George Michael's 'The Faith Tour' Live Album Arrives November 6: 18 Unreleased Tracks From Paris 1988

Nearly a decade after his death, one of pop's great voices is about to fill rooms again. George Michael Entertainment and Sony Music Entertainment have announced The Faith Tour, an 18-track live album of previously unreleased recordings due worldwide on November 6, 2026 — drawn from the Paris-Bercy stop on the European leg of the Faith Tour in 1988, the superstar's first solo concert tour.

This is not a compilation of familiar studio cuts with crowd noise. The album is a complete archival concert document: live renditions of every classic hit single from Faith — the title track, Father Figure, One More Try, Monkey — alongside Careless Whisper, plus a set of covers that trace his musical DNA. He tips his hat to his heroes with Stevie Wonder's Love's in Need of Love Today and Labelle's Lady Marmalade, and he nods to his own past with two of WHAM!'s most beloved hits, Everything She Wants and I'm Your Man — the 24-year-old completing, on stage, his transformation from adored band member to bona fide solo pop superstar.

The production pedigree is serious. The concert was shot on 35mm film and kept for decades in the archives of Sony and George Michael Entertainment; the footage has been restored, and the concert's sound was remixed and remastered with Chris Porter — the singer's longtime collaborator — and David Austin, then adapted for immersive spatial audio. Mastering engineer John Webber handled the final pass. This is the level of care usually reserved for canon-level documents, which tells you exactly how the estate views this material: not as a bonus disc, but as a time capsule from a defining era of pop music.

The physical editions reflect that ambition. Sony's announcement lists vinyl, a limited-edition picture disc, CD, and a deluxe box set with a book of previously unseen tour images; the box set configuration runs to three vinyl records, two CDs and a 136-page book devoted to the tour. Fans got their first taste on September 2, when a live version of Father Figure was released as the preview single — a smart choice, since that song was the fourth single from Faith to top the Billboard Hot 100 after its release in late December 1987.

And the album doesn't arrive alone. The restored George Michael: The Faith Tour concert film is heading to cinemas — North American theaters on December 11 — with the trailer already out and a ten-minute unreleased short film by Mary McCartney, Finding Faith, drawing on archived audio and found footage from the 1986–1988 period to set the tour in context. November's album and December's film make this a two-act archival event: first the concert in your living room, then the full cinematic experience on the big screen.

It's worth remembering what Faith the album actually was. George Michael wrote, arranged, produced and performed it almost entirely himself — the emergence of a new kind of pop icon, one capable of blending soul, R&B and rock into a sleek, emotionally driven, singular sound. After its release he became the only British male solo artist ever to score four U.S. number-one singles from a single album on the Billboard Hot 100 — a record that, remarkably, has yet to be matched. The album's influence is cited by a whole swathe of today's biggest stars, from Taylor Swift to Sam Smith to Harry Styles. This live document is the sound of that achievement at its absolute peak — not in the studio, but in front of a Paris arena, at 24 years old.

What makes the Paris-Bercy setlist such a smart archival choice is its shape: it's the whole arc in one night. The Faith material shows the 24-year-old at the peak of his solo powers, the WHAM! selections acknowledge exactly where he came from, and the Stevie Wonder and Labelle covers point to where his ear always was — American soul and R&B, the foundation everything else was built on. BroadwayWorld frames the album as both time capsule and celebration of one of the most frequently referenced concert tours of all time, and that's the right frame: this isn't a greatest-hits repackaging, it's a single evening, preserved whole.

George Michael died in the early hours of Christmas Day in 2016, of natural causes. The decade since has brought reissues and tributes, but a complete, never-before-released concert from his imperial phase is something else — pop scholarship and fan devotion meeting at exactly the right moment. November 6 can't come fast enough.

Mark your calendars: The Faith Tour live album arrives worldwide November 6, 2026, with the concert film following in North American theaters December 11. For more music news, keep it on the Previously music desk — and catch this week's country chart records while you're here.