The 1984 album George Michael considered his peak: “The best I’ve done”
The 1980s have a reputation for sunshine and synth sonics, but really, it was as cutthroat as you could get, and you didn’t need to tell George Michael that twice.
It was, to be fair, perhaps easier for him to wax lyrical about the supposed tribulations of the scene that may not have rang true to the average artist. After all, he and Andrew Ridgeley were at the top of the pop music tree with Wham!, and they existed in a godly league that was pretty much impossible to parallel.
That said, they were more than aware of the scores of green eyes burning up at them in jealousy. Well, those people might not have described it as that. They might have called it bad music, or ambivalence towards the band at best. But Michael knew the truth behind those pretences, and he enjoyed lapping up every second of their bitterness.
The revenge, if you wanted to put it that way, was made even sweeter by the fact that Wham! were far from an overnight powerhouse. While there’s no escaping the fact that their debut Fantastic still went to number one in the UK, it seemed like a continued streak of freak luck was the main thing that got them there.
Subsequently, when it came to trying to repeat the feat, Michael knew he had to bring his A-game. The results left the other bands reeling in shock around them. “Duran Duran and Culture Club were so sneery, and they were shocked when we went past them,” the frontman later recalled, with more than a hint of smugness in his tone.
While he was still somewhat stroking his own ego, he went on to add, “I can’t think of another band who got it together so much between first and second albums. On Fantastic, you can tell I don’t think I’m a singer, but some vocals on Make It Big are the best I’ve done. Even if we were wankers, you still had to listen.”
He had such a way with words, didn’t he? But in a lot of ways, it was the one occasion where you had to credit him for the ego. Wham! simply would not have gone on to become pop music titans if they did not have the belief to better themselves, even if that meant making slight enemies out of Duran Duran, Culture Club, and all the rest.
The elephant in the room was the fact that Michael saw this as his blaze of glory precisely because he also knew it was the end, though. He spoke extensively about Wham! wanting to go out on a high, and therefore made the decision with Ridgeley around that time that they would go their separate ways, before revealing it 18 months later, once the promotion for Make It Big was said and done.
Of course, he had been more than teed up for stratospheric heights of his own, from which the seismic achievements of the band seemed to only serve as a springboard, rather unfathomably. But the ultimate reality was that Michael never needed to worry about what people thought of him; he knew he was on top of the world, and would flaunt that for everything it was worth.
