Milestones: Make It Big by Wham!
Wham!’s breakout second album have earned George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley the exclamation mark.
Modesty wasn’t exactly Wham!’s strong suit regarding album titles. Andrew Ridgeley and George Michael confidently named their debut Fantastic, and with their third long-player, they sent out their Music from the Edge of Heaven. This would be the last entry in the band’s discography; only the aptly titled best-of collection The Final put the finishing touch. In between came the album that catapulted Wham! to their zenith, made the duo one of the most successful pop acts of the 1980s, and served as a springboard for George Michael into an even more successful solo career: Make It Big.
The title not only reflects the ambitious goals of two childhood friends; it also turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy and proof of the claim that if you believe in yourself strongly enough, you can achieve anything. Even two British lads with migrant backgrounds can rise to become globally celebrated pop stars if they have enough self-confidence. Incidentally, at least initially, self-confidence was absolutely Andrew Ridgeley’s domain. To answer right away the frequently and slyly posed question of what his role in this band construct actually was—since the other composed and produced the songs, wrote the lyrics, could sing in a way that took the breath away from some prominent colleagues, and looked dazzling to boot.
However, the future superstar George Michael didn’t always exist. While a chubby boy named Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou was still struggling with himself, his pounds, and especially his hairstyle, his perpetually grinning friend Andy, besides his sunny disposition and the unconditional desire to belong to the music scene, already carried with him during school days in stuffy English Hertfordshire an absolute certainty: “In my opinion, there was nothing we couldn’t achieve, and no one who could stand in our way,” Ridgeley writes in his autobiography George & Me. “Our friendship was indestructible, and I could already see our chart successes before me. I didn’t really know what such success would actually mean, but I felt it. I knew it.”
All due respect to his prophetic talent, Andrew Ridgeley could not have known the extent that Wham!-mania would take when he, along with his buddy Georgios—he called him ‘Yog’—hatched their first songs and later peddled demos of their joint band The Executive to record labels in London. Unsuccessful, as it turned out, but not without consequences: the formation didn’t survive the continual rejections; George and Andy were soon back to just the two of them.
It’s actually absurd that the hastily cobbled-together tape, with which the duo—temporarily named Wham! by then—secured a label deal, contained not only their “Wham! Rap” and “Club Tropicana” (both later found on Fantastic) but also an initial sketch of “Careless Whisper.” But nothing more: “We were really firmly convinced we had recorded enough to secure a record deal,” Ridgeley recalls. “Today, I can’t believe it anymore, but back then, we really thought we were that good.”
He just wanted any contract, says Ridgeley, no matter where. It’s astonishing that it actually worked with the rather slim application portfolio. It’s less astonishing that the first label choice didn’t necessarily turn out to be the best. “We’ll make a single or two and see where it leads us,” said the duo’s new label boss at Innervision Records. Wham! were therefore dependent on their first professional forays, making an immediate impact. That “Wham! Rap (Enjoy What You Do)” missed the Top 100, and the follow-up single “Young Guns (Go for It)” also didn’t make it into the Top 40 was accordingly a veritable catastrophe for the young band.
Despite this, Wham! were invited to the BBC show Top of the Pops as a spontaneous replacement for an act that had to be canceled at short notice. If anyone ever needs an example of how important it is to seize the moment when it presents itself, Wham!’s Top of the Pops appearance provides the best conceivable demonstration. George and Andy, flanked by backing singers Dee C. Lee and Shirlie Holliman, seized the opportunity that had fallen from the sky, made the absolute best of it, and presented themselves to a wide audience. Their star shot through the roof, and the debut album Fantastic reached number one on the charts. At least in the UK—in the USA, this strange British teen sensation didn’t bother anyone in 1983. Success overseas, however, was one of the megalomaniacal goals on Wham!’s naive to-do list. The next album was supposed to achieve that.
As if the challenge of following a successful debut with a worthy successor wasn’t big enough, Wham! had other stress factors to deal with. As it became increasingly apparent that George Michael was simply the more talented songwriter, the responsibilities within the band shifted. A change that Ridgeley, despite all recognition of its necessity, probably struggled with more than he admitted. Now prominent, the two Wham! members were also constantly under scrutiny from their fans and the press—a situation one must come to terms with first. To top it all off, legal disputes with the label unfolded.
