GEORGE MICHAEL AND QUEEN – Five Live EP

I take the remaining members of Queen’s intentions at face value in setting up a concert ostensibly to honour the memory of their friend but also to encourage awareness and understanding of AIDS, raising some money for the cause. I suspect that there was an unstated intention too though. It seemed pretty clear why the majority of the crowd were present and I am not totally convinced it was to listen to the awareness part of the message. A supposed final chance to see Queen (of sorts) on stage and give Freddie Mercury a send off was more obviously the aim and in this, I guess the crowd’s aim was more in tune with the unstated one from the surviving members of Queen: to get the band on stage and feel a football stadium respond to their songs one last time.

The opening bits of the gig took this well away from Live Aid territory, inasmuch as the acts that kicked the gig off were pretty far from the heritage scene (Metallica, Extreme – who did a quasi Queen at Live Aid medley, Def Leppard, Guns N Roses – though Bob Geldof turned up too, as well as Spinal Tap). Then it veered back into that territory by getting a bunch of mostly heritage singers in to sub on Queen’s songs. It was, I have to say, underwhelming at the time – and rather underwhelming when revisited.

The received wisdom on this is that Freddie Mercury was a unique talent and no one could hope to replicate him. I’m not convinced that is exactly right. I think it is more that it’s very difficult to bring something new or interesting to the party in this situation, especially when these particular songs played to his particular strengths and changing stuff around for new interpretations is not what it’s all about. I’m unsure that a similar concert in the memory of, for instance, Whitney Houston or Robert Plant, wouldn’t descend into a bunch of facsimiles as well and, as such, it’s more probably a format problem than anything inherently superior about Mercury. Of the acts who performed early on, only James Hetfield managed to do much with his song– but then Metallica had been covering Stone Cold Crazy for years and he knew what he was going to do with it well in advance (i.e. growl it out like the proto-thrash metal that it is).

And then, there was George Michael. By this point, my expectations were pretty low. He actually started with a truncated 39 and followed with the version of TATDOOL with Lisa Stansfield which also made it onto the Five Live EP; I don’t think it’s all that great – too soporific. To finish, there was Somebody To Love and, finally, after a night of being disappointed, here was something worth watching. He wasn’t channelling Freddie Mercury – this was his own performance – but his vocal is tremendous and energised the crowd to an extent no one had yet managed that day. By the time he’s punching the air above his head, “yeah yeah yeah”ing, he’s put the entire gig on his back. The orchestration of the crowd in the gospel section brings them along and then handing them the mike for the descending vocal line at the end* – this is the sort of thing that regularly gets derided but, fuck it, pulling 80,000 people together behind one song is a powerful thing, just as powerful as getting a warehouse or club full of people dancing to your tunes. George Michael did it and did it bloody well; something no one else managed on that stage that night (not Plant, Daltrey or Axl Rose, never mind those on the stage who never were bare chested “Rock Gods”).

* A planned move. There is a rehearsal clip on Youtube where George never even attempts this descending line, he was always going to drag in the audience here. You’ve still got to sell it though and he definitely managed that.

The following look on Brian May’s face says it all – a shocked grin across his face, it says, this is what I needed when I got up here, someone to make me feel like that just one more time. It certainly blew everything away on that night and is about the only real reason to watch the concert anymore. I don’t remember the rest of the EP getting much of an airing, to be honest (though am willing to be told I am wrong by those with better memories), so I’d mark on the basis of the lead track, which at the time, I’d have given a 9 but that could just have been because of the other readings of Queen songs that surrounded it. I’d still give it a 6 or 7 now though.

Got to be honest – didn’t know the rest of the EP before listening to it a couple of weeks ago. Sounds like George had fun singing Papa Was A Rolling Stone. Calling You sounds like a vocal exercise to me – well done but, as Tom says, might have been better in a studio setting rather than in front of a crowd, in an attempt to make it more intimate.

Norman Whitfield gets his first #1 since IHITTG, I think. Not much to add to what’s been said already.

