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As is my want this is a fairly self-indulgent post looking at two of my favourite singers George Michael and Billy MacKenzie. Trying to join some dots in their lives and ultimately finding a chasm in their careers but a thread that joins them together in the mid 90s. Where did this idea come from? Well, George Michael’s classic Older from 1996 has been reissued. It’s really special. I’ve noticed real love for it everywhere. George himself said in a Red Line interview:

“I’m very proud of Listen Without Prejudice. But I think the whole experience of losing Anselmo; the period of grief, which was roughly two years that I didn’t write a note of music. And then, the absolute knowledge that the next album I was going to write would be about grief and recovery. Older is my greatest moment. And as I’ve said before I don’t ever want to be that inspired again.”

Wow! There’s so much out there written about Older . This from Ian Wade for Classic Pop Magazine is the best I’ve read and where I found the above quote.
There really isn’t much more I can add to Ian’s article but while I was listening to Older I began to think about Billy MacKenzie, as you’ll know this often happens with me. In particular his 3 CD release from earlier this year, Satellite Life: Recordings 1995-1996 . There is a very similar feel to Older . The songs were recorded over the same period as Older so I assume some similar techniques were used. Both records contain songs of introspection and loss. A mix of old school torch songs and upbeat dance numbers sung of course in those voices.

Certainly as singers there is much to compare between the two. I’ve often imagined George singing the pants off Party Fears Two . So once this spark was ignited, I began searching for any connections between the two. Billy was 6 years older than George. He was from Dundee and George from Bushey, hardly cosmopolitan starts for either of them. They both met musical partners that brought out the best in them. Ridgely and Rankine entirely different characters and talents but just as important in allowing George and Billy to fly.

In 1982 the year The Associates commercial candle shone brightest Wham! burst on to the scene with Young Guns (Go For It) . They were allowed on Top Of The Pops despite it stalling outside the top 40. Unheard of in those days. George’s slick coordinated dance moves light years away from Billy’s off the cuff pissing about. They were in the same charts, on the same shows but playing a completely different game. One demanded they stay there in the full glare of being pop stars, the other didn’t really care. I loved them both. One ticking all my cool needs, the other satisfying all my sheer fun pop wants.

An observation I made while looking back was that Wham’s 1983 and 1984 albums were named Fantastic and Make It Big while The Associates albums from 1982 and 1985 were called Sulk and Perhaps . Telling? Maybe, they definitely sent out different messages to the record buying public. George wanted to make music, he wanted everything, embraced it all and all it demanded of him. Billy wanted to make music but just didn’t care for the promotion, the repetition, the hard yards. Both with talent to burn and voices to die for. One popped in, the other souled out.

This from an old MacKenzie website further proof that while George had his eyes firmly on the prize Billy’s were elsewhere.

Another time George Michael rang Billy to ask him to attend the party where his Faith album was released. (It’s rumoured he wanted Billy to sing) Billy said he couldn’t go as it was the end of the racing season and he had to attend that race meeting as one of his dogs needed to win that race to become Scottish champion. George wasn’t very pleased and said “Fuck off MacKenzie. You’re mad”. (There are differing versions of this story and how George responded. I imagine a head shake and a laugh accompanying the words)

I dug around for any other connection between the two and it appears they did connect occasionally. Again over Billy’s whippets.

From The Scottish Sun in 1994

He (MacKenzie) said: “They’ve been on videos and made cameo appearances on my record sleeves. If I have not got a dog with me people will ask me where they are. George Michael has seen them and asked for advice about his Labrador Hippy. I told him not to feed him any kebabs!”

So where is this ramble going? Well, we’ve identified that George and Billy started with ambition, with partners to lean on and around the same time found fame, George took it and set off to the stratosphere squeezing every last drop out his talent and himself. Billy took it and bought Whippets drifting in and out of the business. Both arrived at the mid 90s having taken very different routes to get there. Neither completely without personal and public issues never really resolved. This is a fantastic insight and recognition of their different takes on fame and fortune. From an interview in 1990 with Billy by Randy Haecker

We’ve had about a dozen Top 50 hits, which is fine, I like it like that. I get congratulated by people like George Michael, who says ‘I love the way that you do things, you just suit yourself’. He knows that it’s not money that brings happiness. He’s got 65 million dollars, but I wouldn’t want that. It would be a curse. Unless you’re going to do something with that … it’s like excess baggage to me. George is somebody who realizes that I could’ve cashed in.

