“Stuck in my head”: The artist that made George Michael want to be a star
It’s hard to quantify the kind of drive that makes someone want to be a musician. Although it might be a certain song or even one lyric that speaks to them in the first place, there tends to be one moment where everything solidifies with an artist and turns their passing fancy into a higher calling that no one is going to get in the way of. While George Michael had many artists that he was proud to call musical inspirations, it wasn’t until he saw one clip that he knew that he wanted to have the kind of fame that he saw on TV.
Then again, many people forget how quickly Michael was thrown into the spotlight. Plenty of artists may have their start early in life and spend the rest of their careers slaving away trying to reach those heights, but the fact that Michael was barely out of his teens when making his first smash hits was the musical equivalent of being thrown onto the treadmill of fame after mastering their first steps.
That’s not to say Michael didn’t have the strength to pull it off, though. He still had been listening to the best soul singers of his youth, and listening to songs like ‘Careless Whisper’; it’s not like he was struggling to figure out what constituted a hit. But outside of his love of acts like Queen and Stevie Wonder, he did have some time for the more lighthearted pop music on the charts.
Because despite how many big names in rock dominated the conversation, the 1970s were also a great time to be a teen idol. Led Zeppelin may have sold a bunch of records, but artists like Barry Manilow and Leif Garrett were still the biggest stars in the world and the crush of every single teenage girl who had posters of them on their walls.
And in terms of omnipresent child stars, David Cassidy was the heartthrob that people couldn’t get enough of. Aside from being hounded by paparazzi, his gig on The Partridge Family made him a star on the same level as every other teen idol in the audience. Still, Michael saw one promotional clip that made him realise that this was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.
After seeing footage of Cassidy on his first trip to England, Michael was determined to become a pop star, saying, “The image that stuck in my head of what I wanted to be was David Cassidy came to England for the first time. There was a shot that stuck with me more than anything else. [He was] slow motion heading a football around on the top of the LWT building. They panned over the side of the LWT building, and there were just thousands of these girls screaming, but they couldn’t get to him. Somehow my desire for safety and my desire for fame all kind of locked up in that moment.”
And there’s a good case to be made that Cassidy’s role was overtaken by Michael once songs like ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ began gaining traction. Even though the British music scene had gone through the punk regime, seeing Michael and Andrew Ridgely was the kind of lighthearted pop that was perfect for ushering in the 1980s, especially when they became the darlings of MTV.
However, as much as Cassidy may have left an impression, Michael took his approach to songcrafting much further. Cassidy certainly had his fair share of sing-alongs under his belt, but there was no way that he was going to come up with something as hard-hitting as ‘One More Try’ on a whim.