Returning to a studio in south France to work on Make It Big was at least partially a flight from all this muddle. Wham! had been working almost continuously for two years by this time. Now, they wanted to catch their breath, take a vacation, and chill while working on new material without being followed at every turn by cameras and screaming fans.
Well... there was nothing peaceful and relaxing about it, at least not for George Michael, who by now held the musical reins of the project firmly in his hands. Manager Simon Napier-Bell somehow extricated his protégés from their contract with Innervision. With Epic/Columbia, a new label was already in place. However, after the agreement in March 1984, they immediately expected results: to ride the wave of Wham!’s success, they demanded the next single practically immediately; the accompanying album had to follow in the same year.
While Andy alternated between throwing himself into the pool, drinking, and parties with friends, enjoying the superstar life to the fullest, George Michael toiled in the studio. When he wasn’t shuttling between France and London to work on individual songs. Contrary to the prevailing synth trend, he relied in his compositions on live-played instruments, such as horns and bass, in the best Motown style.
This was heralded, among other things, by the lead single that preceded Make It Big: “I just wanted to make a really energetic pop record that combines the best elements of recordings from the fifties and sixties with our attitude and approach, which is obviously more uptempo than most of those records and much younger,” George Michael said about his intentions. He couldn’t even untangle everything that flowed into it: “It reminds me of so many different records that I couldn’t even name them all.”
Where the title came from, on the other hand, is well documented: Andrew Ridgeley had written it on a note asking his parents to wake him: “Wake me up up,” he wrote accidentally, and then, fully intentionally this time, continued: “before you go go.” Partner George read it, recognized the rhythm, sensed potential, and crafted a song from it: “I demoed it at home, just with bass and the vocal line over it,” he recounted the origin story. “Normally, I develop songs in my head. At some point, I know exactly how all the parts should sound, and then I sing them to our musicians. It went great. We worked it out during a rehearsal. We actually just used the LinnDrum machine because the drummer was late, but the track turned out so well that we just left it that way.”
Well, tough luck for the drummer. “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” was an instant hit. Everyone and their mother knows this song, and rightly so. “An absolutely dreadful comeback,” ranted Smash Hits critic Dave Rimmer. “George and Andy throw away everything they’re good at to take a trip into the land of Shakin’ Stevens. Horrible!” He was, however, quite alone in his opinion: “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” only reached number two in Germany behind Laura Branigan’s “Self Control.” In the UK, however, the track shot to number one, as planned, also in the USA. It sold millions and today counts among the most defining pop songs of the 1980s and among the most commercially successful singles ever.
For the accompanying video, designer Katharine Hamnett dressed Wham! in oversized white outfits, from which the slogan “CHOOSE LIFE” shouted in block letters—a statement that can be interpreted in all possible directions: against drug abuse, against suicidal thoughts, against a mid-80s nuclear war that wasn’t so unthinkable... Either way, a win, considering the band’s earlier fashion choices, which were sometimes quite questionable.
Questions were also raised by the release strategy of the second single, “Careless Whisper.” Although the only song on this album that Andrew Ridgeley had co-written is part of Wham!’s second album, the single was released in the UK and parts of Europe only under George Michael’s name. In the USA, even more bizarrely, it read “Wham! featuring George Michael. “The singer’s departure into a solo career was already clearly emerging here. For Ridgeley, as he asserted, no big problem: “Although I had co-written the song, I could easily let George release it as a solo project: he had taken it to a completely new level in the studio. And we both knew that it would open the eyes of even the few skeptical doubters regarding what was possible for George Michael beyond Wham!”
History showed just that, but even if this plan hadn’t worked out: “Careless Whisper,” with its iconic saxophone, had to become a mega-hit. Good thing that George Michael held firm to his vision for the song, even if he probably drove some people to the brink of despair with it—among them certainly the eight (!) saxophonists he fired before Steve Gregory finally came along, who could play the melody as it haunted Michael’s mind, even though he showed up to the recording ill-equipped.
