Released today in 1989: Rio Rocks

Parlophone SSS6

The story of Sigue Sigue Sputnik in the 1980s was about to come to an end. As Tony James notes in his overview of the band’s history, “I had not thought about it at the time, but in retrospect, we seemed to be following a similar trajectory to the [Sex] Pistols, right down to their tour of the USA and finishing with a jaunt to Brazil….”

It seems incredible that they had survived beyond their over-hyped debut album, but Sputnik were still releasing singles until the end of the 80s. Their second long-player, Dress For Excess, had appeared in 1988 and had a number of producers amongst them Stock Aitken Waterman, who provided them with their first hit for more than two years with Success. Elsewhere, sales were limited. The goal of breaking the American market had already been more or less abandoned by the group as unrealistic before any chance of a hit was wiped out permanently: at some point in early ’89, EMI shut down their recently-acquired Manhattan subsidiary and left some artists, including Sputnik, without a record deal. The business side of being a rock star was wearing James down. “I was losing any control of the organization by this stage” he said. “I think I just couldn’t handle it any more, wanted to be like the others, just a guy in the band having a great time with someone else taking care of business. Except there was no one else to do that, so I decided to bring in an ‘experienced’ tour manager for Brazil.”

Brazil was the one country where everything Sputnik touched turned to gold – or platinum in the case of the Dress For Excess album. Perhaps it was the inclusion of a track called Rio Rocks. Whatever the reason, they had a receptive audience there and toured in 1989. Ticket sales were good but little profit made it to the group members. “I was expecting that we would be millionaires in Brazil, not realizing that it was really hard to get the money out of the country with the Brazil/pound exchange rate being completely ridiculous. They had something like two hundred per cent inflation over there,” said James. Added to this, the ‘experienced tour manager’ “had stolen all the money earned from the Brazilian tour to feed his own serious drug habit.”

On their return to the UK, Rio Rocks (produced by Brazilian musician Liminha) was released as their latest (and, as fate would have it, final) single. Although energy within the band was low, promotion continued for the single throughout August, with a special edition 12” featuring new remixes of the track, and press releases stated that they were working on material for a third album. However, on his web history of Sigue Sigue Sputnik, James notes this final entry in the Sputnik office diary:

✐ On the first of September 1989, the money ran out and I had to pull the plug on the Sputnik Movie and all its players. But boy what a ride it had been. Believe me, the thrill of a lifetime and I don’t regret one single moment.

NEW SINGLES on sale from Jul. 31
1981
BOW WOW WOW Prince Of Darkness (RCA RCA100)
The HUMAN LEAGUE Love Action (I Believe In Love) (Virgin VS436)
SIMPLE MINDS (Jim Kerr) Love Song (Virgin VS434)
UB40 One In Ten (DEP International DEP2)
1989
Malcolm McLAREN Something’s Jumpin’ In Your Shirt (Epic WALTZ3)
SIGUE SIGUE SPUTNIK Rio Rocks (Parlophone SSS6)
THEN JERICO (Mark Shaw) Sugar Box (London LON235)

Released today in 1982: Bamboo Houses

Virgin VS510

Japan’s split made them the second band arguably at the peak of their popularity to confirm they were breaking up in the autumn of 1982, along with The Jam. Whereas The Jam’s demise came out of the blue for fans, there had been rumours all year that Japan’s days were numbered. Rob Dean had already quit and the remaining members were all involved in projects outside the band. We looked at Mick Karn’s post-Japan projects in the 1980s earlier in the month, as he was the first member to get a solo record in the shops, but how did the others spend the rest of the decade?

Rob Dean joined Illustrated Man who produced an album in 1984.

Steve Jansen and Richard Barbieri continued as a duo, recording an album in 1985 before recruiting others to form a band The Dolphin Brothers for their next.

David Sylvian’s first single without Japan came while the group was still a going concern. Bamboo Houses was a collaboration with experimental musician Ryuichi Sakamoto, who had just completed some work with Japan; it was the first of several collaborations between them. The most prolific of all the former Japan members, Sylvian produced four LPs of his own plus two with Holger Czukay.

At the end of the decade, Japan (still without Rob Dean) re-formed in all but name: Sylvian insisted the name Japan be consigned to the past, and when a new album appeared a couple of years later, it was credited to Rain Tree Crow.