I’d love to find out more about their relationship. They clearly knew each other and it would appear spoke from time to time. If I could do just one podcast. Imagine a couple of hours with those two and a microphone….. In a chat with Billy’s chief collaborator Steve Aungle to accompany the release of Satellite Life we spoke about many things. Unfortunately, George didn’t come up. I wish I’d asked now. Who knows perhaps someone will read this who can fill some gaps?

So here we are, between 94 and 96 George worked on Older for his fancy new label Virgin. As we know from Ian’s piece it was inspired by the loss of George’s partner. While at the same time Billy was working on a number of projects and a load of songs hoping a label, any label would take him. During this period Billy lost his beloved mum. Another connection. All of this has left me wondering what if a major label had taken a punt on an older more mature Billy MacKenzie. What if out of those sessions Billy had put together his own version of Older a grown up, reflective, powerful record. So, taking George’s Older as the template I’ve chosen 11 tracks from Satellite Life that could have become Billy’s version. A what might have been. I think it works. These two albums (one real, one from my imagination) from these two extraordinary artists with their god given talent, complex characters, ups, downs and ultimately tragic endings (Billy at 39 and George at 53) complement each other perfectly. Both rewarding the listener who invests just a fraction of themselves compared to what George and Billy put in.

Again, there is so much out there written about George and Billy, their lives, their talent, how they handled it (or not), their music and their premature deaths. This is merely a muse on their differences, their similarities and a wish that they’d both got older, much older.

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Comments

    • I will bump this terrific post

      By incredible coincidence, I’ve just come onto the board off the back of watching a clip of George, on a sub-Reddit, singing ‘Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’ live… and then being joined on-stage by his surprise special guest, the man Elton himself.

      Top-drawer stuff, and listening to George sing a ballad always gives me the Lovely Shivers and reminds me that I ought to bring his albums back into kitchen-play rotation.

      It goes without saying that Billy’s singing was also magnificent, but I’ll say it anyway, for the record.

      Great post Dave, and I share the heartfelt sentiment in your final sentence.

        • “…both rewarding the listener who invests just a fraction of themselves compared to what George and Billy put in”.

          This is the even better line that I should have highlighted first time round. In essence, it’s “…you’ve got to have soul… to hear soul”.

          Well said, Dave.

      • Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me is a wonderful song.

        A few years back a dear friend of mine, a big George Michael fan, made a late appearance at one of our regular karaoke sessions. It was circa 2am when she texted to say she was en route in a cab.

        The decision was quickly made to cue up DLTSGDOM so that precisely as she entered the room she would be handed a mic with the legendary introduction “Ladies and gentlemen… Mr Elton John”.

        To this day a very happy memory – I have a great video of it somewhere. To be fair to her, she took it in stride and absolutely smashed the Elton part, to much rejoicing.

  2. Great post Dave, two great artists.
    I was living in Bushey when Wham had their first hit and went to one party around that time when ” that George out of Wham” was going to come also, but he never did.
    My old man used to go to George’s Dad’s steak house in Edgeware and at one point said to my Dad that so much money was coming in George didn’t know what to do with it all ….. He was buying blocks of new build flats and other property just to invest in something, but it was always about the music not the money.
    I don’t think that George was ever given enough credit by for his fantastic voice, perhaps that changed a bit after the Freddie Mercury concert where he was impeccable.
    Perhaps that was the thread between George and Billy, both never got the props that they really deserved.

  3. Well @DaveAmitri this may be something or it may be nothing but reading your post rang a bell for me. In my early London days, late 80s my flatmate, in fact room mate worked at Sarm West studio and frequently returned home with tales of music royalty and megamixes of music that wouldn’t hit the charts for months. I remember him being very discreet about George Michael’s recording time there but being full of chat about what a lovely person and great talent Billy Mckenzie was. A quick Google during the interval of a Dylan Moran gig in Dublin this evening indicates that they both recorded their 1990 releases in Sarm West; Listen Without Prejudice and Wild and Lonely. Perhaps they struck up an acquaintance there.

    • Cheers @bamber what a great story. I’ve checked @niallb‘s Sarm West blog and no mention of either album. Maybe he has some more info? It’s inevitable their paths crossed at some point, the thought of them in the same studio at the same time is intriguing

  4. I know we’re meant to consider his later work superior in the context of him being a Serious Artist (which he undoubtedly was), but I much prefer the sheer joie de vivre of Wham! Even in the midst of that youthful exuberance, he could get a point across (Everything She Wants, Where Did Your Heart Go?), but it never seemed to be much fun being Solo George – as indeed was borne out. Spending your days calling in to Richard & Judy in a fog of weed seems sad, in every sense.

