Every Christmas George Michael’s song “Last Christmas” with WHAM! starts creeping up the charts as fans mourn his death and celebrate the holidays. This year was the 5th anniversary of the singer‘s death as he passed away on Christmas Day 2016 at the age of 53. His long-time friend Andros Georgiou spoke to Mirror in an interview published on Christmas and he gave insight into how the passing of Michael’s first greatest love Anselmo Feleppa affected the singer and his life.

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Michael’s song “Jesus to a Child” is a tribute to Feleppa who was a Brazilian fashion designer and the singer‘s first real love. Feleppa passed away from “Aids-related illness” in 1993 when he was 33, a year into their relationship, per Mirror. “George was the love of his life and if he hadn’t died I think George would still be here,” he told the outlet. “After Anselmo, he didn’t find real love,” he said explaining the singer just had a lot of hookups. He “met lots of people but he never found what he had with Anselmo. I saw how happy they were. I think he was quite lost after Anselmo died, it hit him hard,” his friend added.

Michael met Feleppa when he was 27 and previously revealed he knew shortly after they met that he was terminally ill. In 2007 he told Desert Island Discs, ”It was a very strange first love. It was very distorted by the situation. This was the first love of my entire life.”

“It was tragic that I lost him, but it was a wonderful experience meeting him. There have only been three times I’ve really fallen for anyone,” he said. “And each time, on first sight, something has clicked that told me I was going to know that person. It happened with Anselmo across a lobby,” he reminisced.

Michael, born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou catapulted into fame in the 1980s with Andrew Ridgeley in Wham! Before going solo to sell more than 100 million albums worldwide. He was found dead in bed in his home in Oxfordshire by his partner Fadi Fawaz. “We were supposed to be going for Christmas lunch. I went round there to wake him up and he was just gone, lying peacefully in bed,” the celebrity hairstylist at the time. It was confirmed a few months later that the singer died of natural causes and had a dilated cardiomyopathy with myocarditis and fatty liver.