NEW SINGLES on sale from Jul. 30
1982
SYLVIAN SAKOMOTO (David Sylvian) Bamboo Houses (Virgin VS510)

Released today in 1983: (She’s) Sexy And 17

Arista SCAT6

One of the main claims to fame that rockabilly revivalists Stray Cats have is that one of their songs, Rock This Town, was selected by the by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to be included in its permanent exhibit of the ‘500 Songs That Shaped Rock And Roll’. It seems to me that both the song and the group were influenced by, rather than influencing, the early years of rock and roll, but there we are. An American outfit, they came to Britain in the 1980s because of the interest in their preferred musical genre emerging here at the time. The rocker/Teddy Boy scene in the 1970s had produced such acts as Showaddywaddy, a group also active throughout the 1980s but commercially less successful in the latter decade; they had a string of Top 10 hits in the second half of the 70s but were in decline in the first couple of years of the 1980s, ironically just as interest in the subgenre of rockabilly started to pick up. They last charted in 1982, but which time a number of new names were appearing in the charts.

Matchbox, who had been active longer than Showaddywaddy but without troubling the charts, had their first hit Rockabilly Rebel in 1979 and then had four Top 40 singles in 1980. (They later teamed up with Kirsty MacColl for a single in 1983.) Shakin’ Stevens, a contemporary of Showaddywaddy and Matchbox who had released his first single ten years earlier, also began his chart career in 1980. The Polecats were the first signing to specialist rockabilly independent record company, Nervous, at around the same time, and they enjoyed a handful of hits when they jumped ship to a major label in 1981. That was the year Coast To Coast’s (Do) The Hucklebuck made the Top 10, and Stray Cats enjoyed their most commercially successful period. (She’s) Sexy and 17 was a kind of comeback record for them, as they released no new singles during 1982 and were absent from the charts for well over eighteen months. It only made the lower reaches of the UK Top 40, but was a Top 10 hit in the US shortly before they split up. In the same year as (She’s) Sexy and 17, the rockabilly baton was passed on to Roman Holliday, who combined elements from other genres to make their debut album Cookin’ On The Roof a hit; they soon disappeared from the charts. The only one of all the acts listed in this article to sustain a chart career throughout the 1980s was Shaky, but he was more influenced by the rock’n’roll of Elvis Presley than he was by rockabilly.

NEW SINGLES on sale from Jul. 29
1983
HAIRCUT 100 Prime Time (Polydor HC1)
STRAY CATS She’s Sexy And 17 (Arista SCAT6)

Released today in 1986: Open Up The Red Box

WEA YZ75

A fact that might have passed a number of people by in the mid-80s was that there were six members of Simply Red; the name wasn’t a pseudonym for lead singer and main songwriter Mick Hucknall. (Admittedly ten years later, it would be.) The cover of single Open Up The Red Box was one of only two official releases in the UK which featured pictures of the other members. At the time of this 1986 release, they were (clockwise from top, with Hucknall in the centre):

Tim Kellett started his professional career when he joined post-punkers The Durutti Column as a teenager, a band that two other Simply Red members had a stint in also. He played the trumpet in Durutti and this was his main role initially for Simply Red too, although across the four albums he appeared on he also played keyboards, flugelhorn, bass guitar and percussion instruments. He left the group after the album Stars.

Tony Bowers had been active in the music industry for nearly fifteen years prior to joining Simply Red. He was another of the former members of The Durutti Column to join the group, but his time with that band didn’t coincide with Kellett’s: Bowers was a founding member in 1978 but left the following year just as recording work on an album was about to begin in earnest. He then formed The Mothmen who released a few singles before splitting in 1982.He then played bass for Simply Red from its inception until the end of the 80s.

Sylvan Richardson was not an original member of Simply Red, as there was another guitarist called David Fryman before him, but he was part of the line-up in time for the group’s first single. Usually credited only as ‘Sylvan’, he remained with the band for two albums and participated in their first world tour.

Chris Joyce had worked with Bowers both in the original The Durutti Column line-up in the late 70s and then in The Mothmen in the early 80s. After the Mothmen split he worked with Pete Wylie’s and toured with Wah! from ’82 to ’83, before getting the call to join Simply Red.

Fritz McIntyre was the main keyboard player in the first Simply Red line-up, but he also sang: mostly backing vocals of course, but also the lead on the closing track from 1991’s Stars album. He also co-wrote a couple of the group’s singles with Hucknall, and was the only original member of the band besides Hucknall to feature on 1995’s Life album. He left the following year.

