Having left Wham partner Andrew Ridgeley, George Michael had ambitions to become taken as a serious figure in pop, with aspirations towards being like Michael Jackson or Prince. Does he manage it? I think it’s a pretty good stab. It feels a bit like the difference in funding and resources between the USA artists versus the UK artists, but this is some pretty solid pop/funk/R&B based material, with surprising (to me at least) variety to the musical styles on show.
Of the big singles, Faith has a rockabilly/Bo Diddley kind of beat to it, while Father Figure is a slow and soothing sort of R&B with a gospel chorus. I Want Your Sex (which as it has Parts I and II reads on first glance like it’s “I want your sex parts, I”) sounds quite like a Prince track, both because it’s funky and because it’s pretty frank.
Away from these, though, and the rest of the songs are still all pretty good. Quite often with the more pop-oriented albums, the ones that aren’t the Big Singles can often feel like filler, but it didn’t feel like it on this one. Hard Day is another Prince-like piece with a great funky bass-line, and Michael even tries a little “Oww!” like Prince or Jackson. Like Prince’s “Camille” persona, the final verse is sung in a “female” voice by pitch-shifting Michael’s own voice, but it’s technically more accomplished to the extent that I first went to check who the female vocalist was. Spoiler: There isn’t one. On the back of that, much of the work on the album is done by Michael himself but there’s a whole slew of session musicians as well, none of whom I recognised from other projects even though, as with most jobbing session musicians, they’ve been with loads of people. Guitarist Hugh Burns, for example, playing guitar of Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street as I discovered by following up their links.
One More Try is a soul ballad, opening with something not a million miles from Pachelbel’s Canon. Hand To Mouth is an unexpected political track (with a melody that’s a side-step away from Richard Marx’s Hazard) about the effects of poverty (and by extension Reagan and Thatcher’s economic policies). Nothing wrong with that, it just sticks out amid songs about love and sex. Look At Your Hands is an infectious bit of keyboard-driven funk. So is Monkey – the lyric “Do you love your monkey, or do you love me?” specifically referring to the drug addiction of a friend, but one’s “monkey” could be any sort of unhealthy obsession. Finishing the album with a bit of smooth lounge jazz with Kissing A Fool hearkens back to the kind of music we began this list with in the Fifties.
I don’t think I’ve done such a track-by-track analysis before, even when I get into specifics I normally only highlight a few, but this, I think, shows what variety is on offer here. I’m surprised that I had so much to write about this one, to be honest, and also how much I liked it. The 1987 version of me would never have countenanced such a thing in a million years.
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