GEORGE MICHAEL – "A Different Corner"

“Dedicated to a memory” it says on the reverse sleeve, and on the sleeve’s front there is a black-and-white photograph of a man with his back turned to the camera, some distance away, walking into a huge park, unutterably alone. Although Michael was still officially one half of Wham!, the record drips with pungent tears of reluctant farewells, although its subtext is more elusive.

A far more complex and satisfying record than “Careless Whisper” – and yet also a far simpler one – “A Different Corner” can fairly be said to be the first entirely solo UK number one single, in that it was entirely composed, sung, played and produced by the same person. It could with equal fairness be described to the most radical of 1986’s number ones; there is no chorus, and the song’s reflective cycle wafts by in placid echoes of repetition. Comparisons were made at the time with Eno’s Another Green World – that refractory Harold Budd treated piano, the same steady, unobtrusive flow of electronics, the distended vocal drones in the background (though the latter may also owe something to the intro and outro of McLaren’s “Madam Butterfly”) – and through its snow-white sleeve and aura of finality, Laura saw a kinship with “Atmosphere.” This latter was not far-fetched, since George Michael had recently appeared on a BBC2 arts programme where he reviewed, among other things, Mark Johnson’s book An Ideal For Living: A History of Joy Division, and spoke warmly of their music.

“A Different Corner” is indeed a remarkable piece of music in that here, after four years, we finally see the real George Michael emerging, out of the shuttlecocked shorts and faux-machismo, with a finely-judged and emotionally open vocal performance worthy of an older and sadder Cassidy or Donny, and it’s a George Michael we could learn to love. And yet, although he sounds more open than on any of his previous records, the real meaning of the song had to remain buried for a dozen more years.

The giveaway comes in the lines, “I would promise you all of my life/But to lose you would cut like a knife/So I don’t dare.” In other words, he loves his best friend (“‘Cos I’ve never come close in all of these years/You are the only one to stop my tears”) but he loves him that way also, and he is tortured because he cannot bring himself to tell him (his “I’m so scared” is the reddest of excoriating wounds) – the same subtext compelled to remain within the shadows of “Johnny Remember Me” and “Have I The Right?” The music’s careful placidity is a striking counterpart to his agonised voice – and where does that “And if all that there is, is this feeling of being used” come in, when really it’s the paralysing fear of rejection that prevents him from getting close to his desired Other but also stops him from moving away; the torture of lifelong compromise – “I should go back to being lonely and confused/If I could…I would…I swear.” Then his unheard pledge also echoes into the far horizon, just as the man retreats into the greenery, walking away…in silence.

Its also the only one of George’s eighties number ones not to be an overt pastiche of any other sort of music. Which is why I think that my peers found it a bit watery and tuneless at the time (also that ‘arty’, black and white video would make any song seem more boring than it actually is). The lack of a chorus also means that is doesn’t hammer its meaning into you.

These ambiguities are all of the reasons why I now like this so much as a sometimes lovelorn adult of course!

For a contrast, try the live version from a 1998 Parkinson appearance on the B-side of As. This is a lot more defined both vocally and musically, with a chiming acoustic guitar and “Oooh-Oooh”ing female backing vocals. I would guess that this more overtly soulful interpretation would chime better with most present-day listeners.

punctum – I Just Called To Say I Love You came first as an entirely-solo number one…

My friends and I would sit next to the jukebox in our local. We had a kind of “ownership” of it. So each of us in turn would put the 50p in and pick 3 tracks (3 tracks for 50p seemed a bargain at the time). Then one of our group got a girlfriend, not a normal occurrence amongst those who clung on to adolescence in the face of inexorable adulthood and it’s associated responsibilites. She joined our group at the table and also got her 50p’s worth from the Jukebox. She always picked “Careless Whisper”, “A different Corner” and “Freedom”. Without fail. We used to tease her slightly over her obvious Wham! devotion and her “schoolgirl crush” on George Michael. She played along and took all the teasing on the chin, but I always associate the “If I could…I would…I swear” line with us lads filling the pauses with “Bum Andrew”. Chortle, chortle.

We really never realised how close to the mark we were, but of course the object of his affection was not Ridgeley, but someone else.

(i.e. first entirely solo UK number one single done by a UK artist – sorry if I didn’t make that clear)

One of my favourite tracks of all time but it took me until I was well and truly converted to George after “Listen Without Prejudice” to realise just how good this is…

I had to watch the video as I couldn’t remember this at all, and even listening to I had no sudden “oh, that song!” reaction. I pretty much always like hearing George’s voice but this one seemed just a little too wispy, and the video made me think of David Brent which didn’t help.

