Cover Boys : New Musical Express

WHAM! Young Brats Go For It !

New Musical Express, by Lynn Hanna, 
November 27th, 1982

Straight out of school and onto the dole. Now, just over a year later, two Watford boys called Wham! are Britain's newest pop success. Their songs are bold attacks on unemployment and adult apathy - but is it all a ploy to tap teenage disenchantment, or honest political funk? Young guns Andrew Ridgeley and George Michael explain their masterplan.
This was the week when everything went WHAM!

Despite appearances, the success story of Andrew Ridgeley and George Michael is no simple triumph of charmed innocence. A strong streak of native cunning and a shrewd commercial instinct have combined with the more slap-happy element of luck in paving the way for two new conquering pop heroes. On the morning that I meet them, George and Andrew are pretty pleased with themselves, as well they might be with their first top ten single confirming them as the latest chart darlings of a nation's young hearts. And at 19, George and Andrew are still young enough to be part of a generation whose expectations of life after education are totally different from anyone who approached adult life before the present government was elected.

Almost unconsciously, Wham! celebrate a new mood that cherishes the present in the enforced absence of any permanent certainties, and they reflect the excitement of a harder, private, hidden world where 'normal' rules are suspended and different, darker systems are evolving. On a personal level, it's the choice between enjoying what you do or disappearing into the depression. While certain fatuous commentators have seized upon the 'Hard Times' tag as an odious means of self-aggrandisement, Wham! appear to speak simply from their own experience. Such a direct, enthusiastic appeal was bound to link up with a new wave of young consumers distanced from the pop process by an increasingly dreary parade of the calculated and artificial.

Wham! come from Watford, a town on the edge of North London's urban sprawl, where they went to the same school until Andrew left for college while George stayed in the sixth-form. Both are boys who take their pleasure-seeking extremely seriously, and it was in '78, as they remember somewhat solemnly, that they became involved with a suburban soul scene, moving on to affiliate themselves with the ska and 2-Tone musical movement when the discos slipped into a more limpid jazz-funk.

"Ska had that energy. That's what we've always listened to, the stuff that's got the energy at the moment",  says George.

While Wham! expended their adolescent energy in dancing and drinking, school not surprisingly took second place and their results suffered correspondingly.

"Andrew didn't get our exams because he was being a college trendy. I was a sixth-form rebel - which didn't take much", George adds. "I think we both stayed on at school so we'd have an excuse to stay at home and wouldn't have to go out to work, being lazy. We both knew that all we wanted to be was pop stars. We're both the types that should have got our A-levels with flying colours, but we were really lazy, so we didn't. We spent most of the time round at Andrew's house, mucking about on instruments and writing songs".

Inevitably they gathered up a group - a ska band to start with. When they left school they signed on the dole and carried on composing. A year later their second single entered the charts and in retrospect made their short career look almost like a masterplan.

"We were both convinced that once the songs were heard by the right people we were going to make it. It was just convincing other people of that - like parents, that was the hard job. You're surrounded by people who are trying hard and failing dismally, and you've got to convince your parents that you're not one of those people. They don't realise the difference between a hit song and a bad song, they just think it's totally a matter of luck. I always told them, obviously it's a matter of luck, but it's not all luck. If you write good songs for long enough, someone's going to want to make money out of them".

In the event their record contract came just in time, since George's long-suffering father, incensed by his apparent lack of activity was on the brink of throwing him out of house and home. "Now he just keeps asking when the money's coming in", he laughs.

As we talk in a bar a few yards away from their tiny record company offices in the debby mecca of London's South Molton Street, you can't help feeling that these pleasure-loving, smooth-talking teenagers are the owners of two very hard young heads. Wham! are inclined to bandy the jargon of markets, promotion and sales with a commercial candour that's worthy of an experienced ad-man or a satin-jacketed rock executive. In part this is no doubt due to the necessities of understanding the rock rigmarole when you don't have a manager.

"That's been an advantage, definitely", explains George. "We've had a lot closer contacts with a lot of the areas". "We know the machinations a lot more", adds Andrew.

Less charitably it's possible to speculate just how fine the line between a refreshingly realistic attitude to the entertainment industry and the dismally limited vision that characterises The Biz. For the moment, however, the one debatable financial error Wham! have made so far is signing a contract so speedily - to Innervision, a small subsidiary to CBS, for a 500 advance each.

"We knew we were going to be massive, so we didn't want a big advance", claims George.  

"It was the usual job of panicking and signing when you shouldn't really have done it, but it's got us where we are now, so it's nothing really to complain about. Any mistakes that we may have made, we'd still do it again to be number ten this week. Every company has its advantages and disadvantages, there's not much difference".

After they'd signed to Innervision, they recorded a demo tape which had, says George, seven or eight major publishing companies chasing the rights on the strength of what he calls one "killer single" that they'll release at an appropriate time. "A worldwide number one", explains Andrew. "Julio will be green. I know it all sounds really over-confident, but it's just like we've been able to judge our next steps all the way so far, so why not just keep hoping that you're right? We know we're right".

