The artist Elton John called “one of the best songwriters”
The magic that comes with being a brilliant songwriter wasn’t lost on Elton John whenever he made his tunes.
He was more than happy to have written some classics in his time, but he was the first to say when he thought that someone was among the true greats whenever they turned up in the wild. And while everyone from Lady Gaga to Chappell Roan has earned high praise from John over the years, every one of his favourites has that fire that exists in their soul long before they even open their mouth to sing.
It’s not like John didn’t have that same fire when he started. He was the epitome of a self-made artist when he first began writing tunes with Bernie Taupin, and even if no one in England wanted his tunes, he was going to make sure to get his foot in the door by any means necessary when he first began. And when the rest of the world came around to him, he had started to write some of the greatest tunes of any rocker’s career.
The best artists of all time tend to have periods where everything they made was brilliant, and everything from his self-titled album to roughly Rock of the Westies is practically untouchable. But when the 1980s were dawning, John seemed to be both the most and the least equipped star to enter the MTV generation. He was at his emotional rock bottom as an addict, and yet he was an unintended archetype for the station when he started making tunes like ‘I’m Still Standing’.
That was all well and good, but the rock world didn’t need the old guard to start making their old hits all over again. Some of them managed to toe that line pretty sufficiently, like David Bowie, but amid the other strands of rock and roll coming out of the woodwork from the likes of Def Leppard or even the pop flavour of Madonna, George Michael seemed to arrive fully formed when he started making his first hits.
Wham! was already one of the biggest sensations in England, but underneath all of the posturing and outfits, Michael was one of the finest songwriters that the country had seen in some time. He had internalised all of the great R&B and rock songs from his youth, and while an album like Make It Big wasn’t the least bit threatening, hearing songs like ‘Everything She Wants’ and ‘Careless Whisper’ showed him to be far more complex than anyone else on the charts.
So while many awards were considered a bit premature for some audiences, it made all the sense in the world to John, saying, “He’s one of the best songwriters I’ve heard out of Britain for a long, long time. A lot of people tend to put Wham! down as a teenybopper band. You can tell a great songwriter when you see one. As a performer, I would put him down with Bowie and McCartney. He has got what Bernie and I would have loved to have when we were 21 or 22. It’s about him being a great songwriter.”
And the fact that Michael broke up his iconic duo right as he reached the big time was probably one of the best decisions he could have made. While Andrew Ridgely was the last person to hold a grudge, seeing Michael go from strength to strength on records like Faith and even get more depth in his writing on records like Older helped everyone see the more grown-up songwriter that John managed to see in an instant.
It might have been a bit tougher for most people to admit back in the day, but in John’s eyes, the trends aren’t what make bands who they are. What matters is if they have the songs, and when all of the glamour of the 1980s fades away, people will still be listening to everything from ‘Careless Whisper’ to ‘One More Try’ to ‘Faith’ because of the kind of sheen Michael had on his voice.
