Wham! – Everything She Wants
#quotefromthe80s
And now you tell me that your having my baby
I'll tell you that I'm happy if you want me to
But one step further and my back will break
If my best isn't good enough
Then how can it be good enough for two
#Wham #GeorgeMichael #EverythingSheWants
The early days of December 1984 were very important for the music of the 80s. In the space of a few days several songs were released that were destined to remain in history, not only from the 80s. The first was of course Do They Know It’s Christmas, the brainchild of Bob Geldof and all the British and Irish artists he had gathered under the name Band Aid. This song and mostly the charitable initiative to alleviate the suffering for the famine in Ethiopia will lead, as we know, to the American response of We Are the World, of USA for Africa gathered under the leadership of Lionel Richie, Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones, and then at Live Aid in July 1985.
In the same days, another very important single was released by a group that was in any case among the great protagonists of Band Aid, namely Wham! (always with an exclamation mark). To tell the truth, two very important singles were released, but on the same record, because they released Last Christmas on one side, which naturally, given the period, jumped to the top of the charts, without however reaching first place (occupied by Band Aid), and on the other side was an equally beautiful song, Everything She Wants.
Both songs were by Wham! and in both videos Andrew Ridgeley is absolutely present with a protagonist role, but it is a fact that both songs were written and played by George Michael alone, who was entering a new phase of his life, and was well aware that he could continue his path alone, and that he should do so to follow his path of personal and artistic maturation.
Let’s be clear: George had absolutely nothing against Andrew, but the image of the light-hearted pop group for teenagers was no longer fitting to him, and he was ready for a solo career of much more committed songs.
And in fact Everything She Wants is an absolutely profound song, even in the style and rhythm of typical Wham! hits. The song was born in a strange way, because George first created the instrumental part almost randomly, and then later wrote the lyrics on top.
The theme is serious, we said, and almost certainly stems from some situation that George may have observed in some of the people he knew. The protagonist is a recently married man, who after a few months of marriage finds himself in a toxic relationship, oppressed by his wife’s requests, so he is forced to work more and more, above all to maintain his wife’s wishes and demands.
But there’s more: the woman announces that they are about to have a child, and the guy feels trapped in a harmful relationship that is in any case doomed to fail, and he soon realizes that he no longer loves her.
The video is still very Wham! style, even if the black and white images are a change from the pastel shades of Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, for example, and give a feeling of memory, of distance in time. Personally, I have the feeling that George Michael also wanted to visually distance himself from the Wham! period, proudly showing the images of the concerts, but veiling them in gray as to indicate a detachment that evidently had already begun.
However, as we said, Andrew also appears in the video, and the historic backing vocalists Pepsi and Shirlie also appear.
For George Michael, however, this song was very important: not only did he say several times that Everything She Wants was the song he loved most of the Wham! period, but it was also one of only two songs by Wham! which he continued to perform even in the concerts of his solo career. The other, by the way, was I’m Your Man.
In short, in those December days really marked the start of the golden period of the 80s, those seven months between the realization of the Band Aid project and Live Aid, when you could happen to find records like this, where it was impossible to figure out which was the main song of the record! And for George Michael, together with the great success of Last Christmas and Everything She Wants, these days were marking the start of a new phase of his career and of his life, which will be fully realized in June 1986, with the historic farewell concert at Wembley that will close the Wham! experience.
Wham! on Wikipedia
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