for money. For instance, if the Russian billionaire was a bit smarter he'd have chosen to have Andrew Ridgeley and his entire family perform a 639-year-long John Cage piece on kazoos with no breaks for food, sleep or toilets, and it would have only cost him 20p and a half a Curly-Wurly.
We can't make decide whether being Russian is brilliant or rubbish at the moment. On the one hand people would be happy to poison our sushi until our hair fell out and we died, but on the other hand we'd probably be so rich that we could ship over all kinds of singers to our house and make them sing to us while we whipped their bare feet with live electrical cables. It's been happening a lot lately, you see. Only without the electrical cable bit as far as we know.
Christina Aguilera has sung for megarich Russians in the past, and even Shakira has taken wheelbarrows of Russian Rubles in exchange for a quick performance of that song where she says her tits are like hills. But they got nothing like the amount that George Michael got this weekend. George Michael was paid £1.5 million for singing an hour's worth of hits in front of a mysterious Russian billionaire, as This Is London reports:
The rock star was paid the huge sum to play a private, 60-minute New Year's Eve gig for a mystery tycoon in Russia. The 43-year-old singer even managed to fly back from Moscow and be home in Highgate, North London, by New Year's Day morning. Michael's spokeswoman refused to say who hired him for the gig but said the concert meant he was now the 'highest paid entertainer in modern Russian history'.
To be fair to George Michael, he didn't need the entire sum of £1.5 million to become Russia's highest paid entertainer, since as of November 2006 that title went to Dazbog Kotovrinov, who was paid £9.37 to wave an amusingly-coloured shoe on a street corner in Vladivostok for ten years. And, whichever way you look at it, that does sound a little bit more lively than a George Michael concert.
But George Michael needed something to perk up his year. Neither of the singles George Michael released made the top ten, and the only thing breaking up the monotony of George Michael falling asleep in cars, George Michael crashing cars, George Michael falling asleep in more cars and George Michael fumbling with a van driver in a bush in a park at night was all the angry over-defensive shrieking he did about all of it and the occasional TV-smoked drug.
At least however badly George Michael mucks up being famous in England now, he'll always have a welcome home in Russia, where TV executives are reportedly keen on signing him for his own TV show, the provisionally-titled George Michael Careless Whisper Bear-Baiting Dancing Celebrations.
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O'Connor says
Even if I had £999,000,000,000,000,000 to piss upm a wall, I wouldn’t show a penny of it to George Michael. These Russians, eh? All money and no class