WHAM! – "Freedom"

Freedom is a key word for George Michael, and one he will return to later in his career (and also be used in a second hand way by someone trying to emulate his career). But yes, this is too long but at the heart of it is a terrific litle stompalong. I like the Do Do Do’s, it yet again underlines the Wham! do anything / try anything grab-bag of styles which was always great about them. And without the do do do’s, we would get the dididi-di-di-de-dee, bit later for the reprise which is rather fun padding.

I always read the: “If you loved me baby you’d deny it / But you laugh and tell me I should try it”, meaning that she would deny herself the freedom if she loved him, but instead she wants him to shag around too, rather than lying. Though your reading is more obvious.

I’d completely forgotten how this one went so went to look at the video and soon as those do-d-dos started it came back to me. A much better song than ‘Wake Me Up..’ which I think Berry Gordy would have rejected but this one felt like a cover of some obscure Motown non-hit (by Barbara McNair maybe) that ended up being a Northern Soul favourite. But it does go on far too long which makes such a thin song wobble at the foundations a little.

Tom may mock their political affiliations, but I have a vague memory of Wham! playing a benefit gig for the striking miners. I also remember Bruce Springsteen donating money to the NUM at the same time and The Smiths doing a Red Wedge gig. All of these seem so unlikely I wonder if I spent six months of 1985 in political fantasy land. Ah well.

Freedom is a very likeable song and was very much of its time in that Motown revival way. We’ve already discussed Phil Collins’s ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ and The Jam’s ‘Town Called Malice’, but there’s a Supremes bounce to ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go Go’. And we’re about to head into more direct Motown revivals, but that’s for later.

I wonder if Motown seemed like a way of retrieving ‘good-time party music’ from the solemnity and swagger of stadium rock, and the intelligence and challenge of new pop. This is the era of plastic checker bowler hats and beach balls on TOTP and I suspect that Motown signified, for many, a time before music felt it had to challenge its audience. That’s 80% unfair on Motown of course.

I think the key bit there is neither Scargill nor Thatcher but “at 19”: in Rome you weren’t allowed to be voting till you were 36!

(Not that I’m advocating Roman practice: it is WAY TOO YOUNG obvs)

good toon – too long, as mentioned.
The video made me feel quite nostalgic – they had a meteoric rise: late 84 they were playing local leisure centres and here they were in China.

George – and other 80s UK acts (such as Gary Kemp from Spandau) were often quite vocal about their (Old) Labour roots/values – (most likely) coming from families who had been beneficiaries of the NHS and welfare state – but being Pop stars in an age of incremental excess they (unwittingly?) embodied the upwardly mobile, every-man-for-himself values that were embraced by working class Tories in those days.

I have a complex relationship with this song in that I unequivocably loved it in 1984, it bounced and swelled and seemed to promise a great vista of freedom and optimism ahead, and the TOTP performance with – I think – diamonds of yellow and pink lights behind the group seemed like the absolute pinacle of youth and delight.

The memory of this performance, and the idea of freedom, provided me with some consolation during the various miseries of and humiliations of my new life as public schoolboy.

The lyrics, though, I could never fathom. I did suppose that might be a prepubescent thing, but just looking at them now, I do find a tongue-tied jumble that lets it down as a song. Its very hard to care what the mood of the verses is when you have to mentally decipher them as you listen.

One mishearing was crucial to my excitement, though – “I DON’T want your body, baby. Part time love just brings me down” That seemed like quite a statement, some kind of chaste courtley love advocacy buried in the middle of what seemed to be a very flirtatious song. Listening back, I rather wish that my hearing had been right, and would have made it a rather more interesting song.

I didn’t really know what it was pastiching and these days I would certainly rather listen to The Isley Brothers. But Freedom still makes me happy when I hear it, though, which is no mean thing.

TOTPWatch: Wham! twice perfoemed Freedom on Top Of The Pops;

11 October 1984. Also in the studio that week were; Kim Wilde, Sade, Paul Young, Alison Moyet and The Style Council. Mike Read & Tommy Vance were the hosts.

1 November 1984. Also in the studio that week were; Heaven 17, Duran Duran and Jim Diamond. ‘Ooh!’ Gary Davies & Mike ‘Smitty’ Smith were the hosts.

Re:13 the drums remind me of nothing so much as that bloke out of the Dave Clark Five (albeit a bit less “marching-band-drummer-who-only-knows-one-rhythm”). Although, I assume like other UK groups of that era, they were trying to emulate the sound of young America.

Plenty of Motownesque energy, plenty of hooks (a few of them being tried out in the phase where the song outstays its welcome for some) and a song that gives wholesome a good name. Not quite in the same class as GM’s previous two outings, but always good to hear again. And how big were George and Wham! at the time? – three number ones out of the last five at this point, and another massive hit to come before the end of the year.

For Paul McCartney at number two, on the other hand, it was a bit of a turning point. “No More Lonely Nights” was from the soundtrack of “Give My Regards To Broad Street”, a film which was critically panned, and it was the last time Macca had a major hit with a serious song (a less-than serious one got him to number 3 for Christmas, and that was that). A strange and unexpected commercial dive, not that he’d be too worried about that financially.

I’ve seen it. Purely by chance though. I was at college and a group of us went to see ‘Ghostbusters’ which unfortunately was sold out so the other options were ‘Broad Street’ or ‘The Terminator’ – I tried to persuade everyone that Arnie’s film had got really good reviews and could be worth seeing but the wussy liberal Fine Art girls we were with didn’t want to, so…

It was truly awful, only film I have ever considered walking out of.

