(#283: 9 July 1983,
2 weeks)
Track listing: Bad
Boys/A Ray Of Sunshine/Love Machine/Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do?)/Club
Tropicana/Nothing Looks The Same In The Light/Come On!/Young Guns (Go For It!)
The title, Fantastic,
with its double meaning; something brilliant and splendid, or a fantasy, an
ideal that exists only in the imagination, and with Wham! I think there was a
touch of both. I remember an interview in the NME in early 1983 – I think Paolo Hewitt was the interviewer –
where the duo talked movingly about being unemployed in the middle of a town
where there was nothing going on, and their need to get away from that
nothingness. It turned out that George Michael’s need was greater than Andrew
Ridgeley’s, or it was Andrew who ceaselessly urged an unutterably depressed
George, slumped over the kitchen table, to get up and do something with his
life; this George Michael, who in childhood already had a horror of other
people, or what they thought about him or the way that he then looked.
The actual story wasn’t that far away from the story they
told Hewitt; both had already been in a ska band called The Executive which
hadn’t gotten anywhere beyond an endless round of dead end gigs and record
company rejections. Ridgeley reckoned that the A&R people were too old and
out of touch; Michael wondered whether The Executive’s songs were really good
enough. Certainly his father derided his ambitions in this area, only for
Michael finally to turn around and exclaim that he had been listening to this
criticism for five years now and it was doing him in. He, he had decided, was
going to go down this path whether his father liked it or not.
When listening to the impertinent exuberance of songs
like “Wham Rap!,” therefore, it is important to consider the extensive history
of pain which lay behind the duo’s apparent laissez-faire
approach to life and that thing called “work.” After The Executive rather
messily broke up, George and Andrew sought out other musicians to start a new
band, but these people drifted away, and they were finally left on their own.
“Wham Rap!,” which originally came out in May 1982, was
viewed by most commentators as a cheery one-off, bridging the “dance, don’t
riot” and “Hard Times/ripped jeans” cracker barrel philosophies (“Don’t let
hard times stand in your way!” and remember the Human League). Actually, it’s
more than that; the Penthouse And
Pavement influences are easily spotted, from Ridgeley’s chugging guitars
via Bob Carter’s deadpan piano chords to John MacKenzie’s “Good Times”-ish
bass, but the song’s apparent good nature belies a very palpable anger, one I
suspect directed at George’s forebears as much as the Government of the time.
No, he exclaims, he’s not going to fit in, surrender to the nine-to-five
anti-ideal; he will do exactly what he wants to do, instead of settling for
twelfth best and rotting.
On Fantastic we
hear the full 12-inch version, with different lyrics to the 7-inch edit, so
miss pearls like “Well, listen Mr Average, YOU’RE A JERK!” and the slightly
desperate “You can dig your grave, I’m staying YOUNG!” However, we do get
things like “HEY-JERK-YOU-WORK!,” and “I CHOOSE to CRUISE!” and a general air
of insurrection, particularly when we reach the call-and-response section (“Do
you want to work?” “NOOOOO!!” “Are you gonna have fun?” “YEAAAHHHHH!!!”). There
are attacks on Thatcher’s maladministration (“So they promised you a good job –
NO WAY!”) and a more general feeling of nascent Generation X (both men were
born in 1963) in that they are rejecting everything that “society” has to offer
except what it can happily take from society (“Take pleasure in leisure,” “’Cos
the benefit gang are GONNA PAY!”).
One critic at the time complained that only in his worst
nightmares did he imagine that there would be a top ten song with backing
vocals of “D.H.S.S.!” and saw it as a surrendering to Thatcherism. But “Wham
Rap!” is, if anything, a furious REBUKE to Thatcherism; yes, we’ll take the surface
of what your promise but know that nothing, but NOTHING, lies underneath. And
yes, if you were out of work and had a family to feed, being on the dole was no
fun at all. But if, in the eighties, you were young, you could probably find
yourself a pretty decent standard of living without actually having to work;
rents were cheaper, as was the cost of things in general, supplementary benefit
could be supplemented by housing benefit, and if you really had something to
offer you could go for the Enterprise Allowance Scheme – one of Thatcher’s very
few good ideas - and get £40 a week (which went an awful lot further back then)
to help get yourself up and running.
