Young Guns (Go For It!)
Just days before George Michael died, pop threw up one of its strange coincidences. The Top of the Pops repeats on BBC4 featured Wham!’s debut performance on the programme, an appearance so effervescent that even John Peel, presenting that evening in late 1982 was moved to comment — without any apparent sarcasm — on its excellence. Michael and Andrew Ridgeley — in tandem with Pepsi and Shirley — burst on to and almost through the screen, suggesting that here was a form of suburban expression that was neither angst-ridden nor angry, but joyous and self-confident. Michael was the cocky lad about town, living for dancing, contemptuous of those already shackling themselves. He was a fresh-faced boy, bursting with life, and eager to live it: “I said ‘Soul Boy, let’s hit the town!’ / I said ‘Soul Boy, what’s with the frown?’ / But in return, all you could say was / ‘Hi George, meet my fiancee.’” It was glorious. It formed a pair with Wham!’s second single, the equally ebullient Wham! Rap, which suggested that being out of work was less a hindrance than something you should twist to your advantage: “Gonna live my life, sharp as a knife / I’ve found my groove, and I just can’t lose / A1 style, from head to toe / Cool cat flash, gonna let you know / I’m a soul boy, I’m a dole boy /Take pleasure in leisure, I believe in joy.” This wasn’t the way George Michael presented himself or his music for very long, but it deserves to be recalled that Wham! burst into British pop as a dose of aural sunshine, their blinding white teeth, their lustrous tans and their penchant for dressing like it was summer in St Tropez even if it was winter in Watford selling a dream, which is what great pop has always done.
A Different Corner
Michael had already had one solo single while he was still in Wham!, Careless Whisper reaching No 1 in 1984 (and gifting the world the perfect couplet “I’m never going to dance again / Guilty feet have got no rhythm”). His second solo single, released before they finally split in summer 1986 — and which also appeared on the Wham! compilation The Final — was an even starker signal that the days of shuttlecocks down the shorts were past. It was bleak and empty, entirely synthetic in its musical textures, both chilly and — thanks to Michael’s extraordinary performance — warm and enveloping. His voice is by turns tender, hurt, defiant, soaring. Songs of heartbreak are nothing new, but Michael managed to make this one feel as if he was the person to feel the terror of the loss of love. And, like Careless Whisper, it demonstrated his gift for a couplet that captures the mood of the song: “Take me back in time, maybe I can forget / Turn a different corner and we never would have met.” Those of us — me among them — who foolishly took the view at the time that Michael was a teen poppet really should have learnt differently from this.
Faith
Michael’s first solo single after Wham! split was I Want Your Sex, but Faith became his signature solo hit. It takes what was a fairly common pop style at the time — the ultra-modernised rock’n’roll pastiche that bands like Westworld and Sigue Sigue Sputnik had taken bashes out — but Michael did it better than anyone else, by far. It opens with a brilliant joke — Chris Cameron on organ, playing a churchified version of Wham!’s Freedom — before an acoustic guitar hits the Bo Diddley “shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits” rhythm. Michael wrote, arranged and produced everything on the Faith album, and the title track was a triumph of arrangement and production, not just in the sleekness of the verses and chorus, but the perfect faux James Burton twangy guitar solo. Once we learnt that Michael was gay, the lyric — he is turning away from a woman who wants him — took on a different cast. Perhaps he was trying to tell us something when he told us “I’ve got to think twice before I give my heart away.” Maybe, of course, he was just pastiching rock’n’roll. Either way, this was perfect pop, looking backward and forward at the same time.
Father Figure
Faith’s crowning achievement was Father Figure, another of those ballads — like A Different Corner — that was hushed, intimate, in which Michael appeared to be singing directly to the listener. Father Figure shimmers, a mirage that’s always just out of reach, that dissipates as soon as you try to pin it down. And, like so much of Michael’s best solo work, it aches with a profound and inconsolable sadness from its opening lines: “That’s all I wanted / Something special, something sacred / In tour eyes / For just one moment / To be bold and naked / At your side.” Michael was slowly stripping himself before the eyes of his audience. Five years earlier, they had been the teenagers who screamed at gigs — just a year earlier, those same kids had been filling Wembley Stadium for the last Wham! show. Now he was daring them to step into adulthood with him, and finding a new audience at the same time.
Jesus to a Child
Jesus to a Child is a remarkable record: a display of restrained, dignified grief that lasts nearly seven minutes and was a huge worldwide hit. He wrote the song for his lover Feleppa Anselmo, whom he met in Rio de Janeiro in 1991 and who died just two years later of an Aids-related brain haemorrhage. Anselmo’s death left Michael in such grief that he couldn’t write, until this song emerged, apparently in only an hour. Michael was still not out as gay when Jesus to a Child was released, but it was fairly unambiguous. Whereas Father Figure, for example, did not offer any clues as to the sex of its subject, the very fact that “you smiled at me / Like Jesus to a child” identified Michael’s lost love as a man. And the loss in this song, even if you don’t know the story behind it is profound. The hints of bossa nova, the effortless chord changes, show not just that Michael could write brilliant ballads, but that he could write brilliant ballads that would have sounded as good in any decade, to any generation. On Jesus to a Child, Michael sounded like a man who understands not just his own pain, but yours, too.
