Wham Bam, thank you Mam!
In the great celebrity cull of 2016 – the horrific holocaust which claimed the lives of Dame David, Leonard Cohen, Pete Burns, Prince, Victoria Wood, and the spoon player from The Wheel Tappers and Shunters Club (that was a hard one) – one death loomed over them all: the man born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou in East Finchley on 25 June 1963.
Humanitarian, philanthropist, all round good egg, George Michael’s untimely passing affected me more than any other. I used to see the horrible headlines; caught doing unmentionables in toilets, driving cars into Snappy Snaps, falling out of other vehicles on the M1, and I’d think ‘Ahh George just write us some more great songs, and tour; we all love you.’
Alas, I’m the last person in the world to tell someone how to live their life. Or in George’s case lives.
When the stories trickled out about all the fantastic stuff he’d done in a very George clandestine fashion to help people in need over the years – be it working in soup kitchens, giving away pots of cash to this charity and that charity, paying for a couple’s IVF treatment and so on and so forth – the list is endless. As did so many of us, I thought ‘Now there is one truly great guy‘, and his tragic death robbed the world of not only a consummate artist but an all-round brilliant human.
But this is not just a George Michael feature, it’s an Andrew Ridgeley one too (he‘s the ‘other‘ one, of Egyptian, Italian and Scottish heritage). For together, the boys who met at Bushey Meads School in 1975 went on to become one of the best selling pop duos of all-time, Wham! They took the name from a rap that Andy had made up and as for that final character? In typically comic book fashion worthy of Roy Lichtenstein, Yog declared, “There was no point in calling yourself Wham if you weren’t going to have an exclamation mark!”
Following on from my articles on this website covering Saint Etienne and the purple regnant Prince, Steve Pafford asked me if I would pen a third to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Watford Wonders’ debut album Fantastic entering the charts at No. 1 in Britain. He feels he was perhaps a little too close to George on a personal level to be objective, though you can hear extracts from his taped conversations with his fellow Hampstead half-Greek chum in the brand new official Netflix documentary on the duo that premiered today.
For such a new pop act that were perceived little more than a singles band, that Fantastic achieved pole position by pushing down the three biggest albums of 1983 – The Police’s Synchronicity, Michael Jackson’s Thriller and David Bowie’s Let’s Dance – was no mean feat. Wham! had arrived, and even though it would be over less than three years later. Within this short span, it became abundantly clear that George was the songwriting and producing talent and future solo if sporadic megastar.
So without further ado, and to conveniently tie in with The Singles: Echoes From The Edge Of Heaven compilation, here is a Perfect 10 of Wham! on 45.
Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do) (1982)
I resisted the lure of the bouffant debutantes for years, because of the teenage conditioning that said “Wham!’s for girls, Duran’s for lads.” (So who were Culture Club supposed to be for then – intersexers? – Ed.) Which is odd really because when I finally gave in and placed my rosette on the lapel of Whamness, the reality was there all along.
Wham! are miles better than Duran. Oddly enough, Simon Le Bon was born in Bushey, the very place George and Andrew met. It was the place where you were raised by nice upwardly mobile parents, in the type of safe stranglehold that the Pet Shop Boys later aptly described on Suburbia.
Wham’s debut release was based on Andrew’s lack of work, or indeed lack of ambition. It wasn’t explicitly saying the dole is bad, or “look at them workshy fops robbing the state”, etc, it was ambiguous, and sarcastic. And it was sexy too, capturing the Chic groove that Rapper’s Delight has, and is arguably no more lyrically naive, ie why shouldn’t Home Counties boys do rap? George had a part-time job as a DJ, and on one night he heard Level 42 and decided to crib a bit of Brit Funk, and weld it to a lyric that was biting satire. And hysterically funny.
These were not words you could attach to the higher middle class mock working class miserabilisms of Joe Strummer. In one fell swoop, Wham! had outfoxed the old guard. They may have hated it, but it was attracting the shop girls, and bored housewives and the youngsters and the boys who wanted to be the boy about town. They were selling the idea of the modern day dandy, which was kind of appropriate seeing as how both George and Andrew were both enamoured with Adam Ant in a visual sense if not much of a musical one.
Young Guns (Go For It!) (1982)
Oh it’s another top draw, following from the early promise of the sadly flop debut. Wham Rap! would belatedly become success on the back of this sophomore single. Another kitchen sink Brit Funk drama that owed a debt of denseness to the likes of Pigbag, Spandau Ballet and especially ABC: with his famously golden ears, George was impressed by Steve Brown’s horn-fuelled production of Tears Are Not Enough and tapped him for the rest of what would become Fantastic.
