GEORGE MICHAEL – “A Different Corner”
At first brush “A Different Corner” sounds too diffuse and tentative to count for much – the kind of single that gets to #1 when its maker is a big enough star that anything will. But this is misleading – “Corner” is wispy and cloudy because it’s an attempt to capture a particular kind of confusion and despair in a pop song. Listen more closely and its politeness – all those nouvelle cuisine dabs of keyboard and guitar – is revealed as paralysis. Michael is impotent: he’s worse off for falling in love, he would go back if he could, he’s terrified of the rejection that might follow if he goes further. A strange fear grips him: in its sketch of sensitive abjection, “A Different Corner” touches the same nerves and explores the same pitiable ground that mid-eighties indie was making its own. “I don’t understand it, to you it’s a breeze / Little by little you’ve brought me to my knees” – you could imagine David Gedge writing that!
You couldn’t imagine him singing it like this, mind you. “A Different Corner”’s kind of wandering, choked-up slow soul would end up being a key part of George Michael’s repertoire, the style he deployed when he wanted people to know he was getting personal. It’s been the source of his worst performances as well as his best, but “A Different Corner” avoids self-indulgence by its relative concision – just two short, tightly written verses given plenty of space in a simple arrangement. The delicacy of that arrangement is fragile – even a touch like the acoustic guitar between verses on the album and video version seems to overload it. But the single mix keeps its balance between comfort and sparseness, its broken-up piano lines halfway between the wine bar’s consoling ambience and ABBA’s icy, grown-up pain. This song of disillusionment and ruined hopes is remembered as a minor single, if at all: for me it’s the best number one George Michael’s been involved with.
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Tom in FT / Popular • Pop • 2,659 views • Share/Save
In these 80s music press wars, who exactly were the soulboys who got championed? I remember seeing a retrospective of ‘awful NME covers’ where the likes of Curiosity Killed The Cat, Hue & Cry and Hipsway featured prominently – was that it?
I suppose it’s too much to hope that George Michael was feted by the music press at the time?
“How Soon Is Now?” from the Johnny Marr perspective is the exact missing link between the Stones’ “Mona” and Simple Minds’ “Seeing Out The Angel.”
100, presumably taken on by MM because they had brilliant minds?
From an outsider’s perspective – both regarding the British music press and the UK as a whole – the British music scene(s)/business/press/etc seems like a frightening vortex of almost pure chaos.
There are fractions and factions pushing this and that. New genres are invented overnight and then rapidly splinter into a myriad of sub-genres and micro-sub-sub-genres, and before you know it, everything is abandonded as a fad. Only to pop up again in a tweaked form with a new name and a new hype a few years later.
Couple this with a penchant for the continual rewriting of musical history (if you can even use that as a monolithical term) and you have something that is fearsome to observe, let alone try to follow or understand. Blink and you’ll miss an entire movement, or scene, or hype. Which, of course, is what makes it interesting.
It’s not that a rapid turnover, or evolution, or whatever you’d like to call it of music seems uniquely British, but the insistence on trying to label, classify and compartmentalise everything does. As does the ever ongoing quest to find and/or create the next Big Thing.
As a reader, during The Hip Hop wars, it was difficult to avoid the internal schism that permeated the NME at the time. Despite this, however, I found those writers from either side of the divide fiercely protective of the music they chose to champion.
In a way, the neutral reader like me, could cherry pick from either side of the divide. What I did find odd, was when thrash metal came on the scene around this time, NME’s coverage of the Big 4 (Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax and Slayer) had anyone left to write intelligently about them at all.
#101 “In these 80s music press wars, who exactly were the soulboys who got championed?”
Um… Animal Nightlife? Working Week? Will Downing?
Anybody and everybody from the Redskins to Terence Trent d’Arby via Bobby Womack and the Pogues as long as they had Soul, Passion and Honesty, Performed with Real Instruments and batted for the right, i.e. the Left, side. NME totally flopped with their House coverage because most of their soulboy intake was obsessed with Rare Groove. They didn’t have the equivalent of an expert like Frank Tope on MM who knew the scene inside out and could write about it intelligently and perceptively, nor (because they turned them all down and they went to work for MM instead) did they have the benefit of the Monitor people who were able to place it in a wider (if sometimes still imaginary) context.
The generational consequence of this of course is that the soulboys’ preferred way of singing (i.e. melismatic screeching to display how much the singer is suffering*) has now become compulsory in our Cowell-driven sub-pop age.
*this is a go at Mariah wannabes and not Mariah herself so hold fire Lex.
I dunno how much the prevalence of melisma has to do with NME’s coverage of soul in the mid-80s.
