FEATURE:
George Michael at Sixty
Three Essential Solo Albums from the Icon
_________
I am going to do…
IN THIS PHOTO: George Michael in 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: John Swannell
a career-spanning playlist nearer the time. George Michael is sixty 25th June. We lost the legend on Christmas Day, 2016. As a member of Wham! and a solo artist, he left behind so much magnificent music! Undoubtably one of the most important artists ever, his voice was beyond compare. There was nobody in the music industry quite like him! I know there will be a lot of celebration and remembrance of Michael when we mark his sixtieth birthday on 25th June. In the first feature, I highlight three essential George Michael albums everyone needs to own. I will include some Wham! music in the playlist feature, but for now, I am turning my attention to Michael’s solo work. His fifth and final solo album, Patience, was released in 2004. It is a shame that we did not get a sixth album from the master! To mark his upcoming sixtieth birthday, below are three solo albums from George Michael that…
EVERYONE needs to own and play.
__________
Faith
Release Date: 30th October, 1987
Producer: George Michael
Labels: Columbia/Epic
Standout Tracks: Father Figure/I Want Your Sex (Parts 1 & 2)/Monkey
Review:
“In 1986, George Michael wandered deep into himself. He realized that, at some point in the five years he had recorded and toured with his bandmate Andrew Ridgeley in Wham!, he had completely lost track of who he was. With Wham!, Michael had achieved his childhood dream of becoming unreasonably famous; he glided across stages, and fans’ eyes waded in his direction. His enormous blonde hair looked like a work of relief sculpture, and his voice pulsed with brightness, like a lightbulb about to burst in its socket. He was one of the world’s biggest pop stars by the time his retro-pop duo fell apart; he was also 23, only just beginning to figure out who he was and what kind of music he wanted to make.
Michael felt isolated, anxious over what to do next—the future seemed elusive and unstable, as precarious as a song’s placement on the pop charts. He was sinking into what he would later characterize as an eight-month long-depression, wondering if he even wanted to return to music. In the spring of ’86, two months before the final Wham! Show at London’s Wembley Stadium, Michael released a solo single called “A Different Corner.” Accompanied by a stark, black-and-white video, it was a sad and strange song that seemed to disappear as it happened, the brief snowflakes of synth and Michael’s tenor evaporating into air. It’s as gorgeous as it is uncertain of itself, quietly stealing back every emotion it offers, leaving behind a crumpled blankness. “The problem was just that I had developed a character for the outside world that wasn’t me,” he said. “So I made the decision to uncreate the person I had created and become more real.”
A little over a year later, he drew a thick, Princely scribble in empty space. It would become the first single for his solo debut, 1987’s Faith, a song called “I Want Your Sex.” A near-total photonegative of “A Different Corner”’s lustless vacuum, built out of the boiling dark of the clubs Michael loved to dance in, “I Want Your Sex” employed a sudden fluency with sexuality to define his post-boy band maturity. He fastidiously programmed every detail of the song—even the mummified sub-rhythms that kick like pistons underneath it, which were produced by an error in a synthesizer pattern from a different track. Michael was so charmed by the accidental thicket of snares and kicks that he built “I Want Your Sex” directly on top of it. “I’ve danced to records like this for years and I buy records like this all the time but I’ve never really had the courage to make one,” he said.
The song was immediately banned by the BBC and strategically suppressed by radio, but it eventually blossomed as a single on MTV once Michael added a safe sex disclaimer to the beginning of the video. The clip focused almost inflexibly on Michael’s face, shadowed by an unfocused haze of stubble, singing in a frayed sub-frequency of his former boyish tenor, all interchanged with shots of body parts: legs walking in a garter belt, water cascading over feet and torsos, Michael writing “EXPLORE MONOGAMY” in lipstick on his then-girlfriend Kathy Jeung’s thigh and back.
In interviews about “I Want Your Sex” and its video, Michael always redirected the subject toward monogamy. He didn’t want the song to be misconstrued as an untamed celebration of casual sex in the midst of the AIDS epidemic; at the time, monogamy seemed to Michael not only a thoughtful response to AIDS but dimensionally sexy in and of itself. “I wanted to write a song which sounded dirty but which was applicable to someone that I really cared about,” he told Interview in 1988. “I mean, it is the perfect situation to really love someone to death and to want to rip their clothes off at the same time, isn’t it?” But it’s a song so sunken into its desire for someone that Michael’s cautious exploration of safe sex gets lost among the chorus’ seductive synth wobbles and the liquid blend of lust and angst with which he sings the word “sex.”
