It turns out that the writer Sathnam Sanghera, “the boy with the topknot,” has been a besotted George Michael fan since the age of eight, when he started listening to his older sisters’ Wham! records. This was an unusual thing to be as a Sikh growing up in Wolverhampton and it got him teased at school. But he stuck with it. So when a friend suggested that he write something fun to compensate for the years of heavy historical research he’d put into his excellent book Empireland, he decided to set off on a sort of pilgrimage in search of his dead hero. First stop was Mondial Cars, a showroom in Northwood, north London, which used to be the Bel Air restaurant, where the teenage Michael worked as a DJ.