George Michael’s The Faith Tour arrived on November 6 with 18 previously unreleased live recordings from his 1988 Paris concerts. The collection captures his first solo world tour, with material from Faith alongside songs from the Wham! years. The full programme is available digitally and in selected physical editions, while the standalone double vinyl presents a shorter, 16-track version of the show.
The opening of The Faith Tour takes a few moments to establish where George Michael was in 1988. A “Freedom” introduction gives way to “I Want Your Sex,” placing a song from his first solo album near the start of a show that still has room for the years that came before it. The new release brings recordings from his Paris concerts together for listeners who have never been able to hear this programme as an official live album.
Sony Music released the collection on November 6, 2026. Its standard programme has 18 previously unreleased live tracks. The recordings come from the first solo world tour, a period when Michael was carrying songs associated with Wham! into the same rooms as the material that had established his solo career. A concert could give those two catalogues a common sound without making the songs feel as though they came from the same moment.
“Everything She Wants” takes more than nine minutes here. The time makes a difference to a song audiences had known as a single. A live arrangement can give the band room to establish a groove and carry it beyond the point at which the radio version would have ended. George Michael can change the pace of his phrasing against it and leave parts of the performance to the players around him.
Other tracks draw attention to smaller changes in the sound. “Father Figure” and “A Different Corner” depend on the space around the vocal, even in a concert large enough for an arrangement such as “Everything She Wants” to stretch out. Putting those recordings on the same set gives a sense of the choices Michael was making as a live singer. A quieter song can change how an audience hears what comes immediately before and after it.
“Monkey” opens the second part of the programme. “Hand to Mouth,” which follows, brings one of Faith’s more socially observant songs into the sequence. Later, “One More Try” runs beyond six minutes and gives George Michael a long passage in which to build the vocal. The movement between those parts shows how the material from the solo album could do different work when organised for a show.
“Careless Whisper,” co-written by Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, runs for nearly eight minutes in the Paris version. The track was already one of his most widely recognised recordings by the time he toured with Faith. Here it belongs to a programme that also features material from the group and the solo record. The scale of the performance gives listeners something beyond the recognition of the saxophone line and melody that first made the song familiar.
The format matters for anyone choosing a physical edition. The standalone double LP carries 16 tracks, omitting “Hand to Mouth” and “Play That Funky Music.” The picture-disc version is also a double LP and is sold directly to consumers. The full programme is available in the larger box, which includes three LPs, two CDs and a 136-page book featuring photographs from the tour. The double vinyl is an edited route through the concert. The box restores the two performances that do not fit into that edition.
There is also an audio Blu-ray through the SDE Surround Series. It gives people with compatible equipment another way to hear the restored material. George Michael: The Faith Tour, the concert film, draws on footage from Paris and should be distinguished from the audio-only disc. One lets the listener follow the sound as a recording, while the film can show how a performance and its staging developed together.
The tour eventually covered 109 shows in 16 countries. The Paris recordings return to two nights within that much larger run. George Michael had to find a way to move between the repertory audiences already wanted and the songs that were giving him a new place as a solo artist. The long performances in this release show how the arrangements themselves could help him make that move.
It has taken nearly 38 years for these recordings to become an official album. The intervening time has made the songs familiar in other forms, which makes differences in duration and sequencing particularly easy to hear. For someone who knows the studio records, The Faith Tour offers a chance to hear George Michael choosing how long to stay with a song and where to put it in an evening. The extended “Everything She Wants” is one place to hear what he and his band could make of those choices.
