PRESS REVIEWS
Hot Press, July 1983.
If the existence of this record didn't so convincingly prove otherwise, the notion of two freshly-scrubbed middle-class, young white boys from the scampi-belt wastelands of outer London coming up with an album of irresistably danceable and energetic disco-funk seems about as likely as the emergence of an electronic band from Roscommon. Nonetheless with Fantastic.
George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley have made an album that while necessarily lacking the angry raw earthiness of the hottest black funk is at the very least plausible. It is a surprinsingly polished and mature collection displaying plenty of originality both in the lyrics and arrangements.
Nothing Looks The Same In The Light shows that there is more in George Michael than just a succession of Wham! Rap re-writes- a medium slow song, it warns of the dangers of letting the heart rule the head at first meeting and features some expressively mournful, treacly-smooth acoustic piano work by George himself.
The preceding track, (and the next single) Club Tropicana also varies the routine to good effect with its relaxed jazzy Carribean flavour, sensitivity embellished by silvery keyboards and swelling brass.
But elsewhere, it's heads down and full steam ahead through the three singles Wham! Rap, Bad Boys and Young Guns (Go For It) and another brace of similary infectious workouts.
George's vocals range wide both in pitch and feel Andrew's guitar work is rarely less than effective, but it is the overall confidence of the arrangements and the apparently effortless momentum they achieve throughout which impresses most. The only reservation is that the whole thing is perhaps a little too polite, too clean and tidy, so that some of the hip rap exchanges come over sounding a mite forced.
If you're looking for a party record you could do worse than to get, get, get on down to your local record shop, pick up a copy of Fantastic and dance the night away.
Peter Owens.
Sounds. 02.07.1983.
I remember making Wham! Rap Single Of The Week and looking all around and into the sleeve of the 12" single for any clues that might solve, as it was then, the mysrery of Wham!
If they were English as Epic claimed, they had to be nuclear physicits doing a project course of Making An Authentic English Dance Music - nothing less than boffins would have made a sound that natural and cohesive. Even after certifying the Wham! Rap a dance classic, I searched for cracks in its brilliant arrangement, some embarrassing glimpses of (unsoulful) English stiffness. Of course there were none, and I'd forgotten - or didn't quite know and Fantastic shoots it home now - that there was a reason for this music sounding fresh as well as Swiss watch-tight : for the boys enjoy what they do.
Fantastic is a stunner. Eight tracks that show Geroge and Andrew enjoying what they do with a total vengeance. The only thing I'm suspicious of now is if they've moved Watford, Herts to Watford, Philadelphia, thus granting the dance terror twins an otherwise impossible fifty years of dance music heritage.
Fantastic oozes panache, a handling of the soulful dance style that is ridiculously easy sounding. The last dance music genuinely 'hit the streets' in the same way as Fantastic will, and those three Wham! 45s have done already, was the Jackson 5 way back when Michael was a tot and ABC amazed us with a freshness that's never quite been recaptured since for me by black artists.
Wham! do just that, and show that 'the streets' are the right place for their dance music. For Wham! are punky, not (jaded, exotic) funky. They are more at home On The Waterfront as opposed to at the cocktail bar or on the clothes horse. Fantastic - corny as it sounds but true - is a great summer '83 coda to the post-Election depression. It fairly hums along.
From Bad Boys on (where have you last heard opening horns that good ?!), tha pace is a steady 100mph without a single stop for lachrymose reflection. Wham! on Fantastic take you by the throat and hurl you onto the dance floor. If you don't respond, you must write for Melody Maker ; this is white heat disco. If jane Fonda used this on her work-out record, her followers would end up as pieces of shrivelled charcoal. Wham! don't take any prisoners.
The trick, if there is one, is of course Andrew Ridgeley and George Michael's arranging, which is never less than inspired, keeping things tight-sounding without too much sheen. Michael's voice, too, is a revelation across a complete album, best illustrated by the way he varies tones from the stroll of Club Tropicana to the swing (the sad, sad swing) of Nothing Looks The Same In The Light. For a start, anyone who can write a title as good as Nothing Looks The Same In The Light is gifted. When you follow that up with a song that is this album's standout, and if released (as it ought to be) as a single will be a summer chart standout, it's just teasing you.
Nothing Looks The Same In The Light sees Wham! genuinely beginning to bite at the toes of Stevie Wonder. The song has a chorus so strong it is practically the entire song along with the inspired title line ; on these two fundamentals, Wham! dance genius just breezes along. Nothing Looks The Same In The Light is a song that will refuse to leave you alone. It's magical.
Other goodies ? Club Tropicana proves they can write brilliant pop ; they do a version of Love Machine that will knock your block off, it's so fast. In fact, amid the white heat of the boogie, questions such as 'are they politically alright ?' (even sad old Bushell says they are now) or 'is this taking music anywhere new ?' hardly seem to matter.
And that exclamatory mark at the end of Wham!'s name now looks like a health warning rather than a vain threat. Fantastic is easily the record of the summer 1983.
City Limits, July 1983.
The idea of Wham! isn't such a bad one : snappy dancefloor pop bristling with optimism, short, sharp and lively and delivered by a pair of Bright Young Men of our times. The trouble is they're a bit too keen on this idea themselves, specifically the many marvellous possibilities it offers for their own self-glorification. Their trio of hit singles (all of which appear here, one way or another) have declined from the likeable Wham! Rap to their latest appallingly shrill and cocky (being the operative term) Bad Boys which comes directly from the Army Cadet land.
The remainder of Fantastic (and there's not much of it) comprises a carbon copy of the Miracle's scintillating Love Machine (pointless), a gushy one-night-stand ballad, a tacky jingle-tribute to some imagined Ambre Solaire lifestyle and, thankfully, a couple of genuinely positive summertime tunes of which A Ray Of Sunshine is the best. Take it with a pinch of salt and like it just for that. Wham!'s real problem though is that they exist in the same implausible Bad Boy dreamland as a million 'bad' boy groups before, one populated by some imaginary super-cool master race, all of whom are twenty-two years old, oversexed (they claim, loundly), under-expoded to the rest of the world, and fundamentally as selfish as hell. At least James Dean got over it.
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