Apologies for the mild digression so early in the thread, but….at the time, one story I recall hearing about the Concert, was that the Pet Shop Boys, having been invited to perform, expressed the intention of presenting their cover version of “We Will Rock You”, but were forbidden from so doing, on the grounds presumably that….well, it wouldn’t have matched the bombast of the (dreadful) version of Killer on this record, I suppose, in part.

Does anyone better connected that I know if this is true? I’m afraid I can’t recall where I read or heard this. Might have been the NME, but equally might have been Chris Morris’s breathtakingly brilliant (still, in 1992) GLR Sunday morning radio programme….

As the title suggests, five cover versions, recorded live, and mainly George; two, the lead track “Somebody To Love” and “These Are The Days Of Our Lives,” come from the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at Wembley about a year earlier and see him backed by the three surviving members of Queen, while the other three are taken from various of the previously mentioned “covers tour” performances – all stemming from a time when George was publicly continuing to work himself (and his you’re-getting-none-of-my-royalties record company) out.

His reading of “Somebody To Love” is so earnest as to qualify as anti-camp; none of Mercury’s raised right eyebrow here as he offers another slice of his tormented autobiography. “Each morning I get up, I die a little/Can barely stand on my feet,” “I try and I try and I try/But everybody puts me down/They say I’m going crazy,” “I have spent all my years in believing you/But I just can’t get no relief” – all easy to ascribe to his own state of mind. There is, however, something in the region of masochism about his wish to plead his loneliness in front of a huge gospel choir and an audience of 72,000, especially when he turns to the latter and cries: “I wanna hear every SINGLE person! See every SINGLE pair of hands!” with the accent determinedly on the “single,” demanding that they sing back to him, “Find me somebody to love” as though engaged in a mass ritual chant to liberate his soul – or maybe he was simply doing a live lonely hearts advert. Either way, it is a pretty disturbing performance.

“These Are The Days” is performed as a courtly duet with Lisa, and George sounds as excited introducing her as he did Elton on his previous number one – “Straight back from Rochdale! Would you please welcome MISS LISA STANSFIELD!!!!” – even if Stansfield’s yearning Northern Soul diva strains aren’t quite what this model song of contented restraint requires. Of the other three songs, we have his well-timed join-the-dots linkage of “Killer” and “Papa Was A Rolling Stone” – two dignified pleas from different generations against solipsistic, alienating individualism and for a true and warm sense of community and belonging, although with a combined running time of eleven minutes, more or less the same length as the uncut Temptations original of the latter song, he labours the point a trifle too much, though note his emphasis on the final “all alone, yeah” of “Rolling Stone.”

The fifth track is his interpretation of “Calling You,” the song from the film Bagdad Café – and his taste certainly inclines me to think that we could swap mixtapes any time – a song which at the moment possibly means more to me than any other. The original film was, literally, dreamlike; a German’s idea of an American road movie, more Caspar David Friedrich than Edward Hopper, with the slightly unreal figures of Marianne Sagebrecht, CC Pounder, and Jack Palance looking as though newly brought back from the dead (and if you check his film credits over the two preceding decades, that wasn’t far from the truth). And the song, as sung by Jevetta Steele, has continued to resonate in the intervening twenty years; an unearthly yet patient union of small detail (“A desert road from Vegas to nowhere,” “A coffee machine that needs some fixing”) and holy transcendence (“Someplace better than where you’ve been,” “But we both know a change is coming/Coming closer…sweet relief”) interspersed with Steele’s stunning and perfectly pitched elongated cries of “I am calling you.”

Well, you can understand that. George does the song due credit, and his own projected isolation is easily graspable, but he can’t resist extending the cry into melisma, and at over six minutes the point has long since been made. So, another postcard – perhaps even another proto-blog post – to tell us where he is, where he’s been and what, or whom, he’s grasping for. A few more years will elapse before we meet George again here, but when he reappears, he will make his presence gently, if grievously, known.

(Bah, not allowed to edit. I should have changed that before posting to “my only previous exposure”, because I have listened to the rest on YouTube now.)