Lyrically, Young Guns is like a homoerotic retooling of Squeeze’s Up The Junction: A guy is jealous of the girlfriend of his best friend. Shirlie Holliman had even been dating Andrew so art plus imitation equals life, however much you choose it.
By osmosis, this has Andrew’s paw prints on it, but it’s George is trying to tell his muse – the young gun of the lyric – to be young, free and single, with the cutting line “Death by matrimony” a defiant declaration that Yog was happy to stay solo. Sleepless nights on an HP bed doesn’t sound so fun neither. It’s pure Difford and Tilbrook, and at this stage Wham! were immersed in presenting the real world. As opposed to a year later when artifice crept in.
Thanks to an act unavailable for a Top of The Pops slot (said to be either Scarlet Party or Status Quo – Ed.), Young Guns was the song that broke Wham!. No holding back now.
Club Tropicana (1983)
The duo’s third single, Bad Boys, reached No. 2 in May of ’83 and gave the lads their biggest single success until 1984. Both wilfully preposterous and extraordinarily camp (“Easy girls – AND LATE NIGHTS! / Cigarettes – AND LOVE BITES!”), it’s a song with its tongue cemented to several cheeks that got taken in deadly earnest. George and Andrew grew to hate it, with its author dismissing it as “writing to formula” and denying it a place on Wham’s 1997 greatest hits CD If You Were There…
Never mind, because a slightly less frivolous 45 swiftly followed. Now we‘re on to the tanned twosome’s clubby critique of the Blitz Kids, and the sun-kissed Ibiza life, all wrapped up as one long holiday. It’s a pertinent lyric, and one that aimed its arrow at the Club 18-30 party crowd: sun, sex, and return home with a party anthem and an STI. The party anthem in this case being the euphoric but still witty punctuated Club Tropicana.
Vocal wise, it’s here where George came into his own with one eye on the zeitgeist: let’s parody the package tour and sell it to the exact same audience who lap up these low-culture expeditions: “You can suntan”. It’s sarcastically assured but its also the final single of its ilk. Because George had his eyes on bigger prizes and different corners. It’s also at this point during the filming of the Club Tropicana video shoot at the famous Pikes that he chose to come out as gay to Shirley and Andrew. (I’m assuming Dee C Lee wasn’t in on the secret, especially as she’d started cohorting with Paul Weller, who George had a tricky time with – Ed.)
The 1980s was a grim time to come out and being from a family whose patriarch Jack was hardly likely to be seen skimming through the Book of Gay Sex (he’d have probably burnt it), George generally towed the line. Privately out in a lot of ways, but in terms of the public persona very much in the closet.
Blue (Armed With Love) (1983)
So, synth-wave. There’s a school of thought that suggests Wham! helped invent the sub-genre (Ah, but did Tangelos and Jean-Michel Jarre get there first? – Ed.) with this gorgeous quiet storm of a tune, hastily bunged out on the B-Side to Club Tropicana – a rare occasion when the never-prolific George didn’t use an instrumental of the A-side as its flipside.
A semi-instrumental slow jam dub, Blue is ostensibly a dry run for the broken-hearted electro blues of Faith at its most coy. It doesn’t even get going til three minutes in – remember when tunes could breathe and not be Spotify-tailored to be in and out from the second bar in two minutes.
A more developed version with sung verses was later performed on tour, and the recording derived from the Wham! in China: Foreign Skies concert film has become better known due to its inclusion on various repackages. Alas, I have a soft spot for the studio take, which was featured on original vinyl pressings of The Final, the Wham! singles compilation from 1986, and arguably still the best.
Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go (1984)
By 1984, Wham! had been extricated from their punitive record deal with Innervision (last gasp cash-in Club Fantastic Megamix? Well, it‘s here) and were now signed directly to CBS/Epic. Admittedly, most artists’ first contracts are never great, but not only did Mark Dean gift the world Wham! but he’d had a hand in popularising Soft Cell and ABC so it’s not all bad.
In an interview with Number One magazine, George made the unbelievably confident declaration, “I’m just writing number ones now,” and then laid out his masterplan for the year, four singles and one album, all chart-toppers. With the same kind of steely totalitarian vision and unshakeable belief as Margaret Thatcher but cuddlier and with better hair, Yog was actually 99% spot on, as the final Wham! release of 1984 – Last Christmas/Everything She Wants – did top the charts in several countries including the US but, thanks to the rush release of a certain Band Aid, just not the UK… until January 2021.
