“I’ve always had a very strange sense of my own future,” said pop musician George Michael, then 23, a year before he released his acclaimed debut album Faith. “And as a child even, I had no idea that I could write or sing, I was convinced that I was going to be a pop singer.”

Now part of the lengthy interview gets the animation treatment by American broadcasting network PBS via its web series Blank on Blank. Originally conducted in 1986 by music producer Joe Smith, who also authored 1989’s Off the Record, the video features Michael, who died in December 2016, talking about his childhood and Wham!’s tour of communist China, where authorities banned concert goers from dancing.

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“The first feeling was of failure,” Michael says in the video. “There was no way we could communicate. And when we actually found out what had gone on [with people being told not to dance] I was just furious. Obviously, I felt some responsibility at the time to represent my generation from the west in a good light and pop music in a good light. After that I realised that they had no real intention of allowing people to absorb what we were doing, I just felt really betrayed.”

The musician, already hugely popular, also spoke about fame and wanting to move beyond the pop ballads for which he became famous. “I’m more experienced sexually than I was as an 18-year-old,” Michael said. “So maybe it’s time for that to start reflecting in the music.”