“It doesn’t really have that magic”: George Michael on the bands The Beatles couldn’t match
The 1960s were a feeding frenzy of inspiration. “It was a nice circle of really good artists, thinking alike, ‘How can I make a record as good as that one?'” Tom Petty once said in praise of the era. It was, in essence, a revolution. Ideas were being passed around as readily as the weed. So, it is little surprise that George Michael was envious of the scene.
When he first emerged with Wham! back in 1982, things had changed—fresh ideas were coveted, and the communal sense of music in revolt was amiss in the world of pop where he plied his trade. However, he looked to defy the rise of MTV’s commercialism and add a dose of soul to his sound, channelling the heroes that had moved him to become a musician in the first place when he was growing up in East Finchley.
As a songwriter, he aimed to bring together everything he loved. The Beatles were a major inspiration on this front. However, they also served up a portent too. They were master thieves, nabbing ideas from Pet Sounds, Bob Dylan, blues artists and more, mutating them in their own unique and original way. It was a time when one hand was washing the other, and Michael felt as though he missed out.
“I used to feel a bit slighted that I hadn’t been able to sit and nick ideas off of The Beatles and The Beach Boys and all the other people that nicked ideas backwards and forwards shamelessly but still had their own thing,” he commented in I’m Your Man. Almost in a bid to get away from the overbearing presence of the counterculture revolution, the cemented sound of the ’80s didn’t lend itself so well to nabbing ideas from such bands, and Michael bemoaned that as a loss.
In his artistic book, everything should be open if it can be conflated with soul and authenticity. This is where he thinks The Beatles split in two. When the Fab Four first learnt to cut their teeth, they were out on a whim in Hamburg, somewhat isolated from everything that was happening in the bluesy world of London. According to Paul McCartney, “There was nobody to copy from. We played what we liked best, and the Germans liked it as long as it was loud.”
They were under pressure from the seedy city’s gangsters to impress the baying audience. However, they had little knowledge of what the hungry hamburgers were after. So, by the time they returned home and found that the pressure was now applied by a lucrative record contract, this same mentality abided: give the people what they want. If the charts were anything to go by, what they wanted was Motown; it mattered not that The Beatles didn’t know too much about its constitution, given that they grew up miles from Detriot and had been plying their craft even further away from the epicentre of American soul.
“They were nicking riffs and doing, actually, some of it very badly and really obviously,” Michael opined of this early period. “The fact that really what they were trying to do at the beginning of The Beatles was actually their own version of Motown, but actually The Beatles had no understanding of R&B whatsoever,” he continued. “That’s what makes them stand out so differently. That’s what makes them so different to The Stones. That’s what is interesting.”
It was this square peg in a round hole outlook that made them unique, as the director of Beatles ’64 recently told Far Out, “They may as well have come from another planet”. But while this uniqueness might have launched them, it was uniqueness by virtue of a shortcoming, and according to Michael, they couldn’t stack up against the real thing. “I can’t really get anything out of the early Beatles stuff. Other than, I mean, it does, it gives you that elation that Motown records do to a degree. But I need that R&B that Motown provided,” he said.
However, the band’s beauty was that they were always willing to experiment and determined to push things forward. So, their sound was rapidly changing in a futurist blur of sudden inspiration. “I think James Jamerson, him and me, I’d share the credit there. I was nicking a lot off him,” McCartney might have admitted of his Motown hero, but he soon took that funky bassline and built brand-new architecture on top of it.
This enamoured Michael and gave him a vital lesson in the sort of songwriting he soon wanted to deliver. “In reality,” he mused, “I love the later Beatles stuff because I think what they were doing in terms of the imagination and the fact that they were using drugs, and the fact that people hadn’t mixed different cultures—the way they mixed cultures at the end was magical. The beginning, it doesn’t really have that magic for me.”
Michael believed that they went from being eclipsed by the likes of Smokey Robinson and The Supremes to standing on the shoulders of more giants than anyone had ever dared to assimilate and saw further than anyone else as a result. Put it this way, Berry Gordy wouldn’t let a sitar through his doors, but The Beatles embraced one while high at a party chatting to David Crosby.
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