Not every singer can keep up their chops forever. Even though many guitarists can spend time practising their scale exercises and making sure their hands are in good enough shape to replicate what’s on the record, there’s only so much time that someone can sing in the studio before their voice starts to feel the damage of playing for years on end. Although George Michael hardly ever faltered during his time in the limelight, he admitted that the Wham classic Make It Big may contain some of the best showcases for his voice.
But considering what that was up against at the time, Michael didn’t have that much to outdo compared to the first record, Fantastic. Despite a fine vocal performance on ‘Club Tropicana’, the group’s debut, emphasising genres like rap, sounds a lot more dated these days, especially with rhymes that sound like an out-of-touch dad should have written them.
Once the duo got labelled as a pop band, Make It Big was them staking their claim as one of the biggest forces in pop music. Sure, Duran Duran made new wave look a lot more alluring, but not even they had tunes like ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ or ‘Everything She Wants’ under their belts.
And looking through each track, Michael puts his voice through its paces a lot more than people realise. ‘Wake Me Up’ may have been the delightful pop song for the record, but the high notes that he goes for on ‘Freedom’ are still near-impossible to hit once someone starts growing into their adult voice.
Then there’s the song ‘Careless Whisper’, which is certainly in the conversation of one of the best vocal performances of the 1980s. Whitney Houston is also in that category, and we can’t ignore Queen’s tunes from the same era, but Michael singing with the same kind of emotional heartache of a man twice his age is the finest performance to come from a supposed child star. The saxophone may tie it all together, but after reaching the end of the album, nothing could follow what Michael delivered here.
For all of the distance that he put in between his solo career and his childhood band, though, Michael had to admit that Make It Big still had the most pitch-perfect notes he ever hit, saying, “I can’t think of another band who got it together so much between first and second albums. On Fantastic you can tell I don’t think I’m a singer, but some vocals on Make It Big are the best I’ve done. Even if we were wankers, you still had to listen.”
As much as Michael’s voice has laser precision on his sophomore release, seeing it as his peak might be selling him short on his later work. Throughout his solo career, Faith helped shed the skin of his squeaky-clean image, and later projects like Listen Without Prejudice and Older incorporated more sophisticated textures to his voice, including him getting more into his lower register on tunes like ‘Jesus to a Child’.
Pop music has always relied on a catchy tune rather than a great singer half the time, but Michael was one of the few daring enough to ask for both, and listening to Make It Big, this wasn’t just some arrogant kid. This was a musical tour de force looking to blow everyone away from the minute he opened his mouth.