If I hadn’t know it got to #1 (well, I’d forgotten it did until a few minutes ago!) I would have reckoned it was a b-side. A bold choice, I’ll give him that.

No drums! That must be an unusual thing for a number one. Having said that, we have another percussionless one later in the year, plus one other which might as well be – a bare few seconds of the strangest drums I’ve ever heard, if indeed that’s what they are. We’ll get to those soon enough.

It’s not in the nature of popular to throw up too many hidden delights, but I’d never heard this before and it’s a lovely thing. It’s very hard to get a grip on, but there’s a strong song in there. It’s a nice performance by George, he pulls off the trick of being simultaneously full-on and restrained, possibly achieved by simple use of the volume control on the mixing desk. The arrangement is nebulous to say the least. It’s a bold choice alright, he must’ve felt confident indeed to even suggest this to the record company as a single.

The more time passes, the weirder it seems that Prince’s UK chart positions were so low. EVERYBODY loved Kiss from where I was standing – and age has hardly dimmed its charms compared to 1986’s other hits – yet it only made no.6; Sign O The Times – no.10; Raspberry Beret – no.25! But his Popular moment will arrive, eventually.

Yes, C86, July. Spoils a happy coincidence but there you go.

to go from ‘everything she wants’ to mid-period sting – YECH! most egregious popular overrating since ‘lady madonna’; praying to jesus ‘praying for time’ or ‘jesus to a child’ didn’t top the charts over there. concurrent comics equiv.

3 for me

Another better, roughly contemporary thing this track reminded me of *a lot* at the time: Blue Nile’s easter parade.

@JJ 23. Do you have lots of Smiths on your playlist (they were in their singles pomp in 1986)? And doesn’t Gabriel’s ‘Sledgehammer’ jump out just as much as ‘Kiss’? I certainly remember both tracks making dancefloors *explode* in part because their basic sounds were novel.

Swanstep – just “Panic”, it’s actually the only Smiths song to ever have charted on Tracks – which was, and still is, a mainstream-friendly, listener voted chart show on Swedish public service radio (the national P3 channel which more or less corresponds to BBC Radio 1). But it’s THE standard for pop charts here – it’s the one which made people have heated schoolyard discussions, compile statistics and draw diagrams. The actual sales charts are also presented on national radio every week, but they never had the same cultural impact.

An arcane selection process governs which songs are eligible for voting, but it’s basically based on P3’s general rotation playlists. This, and the fact that the chart is listener voted, inevitably means it’s biased in some ways that the sales charts are not (and vice versa), but the one clear and unambiguous trend that I’ve been able to spot so far by pouring over the late 80’s and early 90’s charts lately is that Tracks was very slow on the uptake when it comes to house and hip hop. There is a good amount of italo/euro-disco though, for far longer than I would have expected. I would’ve guessed the Smiths to be more popular than they actually were, but apparently they were too indie.

(If you’re really interested, you can find the Tracks chart archive here: http://www.sr.se/p3/topplistor/tracks/?listID=1&getListY=1986&showyear=1986 )

“Sledgehammer” does feature, but I think I’ve listened enough to it before for it to be so familiar that it doesn’t provoke any kind of reaction. Bear in mind that I’ve just had this playlist puttering about in the background while doing other things, I haven’t examined the songs in any particular detail or with an analytical frame of mind. “Kiss” on the other hand is a song that I certainly recognise but have never really listened to actively before – as for why, I have no clue.

This section of Popular has caused me to have another look at The Smiths. They started off with some very nice hooky tunes, up to around ‘William It Was Really Nothing’, but their releases over this period are some very poor pop singles – very poor choices actually, they could’ve done with halving the number of releases and using different tracks instead.

I’d be surprised if any of them got much airplay*. Certainly it’s hard to imagine anyone being suddenly turned onto the band by, say, ‘Shoplifters of the World Unite’. ‘Panic’ feels very much like the exception, and even then sabotages itself with the horrible phrase Morrissey picked for the coda. It all smacks too much of band-as-cosy-cult.

I guess I’m writing about this here because ‘A Different Corner’ is about as uncommercial a big hit as I can imagine, but there’s still more immediacy to it and a more intuitive understanding of entertainment. Partly it’s just that George is a better singer, but he’s also desperate to convince the listener, to draw you in, in a way that Morrissey (on the singles anyway) never does.

