The 1980s singer George Michael said made the “most beautiful” songs
There aren’t many George Michael songs in his catalogue that didn’t focus on raw singing above everything else.
He was born to be a superstar before Wham had formally broken up nad when you listen to the way that the melody dances in ‘Careless Whisper’, it’s almost impossible for anyone not to get swept up in the drama of that song. And if Michael was going to talk up some of his favourite acts, he was going to prioritise the melody over everything else whenever he turned to his record collection.
After all, this is a guy who cited people like Elton John and Queen as some of his greatest influences, so it’s not like he was going to go straight for the avant-garde approach every time he sang. He did have more underground influences like Joy Division that he couldn’t get enough of, but if he wanted to do a song justice, he wanted to have the melodies that he felt John Lennon and Paul McCartney would have been proud to have written.
And a lot of that came down to him woodshedding everything. Not all of his songs needed to have the same formula or anything, but when looking through that first Wham album, he was clearly testing the waters of what he could do. Some of the tunes are a little bit cringy today, but it was all building a bridge before he eventually got to listen to what ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ sounded like on the radio.
But their synth-heavy brand of dance music wasn’t exactly the newest thing in the world when they started. Some of the biggest names in synth had already started becoming one of the biggest pieces of the music industry, and it wasn’t out of the question to see 12 different new wave bands out at the time trying to make a name for themselves with their keyboards front and centre in the mix.
Anyone could have found themselves becoming a gimmick, but Pet Shop Boys were the kind of band that had genuine pathos behind everything they sang. Neil Tennant didn’t need to have the greatest range in the world so long as you could believe every word he said, and even when he wasn’t singing his own songs, his version of ‘Always On My Mind’ is still one of the best synth-driven songs of all time.
And compared to the rest of the synth world, Michael felt that there were hardly any other artists in Tennant’s field that could measure up to him, saying, “Neil Tennant, at a certain point in the 80s, was writing the most beautiful songs. No one wants to hear frightening, terrifying songs about Aids, but they do if they’re gay and they’ve lost friends, they do want to hear those people referred to and remembered and honoured, and I think some of Neil’s work did that beautifully.”
That kind of songwriting also did a lot when Michael needed to break down his own barriers on every one of his records. He wasn’t ready to open himself up to the world yet when he was in Wham, and even if he didn’t feel comfortable coming out on record, you could tell that he was clearly going through a certain dialogue with his audience when he started writing about love in a more mature fashion on Older.
So while Pet Shop Boys shouldn’t get credit for starting Michael’s career or anything, they were instrumental in helping him flesh out his sound to a certain degree. Anyone can find a way to make a few catchy tunes, but the idea of truly opening up to someone and finding common ground is the kind of thing that Michael needed to have locked in before he could truly blossom as a songwriter.