Re 5: It’s true, but I don’t think they were entirely serious. I’ve used Neil Tennant’s pomp-popping quote as the conclusion to a particularly testing chapter in my forthcoming book (April 2012, don’t hold your breath):

“When they had that Freddie Mercury tribute concert we were going to offer our services to do We Will Rock You. We were going to come onstage with one of those old drum boxes with a little pitter-patter beat and make We Will Rock You into this tiny little fey statement. It would have been great if we’d done it wearing dunces’ hats, waving our heads from side to side.”

Thanks, Wichita, I knew somebody here would know the answer! April’s not far away… I spose at least the dunces caps got an outing in the video of “Can You Forgive Her?” the following year….

Didn’t Papa/rolling stone get a 12″ ‘remix’ also? No mean feat for a live performance!

@12, thefatgit. Thanks for that link. Buckley man,… I know his noodly guitar accompaniments aren’t everyone’s cup o’ tea, but they work for me. Michael’s track has that horrible synth-piano all over it, but you kind of put up with it if that’s the only version you know… Listening to Buckley’s willowy guitar version then feels like being let out of prison. I wonder whether Michael still does Calling You live, and if so whether he’s adopted any of Buckley’s arrangement?

As an American, I am kind of shocked that almost none of the songs (minus a couple Wham! songs) I associate with George Michael have popped up. Where’s Faith? Monkey? Freedom ’90? One More Try? I Want Your Sex? Father Figure? I feel like what’s going on with George Michael is the same thing you described with Michael Jackson — tons of #1s, but they don’t describe the artist that well.

I don’t know whether others had more efficient ways of seeking out new music back in the late 70s, but for me those autumn days are redolent of waiting to hear the new Queen single. You’d read about the impending release of the new single and album in Record Mirror, and for a few days you’d wonder what a song called “Somebody To Love” or “We Are The Champions” might sound like. Then one morning Noel Edmonds would say he was about to play the new Queen single in two songs’ time, and you’d make a quick calculation as to how late you could get out of the door and still make it to school for registration.

That was the feverish state that “Bohemian Rhapsody” had got you into. And it has to be said that, since nothing could quite live up to that level of anticipation, both STL and WATC disappointed me at first before I came to terms with them. (“Bicycle Race” disappointed me and still sounds a dud, whereas “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”, described by the RM reviewer as “three years out-of-date Manhattan Transfer” was an immediate winner.)

It’s fair to suppose that fellow pop fan George Michael, a year younger than me, might have had something of the same experience, and that once he’d listened a couple of times he’d have realised that it swung like a good ‘un. It crashed straight in at number 4 and looked a cert to depose Chicago from number one – but then stopped! in the same position! while the clearly vastly inferior Showaddywaddy climbed to the top. Nevertheless, it was a song he no doubt absorbed as part of his pop education, and just over 16 years later, in circumstances no-one could have foreseen in 1976, he got to sing it to a stadium-full of people and take it to its rightful place.

And yes, what a job he does with it. He goes into it off the back of the duet with Lisa Stansfield, during which he sways along to Brian May’s guitar solo while Lisa stands still. In between the two songs (I’d forgotten this before YouTubing just now), there’s a heartfelt plea to the crowd – “it’s estimated that by the year 2000, 40 million people will be infected with HIV: and if you think they’ll all be gay people or drug addicts, then you’re pretty much lining up to be one of them”. And perhaps that plea was on his mind as “Somebody To Love” kicked in. The concert was on 20 April 1992; Anselmo Feleppa, his partner since the previous year’s Rock in Rio festival, would be diagnosed with AIDS later that year and die on 26 March 1993 – his death inspired “Jesus To A Child” – and shortly afterwards this EP was released.

As for me, no such poignant associations with this record. On 2 May 1993, while it was number one, Aston Villa’s surprise home defeat to Oldham handed Manchester United their first league title for 26 years. Truly, those were the days of our lives.

A really appealing EP, in my opinion. George on top form here, a 7/10 from me.