NEW SINGLES on sale from Jul. 28
1986
SIMPLY RED (Mick Hucknall) Open Up The Red Box (WEA YZ75)
David SYLVIAN Taking The Veil (Virgin VS815)

Released today in 1984: Mothers Talk

Mercury IDEA7

The TEARS FOR FEARS Story Part 2

“Luckily we don’t have a record company that expects us to regurgitate records like a factory,” Curt Smith told Smash Hits in 1983. It was just as well. Tears For Fears were developing reputations for taking their time over their music. With work on The Hurting finished at the beginning of 1983, by the end of the year all they had added to their repertoire was a single called The Way You Are.

There were two main reasons for long wait for new material. Firstly, there was the day-to-day business of having a hit album: The Hurting and its attendant singles needed promotion outside the UK and as sales picked up in other territories, the Smith and Roland Orzabal toured to support it. Secondly, and rather more significantly, they were concerned about the direction their work should take. Details about the nature of album number two were vague, but they did say The Way You Are would not be featured on it. Later, they would distance themselves further from the single, despite it being a hit, Orzabal saying, “we lost our way a bit musically. We used to be on the planet Sylvian and now we’re on the planet rock’n’roll, it’s just that the rocket took a long time getting there! No, seriously: we had to re-group and decide what our musical direction was going to be.” Orzbal’s comments came on the release of Mothers Talk, in the middle of 1984 – well over six months after their last release. In that time they had recorded the song twice, working with a new producer to lay down the first version in early ’84. Dissatisfied with the finished product, The Hurting’s producer Chris Hughes was brought back to re-work it. (It wasn’t selected for release as a single in the US originally, but when it did finally appear on a 45rpm disc there in March 1986, it did so in yet another mix, this time by Bob Clearmountain.)

Smith said it was that during their time out of the public eye, they had become less precious. “The only reason we were precious before is because we were terrible,” said Orzabal. “Now we’re going to do things more quickly, make mistakes and make complete prats of ourselves.” Hindsight has shown that statement to be largely false: the two year wait for the second album was nothing compared to the four-and-a-half year wait for the third; if they made mistakes they certainly weren’t done publicly; and they didn’t make prats of themselves. Quite the reverse: they were about to release of series of classic singles that would be hits all over the world.

NEW SINGLES on sale from Jul. 27
1981
U2 Fire (Island WIP6679)
1984
TEARS FOR FEARS Mothers Talk (Mercury IDEA7)
1987
Rick ASTLEY Never Gonna Give You Up (RCA PB41447)
KING (Paul King) Follow My Heart (CBS PKING2)
SIMPLY RED (Mick Hucknall) Maybe Someday… (Elektra YZ141)
Kim WILDE Say You Really Want Me (MCA KIM6)
Danny WILSON (Gary Clark) Mary’s Prayer (Virgin VS934)

Released today in 1982: The Dreaming

EMI EMI5296

The KATE BUSH Story Part 2

The first of the long gaps between releases mentioned at the end of Part 1 of If You Were There’s brief history of Kate Bush’s career came immediately prior to the release of this, her tenth single. The thirteen-month wait for The Dreaming was same duration as the pause between her fourth and fifth singles referred to in the previous article, but her public profile was high in that period due to the Tour Of Life, its attendant EP, and a guest appearance on Peter Gabriel’s hit song Games Without Frontiers in early 1980, which helped to plug the gap between her own singles. In the year prior to The Dreaming, there were no releases at all and she had been absent from the charts.

But to pick up the story where we left off last time: her third album Never For Ever, released in September 1980, was a resounding success. She became the first woman to have a chart topping album of new material in Britain. (The following month, Barbra Streisand would become the second; both she and Connie Francis had previously had #1 albums, but with compilations of archive material.) What was all the more remarkable about Bush’s achievement was that the album actually entered the chart at #1, and she had written it and co-produced it herself. The diversity of reference points and influences was as wide as ever: her writing was inspired by people, places, music and film. There was Egypt, celebrating the titular country; The Infant Kiss, inspired by the disturbing 1961 film ‘The Innocents’; Blow Away, an exploration of an imagined showbusiness afterlife which name-checked a number of deceased entertainers; and Delius, a tribute to the composer, which she talked about on Russell Harty’s BBC chat show in the presence of Delius’s amanuensis Eric Fenby, himself mentioned in the song’s lyrics. Bush was experimenting confidently with her writing and her vocals – perhaps most affectingly on the brief, lyric-free interlude at the centre of side 2 of the album, Night Scented Stock – and importantly, she had discovered the Fairlight, a digital sampling synthesizer that had a significant impact on her composing. The tool was introduced to her by Peter Gabriel on whose third album she had appeared and from which the single Games Without Frontiers had been taken.

