The first cassette tape I ever bought with my own money was Make It Big by Wham!
And by “my own money,” I mean babysitting money—the original Gen X venture-capital fund.
I can still remember the particular thrill of buying something I desperately wanted with money I had earned myself, and apparently I chose wisely because some forty years later, Wham! still occupies a ridiculously large piece of real estate in my musical heart. “Last Christmas” remains my favorite Christmas song of all time. And don’t you try sneaking in the versions by other artists. It’s only my favorite when done by Wham!, thank you very much.
So when I met Janey Lee Grace at a podcasting conference and discovered that this perfectly lovely woman standing in front of me had actually been a backing singer for Wham!, there was really no universe in which I was going to behave normally.
I was fangirling. Big time.
Thankfully, Janey was gracious about it.
Which, after reading From Wham! to Woo: A Life on the Mic, seems entirely on brand.
Because while the title may lead you to believe this is primarily a nostalgic romp through the pop-music world of the 1980s—and there is plenty here for those of us who still believe George Michael’s hair deserved its own billing—this memoir turns out to be about something much more interesting: reinvention.
Janey has lived what feels like several entirely different lives without ever completely abandoning the woman who lived the one before.
She takes us back to her early ambitions in music, forming bands, gigging and eventually landing in the extraordinary orbit of some of the biggest names in British pop. She sang backing vocals for artists including Mari Wilson, Boy George, Kim Wilde and, yes, George Michael and Wham!, including touring with them during that extraordinary era when Wham! wasn’t merely successful—they were a cultural phenomenon.
For a Gen X reader, these sections are pure catnip.
But what makes them work is that Janey isn’t writing as though she knew at the time that she was living through something iconic. She’s writing from the peculiar vantage point most of us eventually reach in middle age: looking backward at our younger selves and thinking, Good Lord. We actually did that.
There are the gigs and the hair and the music-industry stories, but there is also the uncertainty of trying to build a career in a business that isn’t exactly famous for providing stability. Janey eventually had her own taste of chart success with Cola Boy and the Top-10 hit “7 Ways to Love,” another chapter in a career that refused to follow anything resembling a straight line.
And I loved that.
Because this isn’t really a story about climbing one ladder.
It’s about climbing one ladder, discovering another ladder leaning against a completely different building, climbing that one for a while, finding a microphone somewhere, writing some books, discovering holistic health, getting sober and eventually realizing that maybe the ladders were never the point.
Then comes radio.
For more than two decades, Janey worked alongside the legendary Steve Wright on BBC Radio 2’s Steve Wright in the Afternoon. Her stories from those years give the reader a glimpse behind the curtain of broadcasting—the personalities, the guests, the ridiculous moments and the particular chemistry required to make radio feel effortless when, of course, it isn’t.
Those sections took on additional poignancy for me knowing that Wright died in 2024. Janey isn’t simply cataloguing a career achievement. She’s remembering a friend and colleague with whom she shared a huge portion of her professional life.
But somewhere along the journey, the book begins making the transition promised by its title.
We move from the Wham to the Woo.
Janey became increasingly interested in natural and holistic living, eventually writing Imperfectly Natural Woman and building an entirely new career around health and wellbeing. What I appreciated is that she doesn’t pretend there was some perfectly orchestrated pivot in which Pop-Star Janey packed up her leg warmers on Friday and Holistic Janey emerged fully enlightened on Monday morning.
Life doesn’t work that way.
We accumulate versions of ourselves.
And that, to me, is where this memoir becomes far more relatable than a celebrity tell-all.
Janey’s exploration of alcohol and her eventual decision to live alcohol-free adds another layer entirely. She writes about recognizing the role alcohol had begun to play in her life and eventually moving toward sobriety—a journey that ultimately became not just personal but professional through The Sober Club and her work helping others reconsider their own relationships with alcohol.
As a sober woman myself, those parts naturally resonated with me. There is something particularly powerful about reading another woman’s account of realizing that alcohol doesn’t have to completely destroy your life before you’re allowed to decide your life would be better without it.
And perhaps that’s the thread connecting all of Janey’s seemingly unrelated careers.
She keeps paying attention: To what works and what doesn’t anymore. To what feels authentic and to what needs to change.
Toward the end, Janey distills some of what she’s learned into her own “12 Rules for Life.” I liked that choice because by then we’ve watched her earn them. These aren’t commandments handed down from a mountaintop by someone who figured out life at 27. They’re observations collected through decades of music, broadcasting, motherhood, wellbeing, alcohol, sobriety, success, disappointment, and starting over.
That makes a difference.
At the risk of sounding like a stalker, I occasionally wanted Janey to linger longer. She has lived such an unusually rich life that there were stories I wanted her to crack open another inch. Memoir readers are greedy that way. Give us the backstage door and suddenly we’re asking to look inside every dressing room.
There are some moments when the book moves quickly through experiences that could probably sustain chapters of their own. (Yet isn’t that just like a rockstar and those touring with rockstars? They roll into town, they’re here, they sweep you off your feet, and just like that, they’re gone.)
I sometimes wanted more reflection from Present-Day Janey about Younger Janey: what she misunderstood then, what she sees differently now, and which moments changed her in ways she couldn’t recognize until years later.
But honestly? That momentum also suits her.
Janey Lee Grace doesn’t appear to have spent much of her life standing still.
From Wham! to Woo is part music memoir, part broadcasting memoir, part sobriety story, part wellness journey and part love letter to the gloriously nonlinear business of becoming yourself.
And maybe that’s what I liked most about it.
By the time we reach our fifties and beyond, most of us have collected enough former selves to populate a small dinner party.
The teenager, the career woman, the mother, the woman who made questionable choices. The woman who survived the aforementioned questionable choices. The woman who changed her mind. The woman who finally stopped doing something that wasn’t serving her anymore. The woman who discovered something entirely new and thought, Well, why the hell not?
Janey doesn’t throw those women away. She brings them with her.
Which means that despite the famous names, Top-10 records, BBC studios and touring with one of the biggest bands of the 1980s, From Wham! to Woo ultimately feels less like a book about celebrity and more like a book about evolution.
Of course, I may never entirely recover from the fact that someone I’ve actually met sang backup for George Michael. There are limits to personal growth.
Four sobees—and an enthusiastic recommendation for fellow Gen X readers, music lovers, sober and sober-curious women, and anyone who has ever looked at the strange collection of lives they’ve lived and wondered how on earth they all belonged to the same person.
Turns out, they do.
#QUITLIT Sobees Score: 4 out of 5
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