RAYE, Sombr and Teddy Swims honour George Michael

Sunday’s CBS and MTV broadcast lands days before the tenth anniversary of his death, with the Faith Tour live album and film still to come.

The 2026 MTV Video Music Awards will include a tribute to George Michael. RAYE, Sombr and Teddy Swims are set to perform a medley in his honour, with Adam Blackstone as musical director. The ceremony takes place on Sunday 27 September 2026 and will be broadcast on CBS and MTV.

The announcement was made on 22 September 2026. It arrives as the tenth anniversary of Michael’s death on 25 December 2016 draws near, and as the live album and film *George Michael: The Faith Tour* approach their release. For listeners who still play those records every day, the night is less a memorial slot than a chance to hear the catalogue treated as a living craft.

From Bushey to the solo years

Michael first rose with Andrew Ridgeley in Wham!, the English pop duo formed in Bushey in 1981. Between 1982 and 1986, the pair sold more than 30 million certified records worldwide and became one of the defining acts of the decade. The run took in the album *Fantastic* in 1983 and *Make It Big* in 1984, the year of the single *Last Christmas*. It was followed by *Music from the Edge of Heaven* and the hits collections that closed the chapter in 1986, among them *The Final: 14 Greatest Hits* and *The Singles: Echoes from the Edge of Heaven*.

As a solo artist, he became one of the best-selling musicians of all time, with sales estimated at between 100 million and 125 million records worldwide. He scored ten number-one songs on the US Billboard Hot 100 and thirteen number-one songs on the UK Singles Chart. *Faith*, issued in 1987, fixed the next phase of the work; *Listen Without Prejudice* followed. Michael was known as a creative force in songwriting, vocal performance and visual presentation. He won two Grammy Awards, three Brit Awards, twelve Billboard Music Awards and four MTV Video Music Awards. The Radio Academy named him the most played artist on British radio between 1984 and 2004. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2023.

Why this stage, and why now

A medley at the VMAs places three current performers in front of that body of work, with Blackstone directing the music. The awards marked Michael four times while he was alive; bringing the songs back under those lights keeps the craft, not only the name, in the frame. The timing is deliberate in another sense. The forthcoming *George Michael: The Faith Tour* live album and film return the stage material from the *Faith* era to circulation. That record is most closely tied to his solo breakthrough after the Wham! years.

What the medley will contain has not been detailed beyond the three singers and the musical director. That leaves the arrangement and the song choices for the night itself. For an audience that knows the Wham! singles, the *Faith* run and the later solo work by heart, the point is less novelty than continuity: the same songs, carried by new voices, on a stage that once recognised the man who wrote and sang them.

Sunday’s broadcast is the immediate next step. The tenth anniversary follows in December. Between the two sits the Faith Tour release, still to come, another route back into a catalogue that never really left the radio. The VMAs tribute does not rewrite that history; it simply puts it under lights again, for one night, with RAYE, Sombr and Teddy Swims out front.