1980 finished with the release of standalone Christmas single December Will Be Magic Again, which she had written a year earlier. Then, the periods of silence she would become famed for started. Her focus was album number four, which she had already started working on. Seeing Stevie Wonder in concert at Wembley in September 1980 had inspired the writing of the extraordinary Sat In Your Lap, more on which later; she had recorded an initial demo within days of attending the concert. More demos were made the following month and then in early 1981, she took some weeks off to recover from the prolonged period of promotion for Never For Ever. Recording for the album proper started in May and it would take a year of effort to get the recordings sounded the way she wanted them: this time she was producing on her own, and the sessions took place in five different studios, initially at the Townhouse, then to Abbey Road in June, Windmill Lane in Dublin in July, back to London at Odyssey from August to December, and finally Advision from January to May 1982. During this period, she made occasional appearances on television and gave a press interview here and there, so she could not be described as ‘reclusive’. She was rumoured to be writing a book about her life and work, and it was true that she had talked to publishers Sidgwick & Jackson. The idea of Kate setting the record straight might have come from the publication of the bizarre Kate Bush: Princess of Suburbia, the first of a number of unauthorized books about her. Smash Hits described this as a “very thin and appallingly designed book,” featuring “half-baked theorizing and Sun-style rumour-mongering … nobody should be surprised if [Bush] decides to take some kind of legal action against the authors…”. Allegedly, Bush and her family did indeed take action and author Fred Vermorel (who later wrote another book about her) claimed he was simply spoofing tabloid journalism; it wasn’t supposed to be taken as a scholarly work.

During the year of the fourth album’s gestation, Bush’s only release was the percussion heavy, vocally acrobatic Sat In Your Lap at the end of June 1981, her first for just over six months and her last for over a year. Dramatic, theatrical, with no discernible chorus and lyrics on the theme of education and learning, it maintained her reputation for the unusual and challenging, and did well, reaching #11. Its abrupt and startling climax was one of the most thrilling endings to a pop song in the 80s. But while the critical reception to this single was favourable, the reaction to her next was mixed. Smash Hits’s response to The Dreaming was uncharacteristically uncharitable: “The oddball single to end all oddball singles. Slow, spare, distinctly tribal and very bizarre. Sample lyric (one of the clearer ones): “Dangle devils in a bottle and push them from the pull of the Bush”. Shepherd’s Bush? Steve Bush? [Smash Hits’s designer and later editor] Kate herself? No dear, the Australian Bush. Oh, silly me. Strictly for aborigines.” New Musical Express praised her experimentation: “Kate… has zoomed into the stratosphere with the first piece of ‘Aboriginal’ pop since Rolf Harris’s Sun Arise (Alice Cooper made it too Detroit to count). Apparently Rolf actually appears on this single! The Dreaming is the most unusual record of the week, full of environmental drones and atavistic thumps, with Kate singing in some kind of accent, presumably supposed to be aboriginal, that I’ve never heard before. Bold and good.”

Over at Melody Maker, a detailed review concluded with an open verdict: “Last week they did a ‘blind date’ and played this on Roundtable¹ without telling anyone who it was. I burst out laughing when the guy from Bucks Fizz said he thought it was Kate Bush – and passed out when they said he was right. The Roundtable panel slagged it mercilessly. It’s the weirdest damn record I’ve ever heard (this week anyway), a clanking chain-gang rhythm, tribal, primitive and relentless, and then in comes Kate’s fearsome twisted voice diving and swooping in different accents. ‘Bang goes another kanga on the bonnet of the van.’ To be honest it put the fear of God into me. Who can conjecture what was on her mind when she wrote it? – it could be a soundtrack for ‘The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith”, a protest song for aborigines, or any race driven from their own land by ‘civilization’. Maybe she just wanted to do a tortured update of Sun Arise. Among the nightmarish array of hoots and howls that explode around Kate in the jungle, Percy Edwards and Rolf Harris contribute their odd vocal acrobatics to the sounds of the animal kingdom. And the B-side is basically a dub version of the same disquieting episode. I’m not entirely sure, but I think Roundtable were wrong.”

