In Netflix’s new Wham! documentary (helpfully titled Wham!), part of the 80s pop duo’s story is told via the medium of the scrapbooks that Andrew Ridgeley’s mum Jennifer kept on the band from day one. She stuck in their earliest press clippings and dutifully labelled them in her rounded handwriting, rendered in blue felt-tip pen. She kept them up through their subsequent superstardom, right up until Ridgeley and George Michael called it quits in 1986. Even though we only see snippets of them, they’re clearly beautiful, loving, personal documentations of pop fandom, the kind that even those of us who don’t have children in leading pop bands are prone to keeping as young pop fans.
We’d love to see scans of your personal pop scrapbooks and learn the stories behind them: what motivated you to compile them, what ages of your life they span, what you felt you were documenting in them at the time and how they appear to you now, why you finally called it quits, and what possessed you to keep hold of them.
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This Community callout closed on 5 September 2023.
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