FEATURE:
Groovelines
Wham! – Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go
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I have included this song before…
in a feature that looked at music guilty pleasures. Now I no longer believe that there is such a thing, I instead want to celebrate and properly show respect to Wham!’s Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go. It turns forty on 14th May. One of Wham!’s biggest and most recognisable songs, it entered the U.K. chart at number four - it went to number one a week later and stayed there for two weeks. It also went to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States, holding the top spot for three weeks. Written and produced by George Michael, the chemistry between Michael and Andrew Ridgeley in the video and on the song is infectious! Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go went platinum in the U.S, The iconic music video features Michael and Ridgeley wearing message T-shirts ("CHOOSE LIFE") which were created by Katharine Hamnett. Recorded in London in February 1984, this classic was the lead single from Wham’s! Make It Big album (1984). An album that saw a run of four perfect singles – Careless Whisper, Freedom and Everything She Wants followed -, I hope that the upcoming anniversary of Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go shines new light on the second studio album from Wham! One of the finest albums of the 1980s. There are a couple of features about the song that I want to bring in. That tell the story of a song that, whilst it divides some, is an undeniable classic. One of the most exhilarating Pop songs ever written. Smooth Radio went deep with the track in their feature about Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’s video:
“As soon as you hear the opening line to 'Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go', you better buckle in for a joyous ride for the next four minutes.
The song is pure pop perfection, and catapulted George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley right to the top of mainstream success at home and in the US.
Everything about 'Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go' became instantly iconic and synonymous with the 1980s - the optimism of the era, the colourful music video, and especially George's glorious hair.
But who wrote the song? What was the inspiration behind the Wham! track? What was the idea behind the 'CHOOSE LIFE' t-shirts? Here's all you need to know:
As with the majority of Wham! songs, George Michael penned the lyrics to and co-produced 'Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go'.
Their hands-on approach to their songwriting and producing separated George and Andrew from the era of pop groups or boybands that preceded them - they had full control of their output and image, and crafted it themselves despite being so young.
Talking about how he pieced the song together, George said: "I'd done a demo at home that just had a bass line and a vocal on it."
"Usually, I write the record in my head; I know what all the parts are going to be and I sing them to all our musicians. And it was great."
"We actually did it as a rehearsal. We used a LinnDrum because the drummer was late, and it was such a good track that we kept it."
What was the inspiration behind 'Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go'?
Despite Wham! having already made a success of themselves with their 1983 debut album Fantastic, Andrew Ridgeley still lived at home with his parents as it was easier to stay there when he was off tour.
One morning Andrew asked his mum to wake him up, so let a note on his bedroom door stating: "Wake me up up, before you go go."
He and George used to record all of the Wham! demos in that bedroom, and after George saw the note he got a kick out of it and almost immediately wrote their mega hit 'Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go'.
A "go-go" is a dancing club which the song's theme is centred around - it's about a guy who's head over heels for a girl who leaves to go dancing before he's woken up. The song is a plea for her not to go dancing without him again.
George wrote the song with a few throwback themes which lent a nostalgic quality to the lyrics, including "jitterbug" which was a popular dance during the 1930s, and writing "you make the sun shine brighter than Doris Day" who was an iconic actress throughout the 1940-50s.
He later explained what he wanted to achieve with the song, saying: "I just wanted to make a really energetic pop record that had all the best elements of Fifties and Sixties records, combined with our attitude and our approach, which is obviously more uptempo and a lot younger than some of those records."
"It's one of those tracks that gets rid of a lot of your own personal influences; it reminds me of so many different records that I couldn't actually nail them down."
How did the ‘CHOOSE LIFE’ t-shirt trend start?
The t-shirts George and Andrew wore in the music video to 'Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go' became one of the most iconic trends of the decade.
Oversized t-shirts with the block capital logos came into circulation during 1983 but were popularised the following year with Frankie Goes To Hollywood's t-shirt 'Frankie Says Relax' and the t-shirt's Wham! wore stating 'CHOOSE LIFE'.
The 'CHOOSE LIFE' slogan was conceived by fashion designer and political campaigner Katharine Hamnett who designed the anti-drug abuse message.
After Wham! turned the t-shirt into an iconic image, other artists were also seen adopting the message with Roger Taylor wearing the 'CHOOSE LIFE' t-shirt in the music video for Queen's 'Hammer To Fall'.
Was ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ a success after it was first released?
After its release in 1984, 'Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go' was an overwhelming success and transformed Wham! into a global pop phenomenon.
The bubblegum-pop song reached the top of the charts in both the UK and the US, where it stayed at the summit of the US Billboard Charts for three weeks.
Critics said: "the Motown groove and patent vocals of 'Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go' are perfect CHR [Contemporary Hit Radio] material which is executed expertly by this British duo," which saw the track go platinum by selling over two million copies.
It was the first single to be released from George and Andrew's 1984 album Make It Big, and helped launch the success of following singles 'Careless Whisper' (which was credited solely to George despite appearing on the album), 'Freedom', and 'Everything She Wants'.
'Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go' is frequently cited as one of the most iconic songs of the 1980s.
Has anyone else covered the song?ore You Go-Go (Full Performance + Scene) 4x17
'Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go' is so attached to Wham! and their image during the 1980s, that no notable artists have dared take it on themselves.
It's understandable why - the music video received plenty of circulation throughout the MTV era, and it became part of the pop culture zeitgeist, so it'd be difficult for an artist to put another spin on it.
The musical comedy-drama series Glee did pay tribute to the song and it's vibrant, positive vibe, with the cast covering the Wham! classic in episode seventeen of the fourth series, called 'Guilty Pleasures”.