Crucially though, radio show presenters and producers didn’t think Roundtable were wrong, and The Dreaming received little airplay. It was a brave choice for a single from someone promoted as a mainstream artist. Whether it was Bush’s decision to release it immediately prior to her next album, with EMI again trusting her instincts on what was the right song to go with, or whether it was EMI’s choice, it didn’t pay off: the single climbed no higher than #48. Although fans’ loyalty to Bush would become very evident in the future, at this time and over the next few months it seemed her audience might have abandoned her during her lengthy period out of the charts.

¹ ‘Roundtable’ was a review show on BBC Radio 1, launched in October 1970 which ran with occasional breaks for fifteen years. DJs (and later on, performers) offered their comments on the latest singles releases; Bush was a guest herself in August 1979. It was replaced by a similar show called ‘Singled Out’ in 1986.

NEW SINGLES on sale from Jul. 26
1982
Kate BUSH The Dreaming (EMI EMI5296)
1985
TRACIE I Can’t Leave You Alone (Respond SBS1)

Released today in 1988: The Loco-Motion

PWL PWL14

The Loco-Motion has been covered by a great many artists and has been a hit for several of them. Written by the legendary team of Goffin and King, it was written in 1962 with Dee Dee Sharp in mind, who had just had a hit in America with Mashed Potato Time. A demo of the song sung by Eva Boyd, the Kings’ nanny, was recorded but Sharp turned the song down, perhaps because she’d already had one hit with a song about a dance craze. Boyd’s vocals were thought to be strong enough to carry the song and so instead, under the name Little Eva, she was allowed to release it herself. It was #1 before the end of the year. Such was the popularity of the song, it was a Top 10 hit for other artists in each of the next two decades: Grand Funk Railroad had another #1 with it in 1974, and then in 1988 Kylie Minogue took it to #3. It’s never been a chart-topper here though: the UK ignored Grand Railroad Funk’s take on the song (although the group had had a hit in this country earlier in the 70s), while both Little Eva and Minogue scored #2 hits with their versions. Other hit versions in the UK include a contemporary rival to Little Eva’s 1962 hit by The Vernons Girls, and a take by Dave Stewart while moonlighting from Eurythmics with Barbara Gaskin in 1986, the year in which Little Eva’s original almost became a hit for the second time.

The version released by Minogue today in 1988 was not the one she had had a hit with in her native Australia the previous year. She had performed the song at a variety night at Melbourne’s Festival Hall on 3 August 1986 with other members of the soap opera ‘Neighbours’, the cast of which she had joined earlier that year. A popular performance on the night, Minogue then made a studio recording of the song which found its way to Mushroom records, who offered her a one-single deal to release it. Mushroom had links with PWL, Pete Waterman’s record company, and the brief Mushroom gave engineer Mike Duffy (on secondment to Mushroom at the time) was to make Minogue’s recording sound like the type of music Stock Aitken Waterman were producing in the UK. Exactly a week shy of the anniversary of her performance of the song at Festival Hall, Minogue’s debut single Locomotion was issued in Australia. It went to #1 for seven weeks.

Mushroom looked to PWL for material for a follow-up, and in the autumn of 1987 Minogue was given two weeks off ‘Neighbours’ to fly to the UK to record something with Stock Aitken Waterman. As has been famously documented elsewhere, it nearly didn’t happen: The Hit Factory was simply too busy. But once Waterman recognized Minogue’s potential, she became a priority artist. In the UK, Minogue’s version of the Little Eva hit was re-recorded by Stock Aitken Waterman (and re-titled, back to Goffin/King’s original The Loco-Motion) for inclusion on her debut LP, Kylie, and saw release as her third British single – almost exactly a year after the release of her first version in Australia.