Michael himself seemed unable to glimpse “I Want Your Sex” beyond its controversy, already looking to exchange it for a different song, a different impression, a different corner of himself to exhibit to the world. In the video for his next single, Faith’s title track, a jukebox needle skates away from “Sex” and gently lowers onto the surface of a new disc. The chorus of an old Wham! single, “Freedom,” bruises slowly into the silence, played on a Yamaha DX7 synth tuned to its “cathedral organ” setting.
The melody is funereal instead of flourescent, as if Michael were entombing his teen-pop past in the bellows of a vast pipe organ. It’s among the first instances of Michael commenting on his music as he made it, embedding his songs with footnotes and reprised themes that connected with his early career. Michael became fascinated with continuity, with how things could change when they were revisited, sometimes revising his songs whole-cloth (“Freedom ’90”) or lightly modernizing them for a new decade (“I’m Your Man ’96”), making his form of pop music a rich and intertextual network of references and repeating motifs.
Out of the deep mournful glow of the organ, emerges… an acoustic guitar? Strumming the Bo Diddley beat? It sounds almost frail playing against a rhythmic skeleton of snaps, handclaps, and whispers across the snare rim. The camera drifts over Michael’s new image: leather jacket shrugging loosely from his shoulders, his gaze buried somewhere beneath impenetrable sunglasses, pretending to strum a sunburst archtop guitar.
In 1987, popular rock music was trying fill arenas with enormous waves of echo; “Faith”’s chords sounded crisp as the blue jeans pasted to Michael’s ass in the video. He was employing rock as a texture, as a signifier of history and depth, absorbing the guitar rhythms of the ’50s and ’60s just as he embedded the drums of the Motown songs from his youth in tracks like Wham!’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.” It made Michael’s work as serious as it was playful, taking established songforms and converting them into modern pop.
The rest of Faith embodies this approach, a montage of different colors and tempos from pop’s unabridged past—the fluttering rockabilly of the title track, the deluxe synthetic bath of “Father Figure,” and the hardboiled synth funk of “I Want Your Sex” all occur on the same side of an album, like alternate histories talking to each other through time, all before “One More Try” wafts in like wind through an empty cathedral” – Pitchfork
Key Cut: Faith
Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1
Release Date: 3rd September, 1990
Producer: George Michael
Labels: Columbia/Epic (U.K.)
Standout Tracks: Praying for Time/Cowboys and Angels/Mothers Pride
Review:
“AMONG THE DISTINCTIONS he has gathered along the slick road to pop superstardom, George Michael found himself the object of a funny Saturday Night Live skit a while back, when Dana Carvey lampooned the famous hip shakes in Michael’s “Faith” video. It was a parody that stuck. Picking up his Grammy for Faith, which sold 15 million copies, Michael tried to be a sport about it — and about the idea that his videos and his ubiquitous butt had rendered his recordings moot. Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 (Vol. 2, said to be more dance oriented, will follow next June) is designed to turn this impression around. For the most part the album succeeds in its effort to establish Michael’s seriouness and deliver him from caricature.
“Everybody’s got to sell/But when you shake your ass/They notice fast,” Michael sings on “Freedom 90.” This is a far cry from the George Michael who, with sidekick Andrew Ridgeley, unabashedly titled a Wham! album Make It Big and scored a Number One U.S. single in 1985 with “Careless Whisper,” a danceable ballad dying to sound soulful. By the time he released Faith, in 1987, Michael seemed to want more from his music than just sales. So, for his crisp productions of “Faith” and “Father Figure,” for example, he concocted silken rockabilly riffs and very simple, effective Middle Eastern bridges in such a way that both white and black kids couldn’t miss — or resist — them.
He was a pop-craft natural, even though memories of “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” — Wham!’s first U.S. smash hit and a savage test of one’s sense of humor — clung to Faith, as well as to the hit “I Want Your Sex,” his provocateur move. Even if his strong, smooth voice sometimes seemed as concerned with set decoration as with the dramatic situations in his songs, Michael proved on his first solo album that he could write and produce music — specifically, a deceptively simple kind of professional, hummable pop.
Michael, like Lionel Richie, has a definitive Eighties pop sensibility — Sixties-style virtuosity or Seventies studio obsessiveness isn’t for him — and on Listen Without Prejudice he broadens and refines it. With his opening songs — “Praying for Time,” the lead single and a distraught look at the world’s astounding woundedness, and “Freedom 90,” which buoys dance beats with revitalizing gospel choruses — Michael challenges and shares confessional secrets with his audience.
In “Praying for Time,” testifying against slow descending chords, Michael offers the healing passage of time as the only balm for physical and emotional hunger, poverty, hypocrisy and hatred. In “Freedom 90,” as the accumulation of syncopated accents signals compulsion as much as it spices the groove, Michael wonders whether, in the past, “it was enough for me/To win the race?/A prettier face/Brand new clothes and a big fat place/On your rock and roll TV.” The tune, in which Michael eventually asserts that “today the way I play the game is not the same,” tumbles out as the dramatic shoptalk of a pop idol ready to trade in his sunglasses for some manner of rock & roll respect.