Before wrapping up, I want to come to Stereogum and their features. Even though they are lukewarm about the song, it is perhaps the fact that some people misunderstood the video and song. Its sheer energy and delight is cloying to some. That is very much their issue. As it stands forty years later, Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go is faultless. It still sounds fresh to this day! It is not dated like many Pop songs from 1984:
“How many people saw the “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” video and assumed that George Michael and Andrew Ridgely, the two members of Wham!, were grinning evangelical anti-abortion activists? It seemed unlikely, and yet the T-shirts spelled it out in a gigantic font: “CHOOSE LIFE.” I don’t know what slogans the pro-life movement was using in the ’80s, but by the ’90s, when I was old enough to take notice of these things, those shirts seemed truly strange. These two bouncy young heartthrobs were dancing and smiling and flirting with the camera, all while blasting out the sort of slogan that angry Christians outside Planned Parenthood clinics were putting on placards
Those “CHOOSE LIFE” shirts didn’t mean what I thought they meant. Wham! got the shirts from Katharine Hamnett, a British activist and designer who made clothes with political slogans. Hamnett has said that her shirts have nothing to do with the anti-abortion movement, that she was enraged to see her slogan co-opted by those interests. To the extent that the kids in Wham! were political, they were lefties, playing benefits for striking miners and singing about partying on welfare money. But you can see where people might get confused. Everything about Wham! seemed too bright and vivid to be real. If they were some sort of subliminal right-wing propaganda effort, it would’ve at least made sense.
“Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” Wham!’s American breakthrough, is one of those ’80s nuggets that refuses to go away. It’s zippy and memorable and unashamedly silly, and it pops up all the time in comedies and animated movies. Everything about the song, right down to the exclamation point in the group’s name, demands to be taken with a complete lack of seriousness. But that intense silliness did its job, topping charts around the globe and turning Wham! into a commercial force.
Georgios Panayiotou was 12 years old when he met Andrew Ridgely. (When Panayiotou was born, the #1 song in the US was Kyu Sakamoto’s “Sukiyaki.”) Panayiotou, the son of a Greek restaurateur and a British dancer, was the new kid at Bushey Meads School, a secondary school on the distant outskirts of London. On his first day in class, a teacher told Panayiotou to sit next to Ridgely, who Panayiotou later called “this horrible little boy.” That teacher did Ridgely a pretty momentous favor that day.
Panayiotou and Ridgely became friends, and they started playing together in a ska band called the Executive. Panayiotou, who’d been determined to become a pop star since childhood, had already been working as a DJ around town. But the UK’s ska fixation didn’t last long, and the Executive broke up. Panayiotou and Ridgely, still teenagers, formed a new group called Wham! Sometime around then, Georgios Panayiotou started calling himself George Michael.
Michael and Ridgely recorded demos at Ridgely’s parents’ house, and they gave those demos to Mark Dean, owner of a UK indie called Innervision Records, when they ran into him at a pub. Dean signed the duo, and their second single, 1982’s “Young Guns (Go For It)” took off after they appeared on the BBC show Top Of The Pops. Very quickly, Wham! became a dominant pop group in the UK, where five of the singles from their debut album Fantastic went top-10. But Wham!’s musical heroes were almost all American, and they wanted badly to make an impact in the US. At first, it wasn’t happening; only one of Wham!’s early singles charted in the US. (1983’s “Bad Boys” peaked at #60.) Americans weren’t trying to hear George Michael rapping, “Hey everybody, take a look at me/ I’ve got street cred-i-bil-i-ty.”
After the success of Fantastic, Wham! broke away from Innervision Records, and after a quick legal battle, they moved over to Epic. That’s when Wham! got rid of the arty, parodic sensibility of their debut and went for a full-on Motown-pastiche vibe. They’d discovered that George Michael was the better songwriter and producer of the two of them, so Michael produced all of Make It Big, their second album. He wrote almost all the songs himself, too.
When Wham! were working on those songs, Andrew Ridgely was living at home with his parents, and Michael and Ridgely were still recording their demos there. One morning, Ridgely had left a note for his mother, who was getting up to go to work: “Wake me up up before you go.” Michael thought it was funny that Ridgely had mistakenly written the word “up” twice, and he turned it into a song, switching things around a little.
Like a lot of Wham! songs, “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” is about dancing and having fun. Michael’s narrator wants to go out dancing, and he doesn’t want his girlfriend to go out without him. In what may have been unintentional foreshadowing, he seems more interested in the dancing than he is in the girl. He tells her that she puts the boom-boom into his heart and that she makes the sun shine brighter than Doris Day, but he really doesn’t want to miss the chance of hitting that high. (On the bridge, he sings that they should cuddle up in bed instead of dancing, but even then, the club is on his mind: “We’ll go dancing tomorrow night.”)
Michael loved Motown, and “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” is his clear attempt at replicating the magic of the Hitsville USA production line. Michael told Rolling Stone that he wanted it to be “a really energetic pop record that had all the best elements of ’50s and ’60s records.” Plenty of people were making Motown homages in the early ’80s, but few of them were quite as blatant as “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” with its high-stepping beat and its relentless feel-good vibes and its big, instantly memorable hooks. There’s a self-consciously retro quality to the song, with its “jitterbug” chants and its Doris Day namecheck. It’s a sort of fetishy celebration of anachronistic Americanisms, released at a time when Americans were in love with British synth music”.
At almost a billion streams on Spotify, there is no doubting that Wham!’s Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go has crossed generations. It came out a year after I was born. I first heard it in the early-1990s. It has stayed with me since. As it is forty on 14th May, I wanted to include it in Groovelines. If you are new to this song, go and spin it now. It only takes one play before it is…
STUCK in your head forever.