It was always ‘Everything She Wants‘ that appealed to my younger ear, and also later on when I started to play 12-inchers on proper sound systems. It banged. That laid-back drug chug with just the right amount of vocals, I mean confection, flying high over the drum track? Shoot. Even the late George Michael, at the start of a Herculean career, understood: Less is more.
“It’s the only song I’ve written that successfully came from a backing track first. I wrote the Linn drum pattern and found a synthesizer program I liked and wrote the backing track in one evening, took it back to the hotel, and wrote the vocal in a hotel room the next morning,” he told ASCAP in Action in fall 1985. “Because it was thrown together that way, I never looked at it as a single ’til everybody started saying it was great.”
The Netflix documentary “WHAM!,” named after Michael and Andrew Ridgeley’s ’80s pop juggernaut, is a pretty talky, chatty affair where both members speak candidly about the ascension of this band they started as teenagers. You fully believe Ridgely supports Michael in his talent and his person, as a closeted gay man yearning to express himself. Michael believes in Ridgely despite his rumored tabloid “partying”—and knows he must eventually disband the project so his best friend doesn’t get eaten by the press, portrayed as a second banana.
The press in the ’80s? Cold, Jack. Wham! had each other’s back, even when Michael’s talent, performance, and production, started to eclipse Andrew’s input, along with maturity. He even receives a songwriting award from Elton John, the duo’s childhood idol, who properly declares Michael as an incredible, bankable lyricist and producer.
And still. No inner turmoil or off-the-record gossip about one another.
This is inspiring when you consider all the car-wreck band implosions (i.e. Rumors-era Fleetwood Mac) that history has wrought by way of unbridled young egos in music.
As the mighty, mighty music critic Wesley Morris put it a couple of weeks back, amid the good vibes and actual brotherhood bond, there is no discussion, critically, about these good-looking white folk “making Black stuff.” What’s the term people like to toss around these days like automated driverless cars in this city? Oh yeah: Cultural appropriation. WHAM sang about “different” topics, had a brother (Black dude) on bass and a sister (a Black woman) in the backing vocals department—and even Michael admitted in the doc that they wore “bad clothing.” (Nevermind his open ambition to dominate the R&B scene in the US.)
It was the same approach as early Beastie Boys, Madonna, Duran Duran, and Soft Cell… you get the point. Nevertheless, “WHAM!” is a great watch—and an even better study.