NEW SINGLES on sale from Jul. 25
1980
Adam ANT Kings Of The Wild Frontier (CBS CBS8877)
BAUHAUS (Peter Murphy) Terror Couple (4AD AD7)
ROXY MUSIC (Bryan Ferry) Oh Yeah (Polydor 2001972)
1988
FIVE STAR Rock My World (Tent PB42145)
Kylie MINOGUE The Loco-Motion (PWL PWL14)

Released today in 1981: Backfired

Chrysalis CHS2526

The sleeve of Debbie Harry’s first solo single Backfired featured a detail from a photograph of her taken by Brian Aris. The rest of the image was seen on the cover of her debut album, Kookoo, with alterations made by Swiss artist H.R. Giger who had recently enjoyed some notoriety for his design work on the science fiction horror film ‘Alien’. Harry’s Blondie band mate and partner Chris Stein recalled that “Debbie and I met him right after he won the Academy Award for ‘Alien’. The original prints of the ‘Alien’ artwork were on display around the country, so we went to the gallery in New York and by coincidence he was there and we met him. We brought him over to the house, and we’ve been friends ever since, pretty much.”

Giger was invited to contribute to the artwork for the as-yet untitled album. “When I was back in Switzerland, I picked up some excellent shots in which Debbie wore her hair combed sharply back,” he said in 1991. (Harry had decided that as the album was not a Blondie one, she would visually distance herself from the group by symbolically dying her hair brown for the Aris photo session.) “Since I had just had acupuncture treatment from my friend and doctor, Paul Tobler, the idea of the four needles came to me, in which I saw symbols of the four elements, to be combined with her face.” The result was both stunning and unsettling: Giger painted over one of Aris’s original pictures to show four spikes piercing Harry’s face and neck. This treatment of one of pop’s most beautiful faces was too shocking for some: Chrysalis mounted a poster campaign featuring the image to promote the album, but Stein remembers organizations such as London Underground refusing to allow them to be displayed for fear of disturbing people.

Nevertheless, as Giger recalled, “Debbie and Chris… liked the idea and, in addition, they commissioned me to make two video clips of the best songs.” The first of these was Backfired, which incorporated elements of the imagery from the album cover along with Giger’s trademark ‘biomechanical’ designs. The other clip was for the track Now I Know You Know which was presumably in line to be a single at one time; in fact, the follow-up single in most countries was The Jam Was Moving.

NEW SINGLES on sale from Jul. 24
1981
Debbie HARRY Backfired (Chrysalis CHS2526)
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES (Siouxsie Sioux) Arabian Knights (Polydor POSP309)
1989
BIG FUN Blame It On The Boogie (Jive JIVE217)
Neneh CHERRY Kisses On The Wind (Circa YR33)
FUZZBOX Self! (WEA YZ408)
Kylie MINOGUE Wouldn’t Change A Thing (PWL PWL42)
TRANSVISION VAMP (Wendy James) Landslide Of Love (MCA TVV8)
Sydney YOUNGBLOOD If Only I Could (Circa YR34)

Released today in 1984: Careless Whisper

Epic A4603

The GEORGE MICHAEL Story Part 2

“He has a huge reputation as a real asshole and there’s no doubt that Simon will make a lot of money out of us,” said George Michael in 1985 about new Wham! manager Simon Napier Bell. “But what he really wants out of it is to be responsible for managing a group that is one of the biggest in the world.” Part of getting Wham! that kind of star status meant getting them released from their contract with Inner Vision, and Mark Dean held Napier Bell responsible for driving the final wedge between his label and the Wham! duo. But strong management from an experienced music industry professional like Napier Bell was exactly what the group needed at this point. He got them a lucrative deal with CBS records, and Michael and Andrew Ridgeley now received proper reward and remuneration as artists on the Epic subsidiary which helped motivate them to focus their efforts on scoring their first #1.

Napier Bell couldn’t work miracles all the time though. He couldn’t prevent Inner Vision’s issue of the dreadful Club Fantastic single, an awful medley of tracks from the Fantastic album released at the end of 1983. Inner Vision won an injunction to prevent Wham! recording for another company on 11 November 1983, and the single was released two weeks later. (Michael and Ridgeley urged fans to treat it as the cash-in it was and not to buy it, but even so it went to #15, such was their popularity.) But, while he negotiated the out-of-court settlement that would release Wham! from Inner Vision in March 1984, Napier Bell did ensure that Inner Vision had no right to release Careless Whisper in that period, a track already written when Wham! joined the label, but one not appearing on Fantastic. This song was to be reserved for Wham!’s next record company and, as it was to play out, for Michael’s first solo record.

