George Michael wrote in yesterdays Sunday Times what he thought of British music at the moment:

"The corporate guys have spent the past 15 years doing their best to relieve artists of their art, and by now they have pretty much succeeded. In the process of ignoring real talent...in favour of malleable, pretty young things, you are depriving the country of one of its greatest assets."

He also said that in 1986 British music accounted for 32% of record sales in the United States but in 1999 that figure dropped to 0.2%.

On Wednesday George Michael paid $1.45m for the upright Steinway on which John Lennon composed Imagine, he said he bought the piano because it symbolized a peak in popular culture. He also said that he 'wanted to keep it out of tiny hands in Tokyo'. He intends handing the piano over to the Beatles' Story museum in Liverpool.

"It was a time when people expressed a naive but genuine belief that they could change the world with music and conviction...These people wrote their own songs, sang them with a variety of untrained voices, drank, took drugs, drowned, marched, looked ridiculous and made amazing, beautiful music."