...or perhaps precisely because of that? “I went into the studio and tried to play it,” Gregory said. “My saxophone is an old Selmer, a tenor sax from 1954 or so, and I just didn’t have that top note. I didn’t have the right notes at all. To play it at all, I had to do what we call ‘false fingering.’ It didn’t sound smooth at all. But I’d been around a while, had a bit of experience, so I suggested: ‘Look, if you drop it down a semitone, just a bit, then I’d have all the right notes available, and we could see how it sounds.’ So that’s what he did—he did some calculations, transposed the whole thing down a semitone, I played it again, in a slightly lower key... When we played it back, George came into the studio and said: ‘Oh, I think we’ve got it.’ Then he pointed at me and said: ‘You’re the ninth!’”
George Michael had already demonstrated consistency in realizing his artistic vision before: after the hastily recorded demo in the Ridgeley living room; he had made a first “finished” version with producer legend Jerry Wexler. After the backing track and George Michael’s vocals were in the can, he had flown in a top saxophonist from Los Angeles to play the solo. Wexler had scheduled an hour for it. “Instead, he was still there two hours later,” recalls manager Napier-Bell, “and everyone in the studio was endlessly embarrassed. He just couldn’t play the intro the way George wanted it, like it was on the demo. That had been played two years earlier by a friend of George, a guy who lived around the corner and played saxophone in the pub for fun.”
“The saxophonist played the part perfectly, but George said: ‘No, it’s still not right, look...’ And then he leaned over the microphone and hummed it patiently again. ‘Here, at this point, it needs to go up a bit, you see? But not too much!’” All the toil came to nothing, as we know. That George Michael, still somehow a teen idol at the time, ultimately told not only a renowned musician but also the producer he admired fervently: “Screw it. I’ll redo everything myself, as if it had never been recorded before, with the musicians I usually work with, and we’ll see what happens.” You have to have the guts to do that. So what happened, George? “The track was much better because I was relaxed, and I think our musicians did a better job than the Muscle Shoals section.” This is why today we have a song that even made hardened mutated comic mercenaries drop to their knees and declare that Wham! had earned the exclamation mark in their band name. And how!
Third single, third hit: the video for “Freedom” consists of footage shot when Wham!—as the first Western pop act, toured the People’s Republic of China. Like the two predecessors, this track appeared before the release of Make It Big. Three weeks later, “Everything She Wants” was the fourth single. It brought the melody that Noel Gallagher later borrowed for “Fade Away” and, on the B-side, the second A-side, a piece that divides opinions. The worst of all or the perfect Christmas song? “Last Christmas” is the latter—a catchy tune to go, you’re welcome—though not included on Make It Big, but on the subsequent and final Wham! album Music from the Edge of Heaven.
After that, the short but mighty ascent came to an end. In this respect, Wham! are similar to Frankie Goes to Hollywood: goal achieved, mission accomplished, thanks, that’s it. There’s another parallel: both acts are pronounced singles bands. The filler material between the oversized hits is quite mediocre. Where Frankie Goes to Hollywood unnecessarily covered Bruce Springsteen on Welcome to the Pleasuredome, Wham! attempted the Isley Brothers’ “If You Were There.” Neither is needed, just like “Credit Card Baby.”
The other baby, which often receives scorn, doesn’t actually deserve it, even if Christopher Connelly was somewhat right when he mocked the overlong intro of the ballad in Rolling Stone: “There really is no excuse for the one minute forty seconds of instrumental lounge music that ‘Like a Baby’ stumbles through.” However, even this ungracious colleague doesn’t doubt that George Michael is a gifted singer; Andrew Ridgeley’s contribution to the overall picture, however, he didn’t grasp either:
“They look like a high-gloss advertisement: George Michael’s music is an unadulterated remake of Motown, and what exactly Andrew Ridgeley does, no one seems to know. No matter: Make It Big is an almost flawless pop record that does exactly what it wants and has a lot of fun doing it. Sure, it’s sometimes flat and thinly orchestrated, but George Michael can write and sing songs that make his teen idol colleague Simon Le Bon look old. He may be less soulful than Boy George (remember: we’re still talking about British white boys), but he has a much greater range, from rumbling bass to the precise falsetto he effectively uses for the first time in ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.’”
...and not only there. Any more questions? Ask the Merc with a Mouth.
Masterpiece (★★★★★)