    • Gosh, that is very sad to read, I didn’t know he’d done that. He was, by all accounts, a very (heart-)broken man in his later years.

      I remember the gut-punch that was the news of his death on that Christmas Day, as he was at his house in Goring, only some 20-odd minutes away from where I live; there was a lot of love and affection for him locally, as a sort of adopted ‘local boy’. I wasn’t in that world, but I had friends in the village who’d crossed paths with him often and were really fond of him.

    • I had a girlfriend who was obsessed with Everything She Wants. It didn’t last. It’s a brilliant song let’s not forget a double a side with Last Christmas. Wham! were / are magnificent

  5. Superb post, Dave.

    The song I thought Billy might cover from the Older expanded version is One More Try. George’s skill was to remain poised in the emotional storm of a song. Sometimes, I’d be egging him on. “Come on, George! Let It rip.” But, mostly, he was right. He managed to wring every last drop of feeling from each word. For this version, there is a gospel choir and George is even more restrained but aching with sorrow. Billy probably couldn’t afford a choir. Just imagine him let loose on this song.

    • Thanks Tigger. That’s wonderful. It’s a good point. George was able to judge perfectly when to hit the throttle vocally. One of the songs I selected from Billy Nocturne VII is a perfect example of his vocal control too. I’d give anything to be able to sing even remotely like that.

  6. Great post Dave. I didn’t know much about Billy other than the ubiquitous ‘Party Fears Two’. Thanks to your compilation I can now find out more. ‘Older’ was definitely the album where I was genuinely quite stunned by the quality and sophistication of the songwriting – listening again just now to ‘Jesus to a Child’ and how the song’s melody uncoils and develops in different ways after each round of the main verse/refrain. He would have been 59 this year and entering the elder statesmen part of his career – who knows where it would have gone. He and Amy are for me are the 2 great losses of this century.

  7. I bought Older when it came out, and I was a bit ambivalent about it. It’s odd that it contains several big hits, given it was released in the laddish fog of the Britpop era. The album feels like what it is: a requiem.

    Time has been kind to it, though. It’s a great late-night album: reflective and autumnal. I play it much more than I did in 1996, and it’s proof that you interpret and emotionally comprehend music differently as you grow (as the man himself said) older.

      • Apart from Oasis, Britpop is largely something that happened in the weekly inkies. Look at the album charts from that time – for every Ash at number one (for a week) there were a dozen Lionel Richies, Enigmas, Take Thats. GM certainly wasn’t underrated by the tens of millions of people who carried on buying his records regardless of whether he was fashionable or acclaimed or not.

        It’s a shame that love didn’t carry him through life better. But we’ve enough examples to know it’s not the real thing.

        • I’m not sure that’s entirely true re: Britpop. The following artists had number 1 albums in the peak Britpop period of 1995-1996:

          Supergrass, Elastica, Black Grape, The Boo Radleys, The Charlatans, Blur, Oasis, Pulp, Paul Weller, Kula Shaker, Suede, Ash, The Bluetones.

          There would probably have been more examples, except that in 1996 the album charts were largely eaten by What’s The Story Morning Glory, Jagged Little Pill and Spice Girls.

          The concept of Britpop was certainly minted in the inkies, but it ended up having a far wider cultural footprint, and consequently a lot of bands who would have been also-rans at any other time ended up selling records in vast quantities. I mean, Black Grape – seriously?!

          What is certainly true, is that George Michael ended up outselling all but a handful of the bands above over the course of his career, and that people continued to buy his records regardless of fashion. We don’t always have cause to say this, but: well done people.

      • When I spoke to Steve Aungle we touched very briefly on Britpop and what Billy thought of it all…

        D – Something I wondered me while I was listening that may be a bit trite but I’ll ask it anyway. 1995-97 was peak Britpop era. Was there any thought to knocking out a Beatlesque, guitar heavy version of Sour Jewell or something to jump on that band wagon?

        S – No. Sour Jewell was supposed to be a tribute to Roxy Music. I wrote the backing track without him there. He was away somewhere and he came back and I just had it playing in my room really loud. I knew he was in the house and he came through and said “what’s that?” I said it was just a new track and he asked if he could put a vocal on it. I said “well yeah, that’s the idea”. I deliberately made it sound as near to early Roxy Music as I could. We had listened to that first Roxy Music album a lot.

