ext week sees the unveiling of a huge, nine-metre-high George Michael mural – and it still might not be big enough. Since the pop star died on Christmas Day 2016, at the age of 53, his legend has only grown, backed up by his catalogue of titanium-plated hits, his evolving image as a gay rights icon, his acts of discreet generosity and, as his cameo on Extras proved, the fact that he seemed a good laugh. No pressure, then, for the artist who is daubing the whole thing on a wall just off the main street in Kingsbury, the north London suburb where the singer grew up. “I’m kind of underestimating how popular he was,” says Dawn Mellor, the 50-year-old artist who has taken on the task. Manchester-born and Derbyshire-raised, the painter is a warm, livewire presence, with piercing eyes and a closely shaved head. Mellor, who is non-binary and goes by the pronouns they/them, is on the second day of painting when we speak via Zoom. They have spent the day going up and down ladders, rain permitting, and the scale of the task, in every sense, is starting to become clear. “Everybody seems to love George Michael! Nobody’s got a bad word to say about him, which I didn’t realise beforehand.” If a mural dedicated to Michael seems inevitable, the choice of Mellor doesn’t. For one thing, the artist is not “like, a super-fan”. They also think that “most portraiture is pretty terrible, as artwork”. Indeed the commission (from the ever-dynamic Studio Voltaire) is a risk given that, as Mellor puts it, “the work that I often make, to some people’s eyes, would look far from respectful or tribute-worthy”. Which is quite an understatement. Mellor’s calling card is images of stars, often women, whose disfigurement by the showbiz system is echoed in disfigurement on the canvas, splattered with paint and scared witless. Everyone from Judy Garland to Margaret Thatcher to assorted primetime telly detectives is trapped in a kind of satirical feminist nightmare. You begin to panic at what Mellor might do to our darling George. “I think there was an expectation that I might do something that was not so easy to understand,” says Mellor, with an accent from Gamesley, near Glossop, still stoutly intact despite 30 years spent in London, “that had a little bit of weirdness to it. Something off.” Yet the more you talk to Mellor, the more the commission starts to make sense, not least because of a furore the artist was the focus of last year. It was alleged, in a series of articles and tweets, that Mellor had essentially hoodwinked the students they were teaching at Goldsmiths, University of London; that they had posed to them as a non-binary alter ego by the name of Tippy Rampage and used their experiences for a book. Mellor never commented – until now – but what is clear is that the whole imbroglio gave them a weird kinship with Michael, who was caught up in his own, rather bigger LGBTQ scandal when caught cottaging in Los Angeles in the 90s. It was also, for Mellor, a bracing experience of something they had been prodding at their whole career – the jarring effects of notoriety. “It’s funny!” they insist, although it often sounds as if it wasn’t. “If I’ve made a career misrepresenting people, and attacking the media for their obsession with celebrity, then of course I’m going to get it back at some point.” What Mellor can confirm about the mural is that it will be less gruesome than their usual oeuvre. “With it being on the street, I didn’t want to do something that was going to be so unbearable for somebody, you know?” They say there will be “multiple Georges” rather than one big portrait, including several from his early Wham! years. This is partly because it is how Mellor recalls him best. Mellor even drew Wham! in the 80s, as a geeky teenager who would use their precocious talent for drawing to make pictures of pop stars “in order to be popular with the girls”. The delicate pencil sketch, made when they were turning 15, looks quite innocent, but even then it was also troubling. “I remember quite clearly a schoolteacher seeing that drawing, and saying that I’d captured either his ‘ponceyness’ or ‘poofyness’, I can’t remember which,” says Mellor. “I remember that really viscerally.” Inevitably, it is gayness, or queerness, that Mellor and Michael have in common. They seem to have led almost parallel lives, him seven years ahead, living two extreme versions of the same history. While Michael hid his sexuality, until the LA episode encouraged him to go “outside” and then some, Mellor fell in with a more alternative crowd in London in the 90s, gogo dancing in gay clubs such as Heaven and performing in lesbian S&M clubs like the Clit Club or Fist. “The only pop music I’d hear would be coming down, or at a chillout.” But now they appreciate the impact of that era so much more, not least on Michael himself. “Lots of people love his music, but there are these reasons why people have affection for him,” they