But what about Wake Me Up then? The title was inspired by a miswritten note that Andrew Ridgeley left on the door of his fridge for George. It raced to the top of the charts, and rightly so. It was a no-town Motown pastiche, name-checking Doris Day, and big boom booms, kinda like the Shangri-Las let loose on the set of Carry On Camping. It wasn’t a song, it was an event. Make it Big. Choose Life, Number One (specially for Top of The Pops viewers, natch), all more-is-more capitalist slogans that led Paul Weller to utter the famous line to the then Smash Hits scribe Neil Tennant, “It’s like punk never happened.” And amen to that.
Freedom (1984)
So so strongly did Go-Go come to identify Wham! after its release that it was probably just as well that the follow-up 45, issued just over two months later, was done so in George Michael’s name rather than the band’s, because by the summer of ’84 Wham! were everywhere. In other words, full on Whamageddon,
Andrew had become the subject of tawdry tabloid stories dismissing him as talentless, a fraud, and a gad about town. My favourite front page was “Randy Andy in naked five-in-a-bed, tug of love, porno sex-change wife swap, spy riddle.” Alas, it was a mock up headline but I so wish it was true. Wouldn’t you?
George, on the other hand, had followed his first solo 45 – the evergreen Careless Whisper, like you didn’t know – with a song that decries “death by matrimony” with a lyric that seems a bit iffy about open relationships and those who can’t commit to monogamy, a flip on a “Men Are From Mars” caricature of gender relations, and a case study in fidelity as game theory.
“I don’t want your freedom, part-time love just brings me down!” George says he wants to be exclusive, but his “girl’ thinks otherwise, and what really rubs salt in the wounds isn’t even “the other boys”, it’s the way she delights in mocking him for missing out. Even telling porkers would be better: “If you loved me baby you’d deny it / But you laugh and tell me I should try it” is one of the more sheepish lines in pop, and Yog’s performance hits the right note of petulance, befuddlement and teenage hurt. There is a school of thought that suggests the femme fatale would deny herself the freedom if she loved George, but instead the coldhearted slapper wants him to shag around too, rather than making up stories and covering up.
Musically, Freedom is an upbeat happy/sad song that pulls its emotional punch by employing ABBA’s old trick of masking distraught lyrics. George had found a niche by pastiching songs from the Swinging Sixties, and in Freedom you have a bright and bouncy Tamla-style stomper that’s so evocative of the decade when George and Andrew were born that if there’s a better attempt at The Supremes singing a lost Northern Soul classic written by The Beatles I’ve yet to hear it. Search out the seven+ minute Long Mix (currently streaming on the Wham! 12” Mixes EP) for the full Fab Four meets Motown guitar and horns experience.
Everything She Wants (1985)
George and Andrew were now breathing rarefied air. In a six-month span, the duo had become monomaniacal success robots, launching three singles to the top of the American Billboard Hot 100. All those 45s came from sophomore set Make It Big, making Wham! the first act to land three No. 1s from the same album since the Saturday Night Fever-era Bee Gees. Even Thriller only got Michael Jackson to the top twice, with Billie Jean and Beat It. Moreover, in both music and subject matter, BJ seems to have inspired this, the mack daddy of Wham! tunes.
Both have the same kind of relentless thump over bleats of terror about impending fatherhood. But where Billie Jean is about denial and existential dread, Everything She Wants makes the situation a whole lot more mercenary by making it all about money. George came up with the beat first — a suitably nervous metronomic pulse with a Minimoogish squelchy synthetic bassline that (apparently it’s a Juno 106, which was all over I Want Your Sex too – Ed.) and reminds me of Prince at his most sparse.
It’s definitely in Wham territory but as Yog said to Smash Hits. “You improve, not by hard work, but by scrutinising it.” The songs, he means. He was never the prolific scribe in that area, but his quality control is the best of any songwriter, and more so in them carefree days of Wham!. The final single to get a hoisting from Make it Big, it’s a kind of victory lap and really, they arguably saved the best till last.
I’m Your Man (1985)
George Michael speaking shortly after the release of I‘m Your Man: “Let’s be honest, kids don’t see enough about sex. Kids are ignorant and neurotic about sex, and it has stayed off the television screen much more than it should.
“Kids should be allowed to see much more sex in terms of caring and love, as opposed to porno. Violence is not something that is incredibly natural to people, but sex is. It should be seen as something a lot more natural than violence.”
Yes, kids, Yog has discovered SEX! Of which later on seemed to be his downfall. I’m Your Man, is still a biggie, and even later referenced chord wise in Wake Up Boo! by The Boo Radleys. If you want joyous, you go to the top. And what’s more joyous than I’m your Man?