        D – I can’t really imagine Billy getting into the whole Blur and Oasis thing. I suspect he preferred Pulp or Suede?

        S – Well, we never really talked about Britpop. I think he made a few disparaging remarks about Suede because they were on Nude Records as well. In fact that was Nude Records one big success, Suede. I remember we were listening to some Suede and Brett Anderson was doing this high falsetto singing and Billy was shaking his head and saying “nah, that’s my territory”. I think he was a bit disparaging about Britpop in general.

  8. 2016 was a bad year for genius pop stars: George, Prince and Bowie all died that year. As time goes by I find I miss GM most out of the three. The emotion he could put into a song put him above most singers I can think of, just an awesome talent.

    Great post as ever, Dave.

      • Very much so, Dave, I was the same. It doesn’t sound like anything else that was out at the time and even now it sounds totally unique. A song that still gives me goosebumps and there aren’t many that do (Comedy by Shack and Boys of Summer by Don Henley are only others that come immediately to mind)

  11. Great stuff, Dave.

    Agree entirely that George Michael is a hugely underrated songwriter and vocalist; he brought enormous pathos to everything he put his voice to. Gone far, far too soon – it’s not difficult to imagine him doing great work well into old age.

    • Thanks Bingo. I suspect he’s one of those artists that would have just kept on writing even though he had a ridiculously rich back catalogue to lean on and keep churning out. I imagine his singing style would have allowed his voice to keep going and not falling into Elton’s pub singer territory.

  12. Listen without prejudice and Older are 2 great albums. Very under listened and appraised too, you see the usual best of polls that never reference them.

    He seemed to write less and less till after Older he was pretty much done. There isn’t much of merit after that. I wonder if he realised this and it contributed to his decline, or the decline caused the creative end. Who knows?

    • This skin-tinglingly beautiful cover of Stevie’s ‘They Won’t Go When I Go’ off Listen Without Prejudice… just pure gorgeousness.

      https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=RxHNn_EKRgQ&feature=share

      Do yourselves a power of good and listen to it three times on the bounce…and I guarantee that every fibre of your soul will implore you to play it again. If that doesn’t happen…well, I don’t know what to tell you…you may be beyond medical help.

      Oh and apropos of nothing, I just have to say that I had a couple of mates round over the summer for the Southern Hemisphere Tests (…or was I at theirs? It all got a bit blurry, tbh). Anyway, at some point post-post-post-match we were out on my/their patio, small hours, very very refreshed indeed, them smoking their jazz-fags, and all playing each other our favourite choons, doing the old ‘…aww you gotta hear this’ game. Now these boys, though young-shavers in their early ’50s, are hugely knowledgeable about Bloody Good Music Across All Genres, and I’ve been introduced to some great stuff by them. However, one of them, who’s got a bit of a blind spot about certain things, was scathingly dismissive of Wham! when I happened to be lionising George Michael and the beauty of his voice and his soul…and then the other one joined in as well, and so I thought: ‘Ah…

      …ha!’.

      (Though in reality it took much, much longer than that for me to join those two sub-clauses together in anything resembling what anyone would normally recognise as ‘a proper thought’).

      So, I let them wibble on with whatever it was they were burbling about [the quality of the hash(?), Robyn Hitchcock, Murray Lachlan Young, the usual shit] and blearily managed to stab at my/someone’s phone/tablet long enough to cue up George to sing ‘They Won’t Go…etc’. And then I discreetly manoeuvred Mates 1 & 2 into the right place emotionally/spiritually/musically with some Al, some Marvin, some Stevie, some Curtis, and then took their legs out with the Full Donny…all without making a big deal about any of it, just providing a warm, underlying, supportive soundtrack to their bollix…

      …and then I started George…

      …and I just kept slowly raising the volume until they became aware that they were struggling to hear each other and so re-tuned their senses to the music…and listened…

      …and then one of them, genuinely awestruck, said “Who the fuck’s this??!!”. And when I told him he did, to be fair, recant his previous comments about George, and praised his voice and singing to the Heavens.

      And I thought “My work here is done”.

      Well I say that…

      …I actually have no recollection of what I thought…or indeed anything that happened between then and Monday afternoon.

      But I’ve checked with them both since, and they’ve both confirmed that they’re now fully on-board the George train.

  14. As I watched George on BBC2 last night I posted a link to this piece on an Associates Facebook page. Billy MacKenzie’s brother Alec answered “George got me through it all”. I’ve been thinking about it all day.

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