* Actually, here’s a quote from Geoff Travis: “I can’t understand why ‘How Soon Is Now?” wasn’t a top 10 single, but perhaps I’m being naive. If only their singles had been played on the radio”.

@Izzy. Well, I dunno. I reckon Panic, Ask, and Shoplifters are some of the perkiest/most accessible Smiths tracks ever (the latter even has a bit of glam guitar swagger about it for goodness sake – Suede took copious notes!) – the rough equivalents of, say, Olivers Army and Everyday I write the Book for Elvis Costello. The Smiths had had a bit of a misery-guts reputation before this, whereas these tracks’ sparkling, irresistible melodies and high flail-around-ability gave the lie to that, and surely did earn them a second look from lots of people… just not by enough to get far into the top 10 in a consensus/non-revolutionary period for music.

Thing is The Smiths (and Rough Trade) cheerled an ethic of unalloyed sulky retreat as their response to what they considered — utterly wrongly — a consensus* period of music: and what they offered was actively reactionary, a return to lost values. Some of their songs are pretty (courtesy Marr); some of them have melodies (courtesy Morrissey) (though a lot don’t); a few of them are actually strong of course — Morrissey has a genuine sensibility, even if it’s largely animated by his contempt for every other kid on the playground.

*I was increasingly involved at The Wire at this time: this was a period of quite unusual richness of battling genres even before hiphop got its second wind… this is the year I interviewed Youssou N’Dour and Salif Keita; also year of Courtney Pine’s largescale emergence. Collision Harmolodics was — it turned out — peaking. The MM aesthetic had not yet, I think, begun properly to emerge.

I’ve never really understood the worship of ‘How Soon Is Now?’ I like it well enough but it’s rather a dirge and not at good as it’s a-side, and I’ve always found the famous lyrics a bit mundane and leaden, Morrisey tackled that subject with far more wit and invention elsewhere. I think one reason it was so hailed at the time was the guitar sound which wasn’t like anything The Smiths had done at that point – the first time this jangly little indie band had gone sonically epic.

What was the name of the Jeans brand that used it in their ads back then? I remember that ruffled the feathers of a few indie kids.

#33 That was a good line-up.”Driving Away From Home” was record of the year for me and I realised 86 wasn’t going to be a golden year when it peaked at 18.

Some good points there. Seeing as how if Popular is going to get a Smiths discussion, this is probably it, I’ll take the liberty of prolonging it a little more. And I am trying to understand why some things get popular and others don’t, so not entirely off topic!

#32 – ‘perky’ isn’t necessarily what people want to hear. Indie bands have always made this mistake, of assuming that the unwashed masses want sunshine and jauntiness and vacuity, and aiming their commercial efforts in that direction. ‘Sheila Take A Bow’ is the sort of thing that results, but also ‘You’re In A Bad Way’, ‘Did It Again’, ‘Electric Man’ and any number of bewildering failures.

Were it needed, any glance at Popular should dispel that myth. ‘A Different Corner’ is about as far from that idea as you can get, but it caught on, an achievement I find more remarkable the more I hear it.

#34 and #35 – ‘sulky’ and ‘thought they knew better’. Yes, most unattractive, and you can see it in that quote from Geoff Travis, blaming the radio for the failures. I wonder if he ever considered why the radio didn’t take to them? No doubt there are quotes a-plenty castigating the general public for their awful taste.

The pity is that I’m sure the Smiths could’ve been handled so much better. A little more care and a discography that read: ‘William’; ‘How Soon Is Now?’; ‘Nowhere Fast’; ‘Well I Wonder’; ‘Panic’; ‘Ask’; ‘There Is A Light’; ‘I Know It’s Over’; ‘Sweet and Tender Hooligan’, and maybe they’d have got somewhere.

Or not, who knows? But it might have been worth thinking beforehand about what might hit, rather than just blaming others when it didn’t. It’s the biggest curse of indie, that it takes away reasons to try, where repeatedly making #1 on the indie chart becomes success in itself. I suppose it’s success of a kind, but it shouldn’t be the kind of success that makes people climb on a stage in the first place. Maybe Andrew Ridgeley could’ve been happy enough on Rough Trade.