Their first record, 'Wham Rap', now due to be reintroduced to the shops on the strength of 'Young Guns' success, coincided with a wider realisation of the huge implications of a young dole queue generation. A spirited fist shaken in the face of adult apathy and suspicious disapproval, 'Wham Rap' is a refusal to be denied the good things of life, its slick sloganeering sliced into an exhilarating funk setting; a spontaneous emotional response rather than a stiff political cliche.

"We were writing about what was happening at the time that was really typical of most people", George explains. "Obviously more with people in the North, they didn't want to go out and do grotty jobs and yet there was nothing else. Where we were, Watford wasn't that bad for opportunities, we managed to do decent part-time jobs. But in a lot of places there's absolutely nothing. Somebody told me the other day, You record cheered up a lot of my friends - which is brilliant! We didn't write it thinking, Let's help kids or anything. We just thought let's write about what we're doing at the moment and make it funny. The idea of actually cheering someone up was great, because we were told that of the limited sales it did, 70 per cent of them were in the North. There were people who were throwing accusations at us for being irresponsible and talking about enjoying the dole when so many people can't. At the same time, a huge amount can and we're writing for them. They obviously got the joke. Some people are going to take any lyric seriously, however funny. We were thinking about doing one on a driving test and you can just imagine people slagging you off for that. You know, Don't you think about all those people who have failed six times? We've done grotty jobs, so we weren't talking off the tops of our heads. We've done all kinds of things - labouring, cinema ushers, warehouse work, cleaning, washing up. We realised after a while it was better to stay at home".

'Young Guns' - a witty condemnation of a dreary domesticity which can prove permanently crushing when undertaken at too early an age - has also met its critics who see an unpleasant male braggadocio beneath the sparring repartee of those crackling love-hate lyrics. "What happened was that the lyric wasn't as well written as it could have been, because George had to do it in the studio", says Andrew. "The sentiment wasn't truly expressed. IT didn't really come across".
"At the same time, I didn't think there was any harm in the lyric", adds George. "It's worked so well in every other way. The idea when we went in the studio was anti-young marriage - of either sex. It didn't mean to be anti-young girls. It just seemed to us that the funniest thing we could think of relating to it was the way you get the boys up the pub saying, Where's so-and-so? Oh, he's at home, she's kept him in again. It might not be right or true of all situations, but it does happen a lot and we're just commenting on it. That is what people listen to, and they think they know that situation. For people in that situation, the girl is the one to feel sorry for. In a lot of cases she's not been brought up to expect anything more than to feel supported and secure. We were just looking at it as it happens. We weren't taking sides. It was a comic observation".

What Wham! achieve on their TOTP slot is an abrupt electric shock that jolts the programme's flaccid system into instant chraged action. Helped by Dee C. Lee and with Andrew's real life girlfriend, blonde Shirlie Holliman adding poignancy by posing as his screen partner, George and Andrew glide through a cut-and-thrust vocal comedy with flashy, fluid funk choreography that shames much of TOTP's stodgy staple diet into comparative sleepy senility. It's young, fetching and funny, and with typical opportunism, Wham! have achieved the best of both worlds by using the skilled resources of professional session-men for the music, whilst ensuring their visual line-up is instantly attractive.

"When we first approached a record company, their first thought was we'll get you a band together to move these songs. We said we didn't really want a band. It's better just to have ourselves as a front. What we've found is that so far we've had two songs that have been completely different and appealed to different markets", George continues. "Eventually we'll have a certain sound that we'll keep to, for a while anyway. You just work towards getting as wide a market as possible without making crappy records. If we can keep up the spirit of the lyrics and the attitude in the record, then it'll always sound like us, no matter who we have behind us. The idea is to keep up the attitude of the records, keep them sounding young and fresh and fun".

Their sparkling crystallisation of that vital, optimistic attitude has to be central to their sudden success. "I think people definitely identified with us on TOTP", says George, "that's why the sales shot up. On 'Wham Rap' we were playing and singing in terms kids could relate to. It's not manipulated, it's just that we're trying to relate to as many people as we can, because there don't seem to be many people doing it". Especially at a time when the people making pop music seem increasingly divorced from its audience.  
"It's drifted back off again into all the big producers like your ABC jobs, your Dollars and Bucks Fizz", George agrees. "And although some of those records are brilliant, they're across the boards. There's nothing really directing itself at the youngsters. Madness are the closest thing that so many people relate to, and even they, I think, are beginning to get a bit bored with what they're doing. The music's not as fun as it was".

The biggest future problem Wham! will face is keeping that shiny bright sense of unspoilt ingenuity. "It must be very, very difficult. That's one of the things we're going to have to fight for, trying to keep a fresh sound", George muses. In the meantime they're about to add a whole new meaning to their hallowed maxim of enjoying what you do.

"We're just about to have to work hard for the first time in our lives I think", admits George with the rueful reluctance of a truly dedicated hedonist. "We've managed to avoid it so far, but if we want to get further than this, we've got to work hard. This is just the beginning", he sighs. "We're aiming at youth, saying enjoy what time you've got, because it's the best time of your life". 

"So far, anyway", adds Andrew.