George and the courts- He wins some and he loses some- after successfully wriggling out of his first record contract with Innervision in 1984, by 1991 he’d enough of Sony- time to go back to see the judge! A long case ended in 1994 with failure in the courts but Virgin came along and bought him out of the Sony contract- yay! Commercially it wasn’t a success on the level of his first solo album in the US at least where his refusal to do promo video’s or really promote on the required level saw only No 1 single, in the UK it outsold “Faith” but only gave him three top 30 hits. Too much of a success it seems for George- it caused a major re-think of how he wanted to be seen as a performer and writer and resulted in his second LP “Listen Without Prejudice Volume 1” in 1990. It spawned 6 top 20 hits in the UK but was massive stateside with four US chart topping singles and sold 11 million in the UK and US alone. The duo accrued an impressive 4 Number one singles and five other top 10 singles from just 10 releases then boom- they were no more! Splitting up at the height of their fame in the summer of 1986 with a sell out Wembley gig and No 1 single was the perfect ending before it all got……tatty.īut what then? The answer had already been given back in 1984- the solo career! Founded on a hat-trick of solo chart toppers George unveiled his master plan to move to the next level- it was called “Faith”. In short they were a commercial hurricane (Yeah Yeah). In the pantheon of 80s pop there are many great acts but Wham! were in fact the 6th biggest singles act of the decade in Britain and the second best selling group with some 4.9 million singles sold in the UK alone, and all the acts above them charted for longer periods of time than the 4 years Wham! had together. With a name derived from Andrew mucking about singing “Wham! Bam” I am the man” to the tune of “Rapper’s Delight” the school friends set out into the world of pop.
George was just 18 when he and Andrew Ridgely were signed up as Wham! and gave us their first single “Wham Rap!” in June 1982 which missed the top 100. Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou- mmmm that name seems too long, we need something shorter, catchier, something you might call a popstar name- how about George Michael?
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