say. “It seems to me that it’s the way he dealt with that scandal, and the way he had zero shame, that he presented to the public, anyway. And that seems to be what people love about him.” Mellor planned on being an artist from a very young age but the aspiration was, by their own admission, hopelessly naive and ill-informed. The older child of a labourer father who was unemployed through most of the Thatcher years and a mother who did secretarial work, they admit they grew up in a “depressed environment”, however beautiful the countryside was. “This sense of … politics, that things were not going to get better. That you had no chance. Everything was against you. It was very much the environment I grew up in.” It’s little surprise then that Mellor, who was shy, took refuge in a dream world of stardom relayed by copies of Smash Hits and the ever-present telly (“my babysitter”). Their first obsession was Michael Jackson, with Judy Garland following at uni, but once they got to art college the approach changed from just plain adoration. For one thing, Mellor had only a rudimentary art education to build on, which until then had consisted of Open University programmes on the French impressionists and whatever could be gleaned from books found in the school’s scant library. “This was the 1980s – there were no artists in the mainstream news,” Mellor says, laughing. “I thought I’d go to art school and be the first woman artist!” At first, Mellor would reject certain people as possible subjects because they had a dark side, but this ended up becoming their attraction. “I worked it out a couple of years later and was interested in them for that reason: their complicated, messy, unsavoury qualities, as well as their extraordinary skill.” Complicated, messy, unsavoury – it all leads us inevitably to the Goldsmiths episode. The gist of it is that allegations surfaced on Twitter last year that Mellor had essentially masqueraded as non-binary to their students, inviting them to confide and share their experiences, which the artist then used for the purpose of their book Sirens. Leaked emails from Goldsmiths suggested that there was prior warning that Mellor would also be “Tippy” (who had their own separate social media account), but the furore flared up over the idea of gender taken on as a kind of lark – and, obviously, the deceiving of students. Yet, according to Mellor, who didn’t comment at the time, the people kicking off weren’t their own students – more other students and activists who didn’t have the full picture. “There were no complaints made by students internally to me whatsoever,” they say today, sounding both bruised and bemused. As for Sirens, it wasn’t reportage at all, they say indignantly, but “a satirical non-memoir”. The book played around with various personas, and this has been Mellor’s modus operandi in their work for years. “Yes, I am non-binary, but also I am playful with that,” they tell me. They started using they/them a few years ago, but can’t remember when exactly. When I note that they seem particularly insistent on the notion of “playfulness”, they say that it “refers to my own history of play with gender in my work and person before and after the culture shifted to embracing new ways to self identify”. Mellor puts a premium on playfulness. I wonder aloud if it’s harder to do that now, though – whether what passed muster on the scrappy queer scene of the 90s doesn’t quite cut it in a more censorious and self-defining 2020. “I don’t know – I’m a bit suspicious of people in middle age criticising young people,” they reply. “That just seems like a trap. I’m not saying [no] completely, but to me, that doesn’t seem like a positive way to think about young people. Young queer people, relative to me, less playful? No, I would never say that. Absolutely not.” Mellor doesn’t feel the need to apologise for the incident. “It doesn’t offend me if people feel I was faking that,” Mellor says. “And I would defend the right of somebody who wasn’t non-binary to do the things I was accused of, but didn’t do! Ha! So that’s the irony.” The bio of Mellor’s Instagram, by the way, reads: “Gallows Humour Advocate”. It’s also set to private. The whole episode has to some extent ended up being weirdly liberating for Mellor, who calls it a rite of passage. And you can only hope that Michael is somewhere out there, watching benevolently. Would you have liked to have gone for a drink with him? “I don’t know if he’d have a drink with me, but I would have a drink with him, maybe.” Oh come on – it’s George! “I would have a drink, I would have a smoke,” the artist eventually says, grinning – because of course, Michael really loved a good toke. “Yeah. A massive smoke in front of the TV, and a five-hour chat about the scene!” • Mellor’s mural will be unveiled on 19 September on Kingsbury Road, London, as part of the year-long programme Studio Voltaire: Elsewhere and Brent Biennial 2020.