None of this, of course, is possible now; but “Wham Rap!”
still, I think, speaks to the younger dispossessed, those who get routinely
rebuked by newspapers for not going out and voting, when what the
Westminster-centred/fixated press don’t understand is that the centuries-old
system has simply failed to work for the next generation, who instead of
stuffing envelopes with leaflets and knocking on doors have decided to ignore
the system altogether and try to work out a new way of living as a society.
Listen to this morning’s Prime Minister’s Questions, with the near-autistic
spewing of clichés and corporate tropes (“hard-working,” “enterprise boom,” “who
made a mess of such-and-such IN THE FIRST PLACE?”) and the fatally timid “attacks”
from an alleged Opposition, all bearing the stamp, and about the same level of
intellectual advancement, of baying public school debating societies – who as
far as I can see promise only a politer variant of more of the same – and you
can understand why people now, as then, decide that this is just not for them,
does not speak for or to them.
But there are seven other songs on Fantastic, this tale of escape from the nothingness of suburban
Hertfordshire – George Michael was born in East Finchley, and it could be
argued that he has never really left the airy corridors of north (of) London
suburbia; he grew up in Kingsbury which, though strictly speaking part of
London (NW9), is in practice so far away from the capital he might have been in
Lerwick (although he could get long, winding bus rides to Golders Green and
Ealing), followed by stints in Radlett and, finally, Bushey, a place mostly
glimpsed from the window of a speeding train, where there is nothing going on
to speak of and a big night out would involve venturing out to, say, Watford –
and overall I think it stands up. I love the sixties tactic of putting their
shadowed logo on the record – two guys in dark silhouette, bopping around and
having the time of their lives – and mostly, on the surface, the music is bright and catchy.
It’s too bad that the album begins with perhaps its worst
song; “Bad Boys” was Wham!’s third single, after “Wham Rap!” and the
breakthrough “Young Guns,” and although it was also, at that time, their biggest
hit, being kept off number one only by the omnipresent “Every Breath You Take,”
it never gets played now, and listening to it you can see why; the soulboy/dole
boy theme was palpably running out of steam, and so it turned into an attack on
that oldest of pop tropes, the parents who Just Don’t Understand. “Don’t try to
keep me in tonight,” warns George, “because I’m big enough to break down the
door!” But elsewhere in the song he says, “Now I’m nineteen, as you see,” and
as Julie Burchill commented in the NME
at the time, his poor parents are probably wondering why he’s still living with them. He’s nineteen – in fact, when this
album came out, George had just turned twenty – and the underlying question has
to be: why is he still there, why has he not moved out into his own place, got
on with his own life? So his complaining now comes across as petulant rather
than defiant.
But “A Ray Of Sunshine” is fabulous post-Lexicon pop, with vibey keyboards,
subtle speeded-up backing vocals (“Watch out boy”), purposeful handclaps and
one of the greatest beginnings of any pop chorus: “Sometimes/You wake up in the
morning with a bassline.” The song’s stride just makes you want to leap out of
bed, go out and get a suntan, but there are also hints of a hidden
vulnerability (“Can’t you see that I’m ready to dance?/Without this beat my
life would fall apart”).
“Love Machine,” a cover of the Miracles’ 1976 hit, is
done as a pretty faithful replica of the original (down to the recurring walrus
groan, although George’s vocal is rather more like Smokey Robinson than Billy
Griffin) and also serves as a tribute to the duo’s roots and a reminder that
not everybody in the mid-seventies was touched by punk; a considerable number
of people adhered to soul and disco, got down to Double Exposure, T-Connection
and Roy Ayers (indeed George’s own musical epiphany came one Saturday evening while
in the bath; he had Capital Radio on, and on came the Gap Band’s peerless “Burn
Rubber On Me.” George leapt out of the water and knew that this was what he wanted to do).
If “Wham Rap!” is challengingly defiant, then “Club
Tropicana” reminds us of the fantasy element implicit in the album’s title. The
song is bookended by sound effects; first, somebody getting out of a car
(echoes of “Love Is The Drug”) and walking towards a club, with booming music increasing
in intensity the nearer it gets; then, at the end, chirping crickets and an air
of exotic otherness, as if the clubgoer has been transplanted into another part
of the world. Rather than being an unthinking celebration of Thatcherite
indulgence – a conclusion nobody could draw from watching the video, which
depicts George satirically pouring the contents of his drink into the water in which
he is bathing – “Club Tropicana” is a tribute to the ability of The Club to
transform the ordinary person and make their life transcend itself; the notion
that you can go to a crappy-looking nightspot in St Albans or Hitchin and end
up somewhere else. You are always aware that this is not exactly real, but
there is something within the walls of the club which the clubgoer can’t get
from their normal life. There is some terrific jazz piano from ex-Sensational
Alex Harvey Band keyboardist Tommy Eyre and some fine bass slapping from Deon
Estes. By the end of the song, the point is that you are ready to get on the ‘plane
and fly away, get the hell out, exceed yourself.