I really like this – my natural channel-hopping instincts probably meaning that I’ve effectively been editing it down into Tom’s ideal version. And I really liked it at the time, even though I was in my brief high rockist period. Perhaps this seemed acceptably retro enough?

@Billy Smart. I misheard “I don’t want *nobody*, baby’ as *your body* too, and like you find the correct version duller. Looking back at the lyrics now I find I also misunderstood the first verse:

People say that you’re no good for me./Saw your lover with another/And she’s making a fool of you, oh.

I now see that’s all just stuff people are saying about George and his gal (the people speak indirectly then directly… haw haw). But I missed that and instead thought that the second bit (from ‘Saw..’) was George (not the people) talking… so that he was cajoling his belle with the news that her main lover (not George, and a woman to boot) is making a fool of her just the way she’s making a fool of George. i vaguely remember having a conversation with someone about the subversive reinterpretation of all that, which has George chasing a bi- guy whose straight lover is making a ‘fool’ of him etc. , which he’s cool with, unlike George, etc.. Oh well….

well, at the time (when I was 12, that is) I really loved this one. I completely agree with what Tom’s saying about its too-extended length (I too would love to hear that Platonic ideal three-minute edit) and how its bounce and froth defeat its harder-edged sentiments. But still–that chorus! It’s still pretty wonderful: nostalgia’s ruined me as a critic here.

As a Yank, it’s hard to imagine that “Everything She Wants” wasn’t a #1 single in the UK (as it was in the US)–that one seemed to be great leap forward for Wham (again, from the perspective of a 12-yr-old kid, lines like “Now you’re telling me you’re having my baby/I’ll tell you that I’m happy if you want me too” seemed almost shockingly cynical).

I think I’d have to pick this as the best of Wham’s four no 1’s although not a patch on their 1982-3 singles. Interesting that there was no video for such an image-conscious band.

#25 Will I’d agree “NMLN” was the last great McCartney song (aided by that David Gilmour guitar solo). The less said about the film the better.

#23 Haven’t seen the whole of “Honest” just the clips of the Appletons revealing their “talents” (Nicole’s are jaw-dropping; lucky Liam).

Oh, ‘Wham In China’, yes. See Lindsay Anderson’s diaries, for a dry look at the Wham! phenomenon seen from the inside by one of life’s natural outsiders. He has quite a high opinion of George, who then doesn’t allow the great director the final edit and refuses to speak to him. Reading about it makes you really wish that you could see the film that Anderson intended…

#23 Give My Regards to Broad Street was indeed a terrible film, a rich man’s folly. The problem is that Paul wrote the film himself, and while he knows EVERYTHING about writing songs, he knows NOTHING about structuring a satisfying script. It follows a kind of ‘day in the life of Paul McCartney’ which manages to be implausible and unctuous. (Pops into a warehouse to make a video – an excruciating ‘bodypopping & robotics’ video to ‘Silly Love Songs’ as I recall; turns up at the Studio to record a version of ‘For No One’; drops in at a Ballroom to play ‘Ballroom Dancing’, etc.). This occupies about half of the film until the prospect suddenly emerges that the tapes for his new album have been stolen by a hostile record company employee. This is supposed to power the narrative on but there are two problem (a) it’s never explained what this person is going to do with them and (b) since we’ve seen Macca perform five songs in the space of 45 minutes with various bands and orchestras, why doesn’t he just take the day off and record the album again? Doesn’t look too hard.

Anyway, this being Macca with his sweethearted meliorist view of the world, the ‘thriller’ plot ends up with everyone revealed to have acted from good motives, everyone sinister revealed to have been misjudged. I guess McCartney was pretty invincible at this point, so the people who historically had challenged him weren’t challenging him any more. Hence this rotten script. I note from IMDB that it seems to have ended the short career of director, Peter Webb.

There’s almost nothing to say in its defence, except that the version of Ballroom Dancing is very good and has a terrific crunchy little guitar solo from Dave Edmunds. The single, as others have said, ‘No More Lonely Nights’, is a beautiful and heartfelt song. Oh and the movie features Ralph Richardson’s last ever acting performance, as I recall.

The Frog Chorus, written for the short film that accompanied Broad Street in the cinema, and which is routinely held up as an example of how awful Paul McCartney’s judgment became in the 1980s, is, of course, a brilliant, witty, sweet and adorable song. If it hadn’t been written by PMcC, it would be regarded as fondly as Walking in the Air or any number of the songs from the resurgent Disney movies of the 1990s. As it is, it remains another strike against Paul.

was there (and i used the term advisedly) a “dance remix” of No More Lonely Nights? i’m sure i remember there being two versions…

Give Me Regards To Broad Street was ALSO one of the worst Spectrum games of all time…

This mostly passed me by at the time, such was my falling out of love with Wham!, and only reached #3 in Australia, but it sounds enjoyable enough today. Six sounds fair. (I rated it just now and the display shows Tom’s 6, my 6, and an average rating of 6. Has there ever been a more uniform verdict?)

The lightness of the music stopped me from studying the lyrics too closely before, but they do reward the attention. Sign of an ’80s backlash against ’70s free love, perhaps? Given the growing awareness of AIDS with no treatment in sight, that would have made it a good fit for the times.

#39 Ah yes, Now 4. My university skin-up board.

Ahem. Stupid students.

surely its george channeling andrew? I don’t want the freedom to make solo singles & sing with other people & get back together occasionally as a part-time band, I JUST WANT IT TO BE US 2…

anybody who thinks this song is too long has never danced to it badly in the basement!

who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/sep/14/george-michael-sentenced-jail-drug-crash