George Michael on the “rather annoying” process of making a hit song
One of the most challenging aspects of being a pop star is trying to control people’s perception of you. No matter how much someone might want to pass themselves off as down-to-earth, there’s only so much they can hide behind if they are really in the business for the wrong reasons. George Michael may have been a pop star who was in it for the pure love of making music, but he thought he would be limited to a gimmick when he made ‘Last Christmas’.
Before Michael had even started gaining traction, Wham was already in danger of becoming a flash in the pan. They had a handful of decent reviews off the back of their first single, ‘Wham Rap’, but looking through their first album, they had a long way to go before they started becoming the biggest stars on the planet.
Instead of having everything launched at the same time, it took them months on end before getting a lot of their songs into the charts, eventually getting closer to more adult styles on tracks like ‘Club Tropicana’. While the heavy-hitters wouldn’t come until Make It Big, Michael had already been looking to expand beyond the teenybopper stuff.
Sure, ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ was a major hit and fills dancefloors to this day, but ‘Careless Whisper’ was the turning point for them. The past few songs in their catalogue were all simple love songs, but hearing this adult breakup song with a melody that Elton John would be proud of was a quantum leap from what they had been working on.
But having multiple hit songs from one record wasn’t enough to satisfy Michael. He wanted a Christmas number-one, and ‘Last Christmas’ was his main effort to push the group forward. It would eventually get outsold by Band-Aid’s ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’, but looking back on it, Michael thought that pieces of the song were a bit too good to throw together on a standard holiday song.
When talking about the track later, Michael’s manager Simon Napier-Bell remembered him always having a bit of an uncomfortable relationship with ‘Last Christmas’, saying, “He was always slightly upset by the fact [that] he naggingly knew it was the best thing he ever wrote. George, above all, really wanted to be remembered as a great songwriter. And I think at the bottom of his mind… it was rather annoying that the song he got so perfect was a Christmas song.”
It’s not like he’s wrong, either. Every note on the track is immaculate, from the synthesiser chords to the little pieces of ear candy that come in right before Michael’s vocal starts. But if he was worried about not living up to his potential, he would spend the rest of his career reminding everyone why he was a world-class songwriter.
Although albums like Faith and Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 didn’t have the same punch as his earlier hits, hearing him as a seasoned pro is still some of the best that British pop ever spit out during the 1980s and the 1990s. So regardless of whether Michael’s biggest hit comes on every December, he still had a wealth of talent across each album that he released.