Whereas “Come On!” could aptly be retitled “Occupy The
Disco”; it is the most political song on the album, as George puts the boot
into “greedy men in far-off places” and dares them to stop his party, his fun,
his life. “No way that they’re gonna spoil your fun!” he sings. It doesn’t
matter if The Man tries to shut his scene down (“Don’t even bother to let us know/When you flick the
switch and stop the show/…And we’ll still be dancing, AS YOU RUN NOW!”).
Remember that, in 1983, the world could still have ended at any moment, and
George is acutely aware of this: “Oh no, don’t think that I’m not scared,” he
says, “I just take each day as it comes/Because it may – it may – IT MAY BE THE LAST ONE!” He is past caring: “I know they
don’t care about me…/And I know they don’t care about you/You may – as well –
enjoy your life as I do!,” echoing “Wham Rap!” The music is the kind of life-affirming
funk-bop that stops graves from being dug.
The record ends with their second single and first hit, “Young
Guns,” a fine and punchy record musically (and note the presence of, amongst
others, Anne Dudley and Brad Lang in the line-up) and lyrically an
unintentionally hilarious one – or was there another subtext in its warning
against marrying too young? Andrew is finding it a drag being dragged around furniture
stores (the female rapper is Shirlie Holliman, the future Mrs Martin Kemp) compared to the great
times he had hanging out with George. Their extravagant dance routine on TOTP – maybe leather and studs were where they were at – pretty much
completed the subtext for those prepared to read it. Still, the final, cross-vocal
tug of war – “GET BACK! HANDS OFF! GO FOR IT!” – is exciting enough to make you
want to read on; the album proper ends with a silly slapstick run-through of
Winifred Atwell on the piano (“Black and White Rag”?).
But, as is not uncommon in such cases, one song on the
album isn’t like the others, and here it is “Nothing Looks The Same In The
Light,” the record’s only ballad (though it’s more midtempo than slow),
written, sung and almost entirely played by George Michael – the only thing he
doesn’t play is the drums, which, as on most of Fantastic, are handled by Trevor Morell, formerly of the really
very strange sixties/seventies jazz-soul-MoR trio The Peddlers – and all of a
sudden we get a glimpse of where this insecure young man is heading. There is
no real indication on Fantastic that
one of these people will become one of the most popular musicians on the planet,
just as one has to remind oneself constantly that this is a duo (Ridgeley’s guitar
chugs along like a reliable suburban train throughout most of the record,
although his only co-writing credits are for “Wham Rap!” and “Club Tropicana”).
However, “Nothing Looks The Same…” is a reflective, almost ambient ballad about
what is essentially a one-night stand; George is waking up in the morning – so much
of this record is about partying, but only this song really deals with what
happens the morning after - but instead of basslines or rays of sunshine, he
merely observes the sun, shining on the bedsheets.
He is not quite sure what to do, or whether he still
feels for this person what he felt and probably said the night before. A large
part of him wants to go: “It’s been a pleasure – see you around,” goes the
refrain, answered by a falling keyboard figure like the world benignly crashing
down around him. His Other – note that he’s very careful not to give his lover
a gender – is still asleep, but he himself cannot sleep. It gradually
transpires that in reality he’s afraid of himself, and he wants to stay. Why? “Because
you’re the first,” he whispers tremulously, sounding exactly like David
Cassidy. So the song is about revelations, and newness, and natural fear and
doubt. But it is a confronting of the gulf between two different perspectives
on the word “fantastic,” and the record’s clearest sign that he won’t be happy
staying at this merry level. The album is dedicated to Andrew Leaver and Paul
Atkins. Both were schoolfriends – Leaver even played in The Executive – but one
died of cancer aged just twenty, and the other in a car crash. Already with
George Michael, the ghosts of his life are threatening to become the wildest of
winds.
Next: Basildon bond.