The rest of Listen Without Prejudice demonstrates exactly what Michael has in mind. Although his bigger ballads, like “Mothers Pride,” a portrayal of sons perpetually learning the ways of war from their fathers, and a live, churchy version of Stevie Wonder’s “They Won’t Go When I Go,” push too hard for momentousness, Michael shines when he puts his new attitude into more modest practice. “Cowboys and Angels,” a dreamy, if blue, romantic affair that glides along on international rhythms, and “Soul Free,” an uptempo groove that uses Motown woodwinds, are as seamless, balanced and complete in themselves as Michael wants them to be. This is also true of his singing on the album, at its best. When, to a straightforward bass line and simple guitar strumming, Michael assumes the passion of Bono and engages the hypnotic melody of “Waiting for That Day” — a song with a brokenhearted narrator who finds that his memory serves him “far too well” — he fashions just the kind of bold pop with rock and soul overtones that Listen Without Prejudice aims for.
And that Michael now seems completely committed to. This time around, George Michael has begun to think that he should provide something to his fans beyond fun and games. Fun and games at Michael’s level needn’t be underrated — as he sings on “Freedom 90,” such stratagems happened to yield a captivating sound for millions of people who like to listen to the radio. On this anxiously titled album, though, he’s operating from the proposition that a damn good sound is only the starting point for how much pop music can achieve. If Listen Without Prejudice starts a trend among Michael’s pop generation to move beyond image to integrity, it could make “rock and roll TV” sound more consistently and convincingly like music” – Rolling Stone
Key Cut: Freedom! '90
Older
Release Date: 13th May, 1996
Producers: George Michael/Jon Douglas
Labels: Virgin/Aegean/DreamWorks
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/george-michael/older
Standout Tracks: Jesus to a Child/Older/You Have Been Loved
Review:
“THERE'S DANGER in emotional ties. George should know that. After all, he was the one who told us so in the first place, way back when life was one big swimming pool full of bleach-blonde soul girls desperate to get their hands on the shuttlecock lurking within those shorts of his.
How times change. Six years and one gruelling court case on from the largely fab 'Listen Without Prejudice Volume One' (home of the almighty 'Freedom '90', remember), and George is more downbeat than ever. The sleeve, a sombre silver'n'grey affair, has one side of George's face swathed in shadow like a man deprived of one eye, while the music, aside from the occasional commercial glitz, is bedtime sophisto-soul; the sort of thing that could convince any pretty girl from Hollywood to High Wycombe to slip between the sheets should the evening have exuded the necessary amount of, erm, sophistication.
There it is, that word again. Because George, for all the angst he so brazenly wears on his sleeve, remains the embodiment of suburban wish-fulfilment. Times may have changed, and his fans may have dipped into the real world, full of the dreary stuff responsibilities, families, getting older but the music still fits the mood like a glove; air-conditioned, gossamer-lite, upwardly mobile.
Lyrically, George is still fighting off maturity with all (young) guns blazing. "My friends got their ladies/They're all having babies/But I just want to have some fun!" he declares on the impeccable 'Fast Love'. On 'Move On' he even invokes the chinking-glass intro of 'Club Tropicana', but makes sure that it leads into a gorgeous, jazz club schmooze, just what his audience are after these days. No more passing out under tables at Club 18-Dirty, George seems to be saying. Let's do it the classier way; dining out at Mezzo, a cool-eyed seduction at his place and then, well, breakfast at Tiffany's.
Upbeat the rest of it is not. 'Jesus To A Child' we know about, while the eerily arabesque 'The Strangest Thing' and 'To Be Forgiven' find George lost in a flood of distant, mystical flutes and even the faint twang of sitar. Cool.
He has his customary dig at the fame game in 'Star People' ("Who gives a f about your problems, darling?" George growls cattily, the victim of one too many glittery ligs) while the final track, 'Free', shimmers to a close wordless, before George, the sweetie, whispers, "It feels good to be free" in its dying seconds.
What more could you ask for? Simply Red may go for the jugular every time with their unnervingly upbeat pop razzle, but George is just too much of an old soul boy smoothie for that. He knows that the art is to never look like you're trying; no matter what the provocation, no matter how frustrating the six-year hiatus might have been.
The real return of the mack then, despite the beardy haircut and the fact he's still so touchy about bad press, NME had to buy their own copy of 'Older' to hear it.
He really needn't have worried. 9/10” – NME
Key Cut: Fastlove, Pt. 1