I STILL remember the December morning I came downstairs to find my mother listening to the radio in tears.

John Lennon had been shot dead. The news came out of nowhere, and she couldn't make sense of it.

I didn't really understand the significance of it back then, but I’d grown up listening to Mum's Beatles records and it felt like someone we knew had died.

Nearly four decades later, it’s December again and my sister is listening to a song on the radio that she used to dance to her bedroom. “Why are you crying?” asks her 13-year-old son, as she gets misty-eyed over Wham’s I’m Your Man.

In the early to mid-1980s our house was often filled with the sound of my sister’s Wham albums blasting out from her bedroom. I was four years older, with a more sophisticated record collection. As far as I was concerned, Wham were a naff pop duo with Princess Diana hair, who fooled around in yellow shorts and sang daft songs for little girls. I was into the Human League and Siouxsie and the Banshees, for heaven’s sake. I had no time for Club Tropicana.

But to my sister, Wham were everything. George Michael gazed down from her bedroom wall, in his Choose Life T-shirt. She loved him possibly more than she loved Tom Selleck from Magnum.

And that’s why she felt such sadness on Boxing Day this week, as news of George’s death was still being digested. It wasn’t so much that a middle-aged man she’d never met, who it turned out wouldn’t have been interested in her anyway, had passed away. It was what George represented; the happy youth he reminded her of and the songs she used to play in her bedroom - just as my mum listened to Beatles songs in hers more than half a century ago.

Over the years, once he'd ditched the yellow shorts, I warmed to George Michael. I discovered a soulful beauty in his songwriting, and a moving sense of melancholy in his voice. Listen Without Prejudice became one of my most cherished albums.

And despite dismissing them as a silly pop duo, Wham's Last Christmas has always been my favourite festive record. The video - that ski chalet filled with beautiful people in chunky knitwear, all the sexual tension of a Jackie magazine photo-love story - has me falling in love with the Eighties every time.

So I too feel sad that George is no longer with us. His death came towards the close of a year which has been particularly shocking in the demise of famous folk. Over the past week alone we've also lost Rick Parfitt, Liz Smith and now Carrie Fisher.

For Star Wars fans, it probably feels like a light has been turned off now that Princess Leia is no longer in the world. The public grief and the shrines are inevitable.

It's what is expected now, when someone famous dies. Crowds gather, vigils are kept and flowers are laid. People sob and hug each other, brokenhearted and bewildered. They gaze into space, shaking their heads in bemusement. Death comes to famous people too. Who knew?

Such public displays of emotion, now de rigueur, stem from Princess Diana's death, when people wept in the street, grieving over someone they'd never met.

It makes me cringe, but I know why they do it. When someone you admired or was part of your life in some way is gone, there's a primal urge to gather with others, to pay tribute and remember the good times. It's ultimately self indulgent, but if people feel the need, so be it.

Me, I'll just raise a glass to those we lost in 2016 and say: "Thanks for the memories."

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