“An embarrassment”: The corny 1983 song George Michael vowed never to play again
Despite being one of the biggest pop duos in the 1980s, Wham! were seen by many as nothing more than a nuisance entity manufactured for commercialism. They were slapped with a barrage of insults by the stuffier crowd in music.
Much of their material and the way they presented themselves was seen as the ultimate embodiment of formulaic manipulations curated to sell as many units as possible and nothing else. This was a rather obvious misunderstanding that many of the decade’s musical ringleaders joined in on, even ones as significant to the game as The Cure frontman Robert Smith.
The gothic icon once had some choice words to say about his pop nemesis. “I could write songs as bad as Wham!’s if I really felt the urge to, but what’s the point? So many songs these days are very shallow,” he told Ro Newton in 1985. “I hate the idea some bands have of refining songwriting. I can sit down and write a single pretty easily – it’s like a pretend exercise.”
George Michael himself was more than aware of the criticism and scrutiny, but he was also in a constant battle with deeper, more personal challenges, alongside the constant fight to feel creatively liberated in a way that actually made him feel satisfied as an artist. He’d have felt like this without the continuous disregard from his peers, but the backlash did give him impetus, leading to solo projects that established him as a singular force.
However, there’s no dismissing how much Wham! gave Michael his own stage, with a string of hits that set them apart as distinctive pop energies – even if they attracted their share of haters along the way. Such is a part of revolutionising the pop world anyway, and that backlash only enhanced their cultural impact in the long run.
Despite their successes, of which there were many, Michael was able to later reflect on things he might have done differently. For instance, ‘Bad Boys’, the third single from their debut album, Fantastic, was written by the singer when he was only 19, tackling the perspective of a teenager who keeps defying his parents. The song did well on the charts, taking position behind another monolith of 1983, The Police’s ‘Every Breath You Take’.
However, reflecting on the track in the 1987 issue of Smash Hits, Michael admitted to feeling embarrassed by the track. “I’m not embarrassed by the whole Wham! thing at all,” he said.
“I’m embarrassed by ‘Bad Boys’ – that was such a bad record.”
Adding, ”The song and the video, they are an embarrassment to me now. Funnily enough, I listened to ‘Bad Boys’ the other day, and I suddenly realised that with the backing track I was trying to rip off an old Was Not Was song ‘Out Come The Freaks’, and I realised how shitty and tinny it sounded in comparison to the original.”
He also said that he felt it was a good record when they first made it, but that he also wasn’t confident enough with what he was doing and was going through a “particularly heavy time” with management, meaning that he just wanted to get the project done, before realising about a week later that he didn’t like the song at all.
“People still love it to this day, too, but I just can’t see it myself,” he added, before rushing to defend that it’s not Wham! that he felt icky towards – just ‘Bad Boys’. “No! I haven’t turned my back on the shuttlecock days. It was just that record – I would never say I was embarrassed by Wham! because it was good fun, you know. I just can’t see myself ever doing it again.”