#36 – I was disappointed to learn that the ‘How Soon Is Now?’ lyrics were cobbled together overnight from a couple of notebook scraps. It shows and I suspect it’s how he worked through the period I’m talking about. It can be a fine way to work if it throws up unexpected juxtapositions – but if it doesn’t it’s no better than any other throwaway method. I’m not sure that it ever does without a lot of follow-up work.

‘Panic’ is actually the biggest disappointment on this score for me – he really touches on something through the verses and builds up an emotional tension, only to spend it all on a bit of fluff. It’s entirely characteristic, I’m afraid. I know the story about its genesis, Gary Davies and Chernobyl (and Wham!), and it’s a good one – but that doesn’t mean it had to stay on the record.

A catchy tune, something interesting to hang onto, and a universal – that’s as close as I can get to defining a winning pop combination. ‘Panic’ is so close and even lands on a universal of sorts – but it’s a whimsical, meaningless one. ‘Contempt for every other kid in the playground’ (#34) is a nice line, and it certainly has a purpose for a certain kind of teenager, but ultimately that’s only so much of a constituency. You have to venture into real feeling at some point.

It struck me, looking at The Smiths’ discography, how many of those songs are second person. The effect, to my ears, is advice rather than empathy. It’s little wonder they didn’t catch on – a preachy Morrissey may or may not be an attractive character, but I’d say he has little to offer an adult audience.

George doesn’t make that mistake. In ‘A Different Corner’ he lays his feelings out in a way that Morrissey does only intermittently after The Smiths’ first burst of songwriting. It may or may not tend towards trite – I think probably not, the recognition of having been changed forever is quite interesting. I don’t think he quite arrives at a universal, but he at least describes a real experience and it’s very much a relationship of equals – I can see what it offers the general audience.

This is indeed one of Michael’s forgotten American hits; I never heard it on the radio at the time, and haven’t yet. It hit the top ten on career momentum alone.

@izzy. How about ‘Please please please, let me get what I want’ as being in ‘A Different Corner”s ballpark? It too feels like only half a song, but what a great half! It’s fairly emotionally direct (although I don’t myself regard that as an especially important value), and although it started as b-side (to ‘William’), Rough Trade/The Smiths themselves/whomever certainly did market it through film/tv soundtracks etc.. As a result, it’s been very widely covered and was from the beginning. And even if it’s not *quite* a standard at this point, it’s closer to that status than ADC is. ADC’s vocal show-boating may, however, make it an attractive Glee-target (do people do ADC on Idol etc.?), so maybe it’s due for a second wind. But I also wouldn’t bet against Glee eventually getting around to PPPLMGWIW (those guitar parts would make for wicked backing harmonies).

Re low Smiths chart positions jeopardising “the overall value of the charts in the longer term”. Rough Trade could have done better, no question – it was effectively a hipy commune, so you wouldn’t expect too much – but EMI and Sire respectively hardly gave Buzzcocks and the Undertones the chart positions their unquestionable classics deserved. Also, who picked the A-sides? Geoff Travis or Morrissey? I don’t know the answer but I know where I’m laying down my entire wage packet.

Re 43: That makes sense. I’d forgotten that mumbling, which was also perceived as arrogant, I think – it felt like that was his breakthrough moment and he blew it. On the other hand, the Kiss vid wasn’t an event like Thriller but I still thought it was seen as something pretty special – clean, monochrome, a certain frisson – at the time. I can’t remember how much airplay he got.

More than the Smiths, though, which even allowing for their chart placings (never higher than 10) was embarrassing – nothing at all outside the evening shows. Their only daytime exposure came via Steve Wright’s Morrissey impressions. No wonder he wanted to hang the c***.

The ‘Kiss’ remarks made me go away and compare the UK and US #1s for 1986. As with 1985, the US #1’s seem much more representative of what was genuinely popular worldwide. How odd, for example, that Sledgehammer, Venus, and Simply Red’s Holding back the Years couldn’t crack the top spot in the UK? Let alone Kiss, Live to Tell, Human, The way it is, etc..

@47 Londonlee. Exactly. The Smiths sold millions of records all over the world just not the 100 million or whatever Wham/Michael moved.

Lee at 47: very true this was still in the days when most hits were “real hits” (slow climbs,hardly any on fanbase sales alone)and this applied to the whole Top 40 and a far,far greater number of people would have knowledge of even small indie-guitar type Top40 hits.
Now how many people even know the Number One? yet alone tracks that peak at 20 or 30.
In these days didnt you even need to sell 40,000 (and many that hung around obviously sold even more) to make positions 40-50 in the charts.