Back in 1982 when I was working at the BBC, I had cause to go and take something to Morrison-Leahy’s music offices in South Molton Street in Central London. There I got chatting to the owners of which one of them said, “Are you a musician?” I said, no, I’m a DJ. “Ah, I might have a job for you.” After a few details, he booked me for a party in the hugest marquee in his back garden at his home in Marlow, Bucks. When I arrived to set up for this gig, my colleague, Danny, asked Bryan Morrison what the party was for and he said, “It’s a launch party for a new group I’ve just signed.” Only then did I find out that I was DJing at Wham!’s launch party and we were introduced to a not-yet-famous George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley.
Bryan Morrison had previously run his own booking agency and put acts into exclusive clubs in London. In the late sixties he formed his own music publishing company, Lupus Music and represented acts like Pink Floyd, T.Rex and Free and 10 years later formed more publishing companies and then represented The Jam and Haircut 100 among others. Dick Leahy had worked as an A&R man for Phillips records and in the seventies, ran the Bell and GTO record labels. The pair set up Innervision records and assigned Wham to their label.
George Michael’s father was a Greek-Cypriot restaurateur who settled in the affluent suburb of Bushey, Herts. In 1975, when Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou was 12, he went to Bushey Meads Comprehensive School and another pupil, Andrew Ridgeley, was asked to look after him. Soon they were discussing records and, given a couple of years, they were playing ska in a local band, The Executive.
In 1982, George and Andrew hired a porta studio for £20 and made a demo of, Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do), with George on vocals and bass and Andrew on guitar and drum machine. They hawked it around London and got a £500 advance from their label, Innervision. That single wasn’t a hit, but their second one, Young Guns (Go For It) made number three in 1982. Wham Rap! was reissued, making number eight, and then they scored top five hits with Bad Boys and Club Tropicana, which was a close cousin to Club 18-30. Their album, Fantastic!, entered the album charts at number one and they hit the road with their Club Fantastic Tour, featuring Pepsi & Shirlie as backing singers and dancers.
Then, in the summer of 1984, they really did hit the high with their first number one hit, Wake Me Up Before You Go Go which, at the time of writing, was creeping close to one billion Spotify plays.
Andrew is often dismissed and playing second fiddle to George, but George has always given him the deserved credit explaining that he inspired many ideas and came up with quirky parts of their songs and titles. He did say, “Without Andrew, Wham! would never have been what we were.” After all it was Andrew who inspired the title of this song. Back then, Andrew was still living at home with his parents and came home a little drunk one night. Knowing he had to be up early the next morning, he wrote his parents’ a note saying, ‘Please wake me up up before you go go’ and signed it, Andrew. Whether Andrew did get awoken by his parents has never been clarified. A few weeks later, however, George went over to Andrew’s house and saw the note which was still stuck on the fridge and said, “Somehow that just struck me as a wonderful title for a song.”
George was a fan of the Motown soul groups like the Temptations and the Four Tops and also admired his peers like Boy George and Culture Club and said, “I just wanted to make a really energetic pop record that all the elements of the 50s and 60s sound, combined with our attitude and our approach, which is obviously more uptempo and a lot younger than some of those records.” To give the song even more of a retro feel, it opens with J-J-jitterbug interspersed with finger snap repeated four times, the jitterbug being a popular dance in the 1930s and a lot of doo-wop groups of the 1950s used to imitate finger-clicking even if not all of them were audible. Then the line, ‘you make the sun shine brighter than Doris Day’ gave the song another innocent, yet retro feel.
So, how does George Michael go about writing a song? Well, he explained to British Music History, “I’d done a demo at home that just had a bass line and my vocal on it. Usually I write a song in my head because I know what all the parts are going to be and I sing them all to our musicians. We actually did a rehearsal and we used a linn drum because our drummer was late and it was such a good track, we kept it.” The main body of the song is about a guy who is totally in love with a girl who goes out dancing to a go-go club whilst he is still sleep and he is pleading with her not to go without him.
It was the first single lifted from their Make It Big album, other singles were Everything She Wants, Freedom and Careless Whisper which was credited to Wham! featuring George Michael in the States, but correctly to George Michael solo in the UK. It’s also cropped up in a number of movies; The Wedding Singer (1998), Charlie’s Angels (2000), Zoolander 1 and 2 and Happy Feet 2 (2011). In 2023, The German car manufacturer, Volkswagen used it to promote their new All-Electric ID.4 Pro – Intuitive Sit-to-Start which involved a dad making his young daughter, who was sitting in the back, giggle because every time he got in, the car played, ‘Jitterbug’.
At the 1985 Ivor Novello Awards, Elton John called George Michael “the greatest songwriter of his generation.” Ironically, in the chorus, George follows ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go Go’ with, ’cause I’m not planning on going solo’ but, within 18 months, that’s exactly what he was doing.