But before that, there was Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, the first release under the Epic deal. Dee C. Lee had left the group by this point, although she had also signed to CBS (shortly before Wham!) as a solo artist. (She also started to work regularly with the band she was later to join, The Style Council.) She was replaced by Pepsi Demacque, and this new line-up on their new label came with a new attitude and new look. The Club Tropicana atmosphere was preserved for ‘Go-Go’: it was a party record, a full-of-energy contemporary take on mid-century pop classics with its “pa-pa” backing vocals which mentioned the dance-craze jitterbug. Unlike Club Tropicana the video for the song was studio based this time, but it again depicted Wham! with other fun-seekers, this time an audience of adoring fans. Wham! were depicted as a band for the first time with a full set of musicians on stage with Michael and Ridgeley, the latter cast as guitar player. Famously, they wore Katharine Hamnett T-shirts with the legend CHOOSE LIFE for the first half of the film, changing into day-glo colours in the second; Michael came to despise the luminous gloves he wore when this image of him was over-used.

So strongly did ‘Go-Go’ come to identify Wham! in the weeks following its release, it is probably just as well that the follow-up, issued just over two months later, was done so in Michael’s name rather than the band’s. The previously mentioned Careless Whisper was a mature ballad with sensitive lyrics (Michael didn’t think so, dismissing the song as frivolous in later years) and a memorable sax solo. It was a sensible move to issue it as a solo single because it is difficult to see how Ridgeley could have contributed to its promotion, but it should be noted that he is credited as co-writer. Also, Michael made it clear at the time though that this wasn’t the start of his solo career: work on a second Wham! album was to continue, and tours were planned. But the music industry was starting to take him more seriously. He’d just taken two singles to #1, the second of which had given Epic their first million-seller, and in addition to records the mention of his name could sell concert tickets, clothing, magazines, and more: when people copied his Careless Whisper haircut (dubbed the most expensive in history, as he had it re-styled during the video shoot for the single meaning for continuity reasons expensive scenes had to be re-shot) he became a trend-setter in fashion circles too. All this, and it was only half-way through 1984: he was still yet to truly make it big.

NEW SINGLES on sale from Jul. 23
1982
The ASSOCIATES 18 Carat Gold Love (Associates ACS3)
CHINA CRISIS African And White [re-issue – check label] (Virgin INEV011)
The FUN BOY THREE Summertime (Chrysalis CHS2629)
1984
George MICHAEL Careless Whisper (Epic A4603)

Released today in 1983: Club Tropicana

Inner Vision IVLA3613

In 2006, celebrating George Michael’s 25 years in the music industry, Sony Music released the appropriately-titled Twenty-five, a compilation of tracks from (supposedly) throughout his career. There were pitifully few selections from his years in Wham!, with just four songs (all 1984 – more tomorrow) making the cut: Everything She Wants, Freedom, Last Christmas and Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go. (Two other tracks recorded during the Wham! years were included – Careless Whisper, also 1984, and A Different Corner from 1986 – but in the UK at least these were issued as solo singles.) This made the collection somewhat lacking, as it really only commemorated a 22-year period given that the first Wham! album, Fantastic, was ignored. Had I been compiling it, I would certainly have found a place for one track from that record, Club Tropicana.

A satirical look at the popular Club 18/30 holiday culture, it’s a song about sun, sand, sangria and … well, not sea, because “all that’s missing is the sea,” as the lyrics state. (“But don’t worry, you can suntan!”) The opening line, “Let me take you to the place/Where membership’s a smiling face,” is just wonderful; if only that were true of the exclusive Pikes hotel (the scene of a number of lavish celebrity parties in the 1980s) in Ibiza where the memorable promotional clip was filmed, with the group dressed in beachwear at the start and revealed to be airline pilots and stewardesses at the end. Fun, witty, knowing: it was Wham!’s first great single and set a standard for their forthcoming second album Make It Big, on which most of the other tracks that did make it on to Twenty-five first appeared.

Footnote: I would also have made a case for 1985’s standalone single I’m Your Man’s inclusion on Twenty-five.

NEW SINGLES on sale from Jul. 22
1983
The BELLE STARS (Jennie McKeown) Indian Summer (Stiff BUY185)
STRAWBERRY SWITCHBLADE Trees And Flowers (92 Happy Customers HAP001)
WHAM! Club Tropicana (Inner Vision IVLA3613)
1985
Nik KERSHAW Don Quixote (MCA NIK8)
UB40 I Got You Babe (DEP International DEP20)