But it‘s all single entendres whereas before it was more playing on George and Andrew’s knowing humour. More nudge-nudge whereas this is just pure wink wink, wank wank. In my opinion, it’s a song about casual gay sex with, probably, a guy under 21. “Wanna take you, want to make you /But they tell me it’s a crime. Oh!”
A special shout out should go to the roll call of musicians, of which I’d spotlight the groovy bass of the brilliant Deon Estus. But for now it fits the Wham! singles remit. And hoorah, yet another number one in Britain. They really could do no wrong.
The Edge Of Heaven (1986)
Usually, when a group is on a roll, they do everything it their power to keep that roll going. That’s not what Wham! did. George announced they were calling it quits just before the release of his second solo single A Different Corner. Everything that followed rather coldly underlined quite how vestigial Wham! had become to him, as a band and brand.
The Edge Of Heaven EP would eventually appear in June 1986 to tie in with a farewell concert at Wembley, and while the lead track is a catchy, all-guns-blazing tune with crunchy guitar work and a nastily wailing-away sax, it’s not quite as great as the duo’s purple patch of ’82-’85.
The kitchen sink production sounds a bit muddy and mono-ish in places, as if it was mixed in a hurry. The song itself is another belter, another Number One, but it’s no I’m Your Man. Still, George and Andrew sound like they’re having a ball, even with Elton John on bar room piano. It’s the 45 that if you shoved all the buzzwords into a computer about how to make a Wham single, it would come up with this. It’s a tad hollow, but catchy as hell. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Where Did Your Heart Go?/Battlestations (1986)
Singled out and spun off from the EP to maintain momentum in some territories – Everything She Wants style – with its own black and white video to boot, is the slow mo of Where Did Your Heart Go? Never a regular turntable champion in my house (I would often listen more to the curious albeit effective update of Wham Rap!), it’s a pleasant cover of a ballad originally released by Was (Not Was) five years earlier. It’s a smoky, evocative track very much in Careless Whisper territory, yet riddled with typical-for-them Was non sequiturs (“We’ll share a rusty can of coke”?!) that George somehow gets to the emotional core of, turning what could’ve been a lark into an impassioned performance. Yog’s interpretive gifts are on gorgeous display here, and he sings like a Greek god. Which of course he is/was.
Here is the great thing about Wham! At the end of the day, they sold people a dream. We projected what we wanted: nice clean-cut boys with healthy tans and gleaming teeth, where every mother would say “Oh, that George is lovely, he’d make a great son-in-law.”
But what made Wham! was they were the antithesis of everything deemed dangerous by Enoch Powell: they were second generation immigrants, and fantastic poster boys for immigration at that. Coming from Somewhere Else isn’t a new thing of course, but it does creatively give you more of an edge to write about where you’ve landed up much more clearer than other people born in the place they’ve stayed in, or in the words of Oscar Wilde, “There’s no greater patriot than a foreigner.”
And he’s right. I think that gives them an advantage because if you come from somewhere else, there’s always that issue of alienation and a different way of looking at things. George was the spotty kid on the margins, big glasses, weight issues etc: the outsider. And of course he lied. All immigrant kids lied, to fit in.
It took a while but Yog learnt how to be comfortable in his own skin, at least regards to his sexuality. I mean, he’d sold us the idea of his being straight, so much so that when Boy George saw the headline “Pat Fernandez broke my Heart,” told Smash Hits, “The only thing Pat Fernandez broke of mine was my Hoover.” It was typically bitchy and mean spirited of O’Dowd because this was an era when to reach that zenith you generally had to be white, and straight. But when he blasted open the closet doors, he did in a way that was fantastic, and so inspiring, as is the final cut on this list.
With its red-light trombone and a brilliant line urging the listener to “Take off your designer clothes”), Battlestations is a fascinating anomaly in the Wham! catalogue. was the first flowerings of George’s then-nascent interest in sleek, stripped-down funk, based around a sleazy snare track of the kind that Prince would much more famously use on Sign “O” The Times the following year.
Raw, minimal, and influenced by contemporary dancefloor trends – but still very much a pop song – it gives a glimpse of what might have happened had the duo stayed together and taken a hipper, more experimental direction. And that rattling chorus is superb, a precursor to the nervy sparseness of Faith’s Hard Day right there.
And if you were there, you’d know.
Mark Gibson
A Wham!tastic anniversary: George Michael at 60, Fantastic at 40 is here
I Want Your Sex: Remembering George Michael is here