#107 this might be why the NME’s dance coverage got a lot better after the soulboys had lost the hip-hop wars – Jack Barron, Helen Mead et al writing about it in 88-90 from the perspective of passionate raver converts rather than people who knew the history. (you could draw a parallel with todays divisions over the ‘hardcore continuum’, but I’m a fence-sitter on that really)
Most of the kids doing sub-Mariah wailing these days were still in nappies (or, crikey, not even born) when the NME was doing the soul beat.
Maybe because I was also reading The Face back then but I saw the soul trend as partly a lifestyle thing about clubbing and nice clothes as much as it was about sweat and honesty and it was easy to go from Rare Groove and embrace House and Techno.
A sharper, hipper and braver NME would be tackling the ‘nuum now for sure. Does someone who’s outside the centre of a movement (cf. Gould/Latecomers) have a better understanding of it, and perhaps a deeper love of it, than someone who’s been in there from year zero and maybe can’t quite get the whole picture?
Mark M at 69: yes but even as early as 1988/89 fragmentation of the music scene was already effecting the charts and sales were beginning to fall enough that (an often transitory) fanbase/this month’s music press hype alone could put something in the Top 10.
I’ve just about heard of the Primitives but never knowingly heard one of their songs and I doubt a large part of this fragmentation ie the vast majority of those who were by 1988/89 buying house records/diehard soulboys knew anything about such bands unlike the Smiths who as Lee implies had by the mid-80s become part of the general pop consciousness (which was just about to disappear forever)enough to at least be known by soul/funk/mainstream pop/whatever else fans (even if it was because they were loathed so much by many such people).
Re 112… Possibly – I’d need to see the maths on an act needed for a top ten hit in spring 88 versus spring 86 to know more. Incidentally, almost all the Smiths fans I knew at school took to rave in a big way…
that really surprises me as there was such a feeling of antipathy to contemporary guitar music back then on the dance scene (and possibly because of what was seen as their whining self-pity the Smiths were held as its nadir). Of course this antipathy was only true to a certain extent as for swathes of the acid/house then rave scene the “rock world” existed almost in another musical universe which aside from the already touched upon kneejerk dislike of the Smiths very rarely imipnged on each other.
And the idea of loads of Smiths fans on the M25 at South Mimms in 1989 waiting for “the phone call” sounds as surreal as a group of 1976 punks waiting in the queue at the 100 club discussing the “finer merits” of Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s latest album.
Re 114: I’m not sure whether that last bit is a joke, but I’m sure lørd sükråt wötsît would tell you that there were lots of punks dying to lovingly discuss ELP if they thought they could get away with it. Anyway, plenty of time to talk about rave in three/four years’ Popular time.
Re 114/5: but while I’m at it – the reason Che Guevara was an idiot is that he failed to realise that almost all revolutions are made possible by large and temporary coalitions of people who for a brief potent moment believe (almost certainly mistakenly) that they have a common goal.
Re:114 – although, given that in ’78 Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s latest album would have been Love Beach, maybe not some many merits to discuss.
this thread has been a revelation for me – I realise I’ve never much been overwhelmed with enthusiasm for jangly indie bands (although if you’d asked me at the time I think I would have thought i did – if that makes any sense) and when I do I like ‘em it’s usually with a girl singer. I bought ‘This Charming Man’ as a single but I preferred Sandie Shaw’s version of ‘Hand in Glove’ – the only Smiths album I owned was ‘Hatful of Hollow’ on vinyl and I’ve never bothered replacing it or adding to it.
I think the reason may be the bands/singers personas remind me too much of myself – I prefer my pop stars larger than life – and I prefer pop music to sound exotic, syncopated and/or more intense than real life. There was a leaden sense of kitchen sink realism about The Smiths which just doesn’t excite me.
Like Lee my musical tastes were shaped by The Face at the time – particularly David Toop who was a champion for Prince, Luther Vandross and Hip-Hop and a wide range of other stuff.
I hate to say it, but Robert Elms’ ‘Hard Times’ piece in The Face opened up a lot of music to me as well. And, yes, I wore old ripped 501s with a studded belt for a while too.
re 114/115: I picked ELP because aren’t they still supposed to be pretty much irredeemable unlike most other groups that the punks were supposedly rebelling against which have since been rehabilitated.
Re 120 You may find that if you read the word Sukrat backwards you’ll discover something…
Also: http://freakytrigger.co.uk/old-ft/essays/2002/07/tarkus1/
http://freakytrigger.co.uk/old-ft/nylpm/2005/10/tarkus-watch/
Interesting,I never realised that!
I now feel a bit less strange for having loved New Pop and then being totally taken (hmm, interesting verb, but the only accurate one) by The Smiths; once I went to the WHSmith at the mall just to look at a picture of them in Newsweek in ’85 in total awe. A year later I began to really pay attention to the UK music papers (I was already buying Star Hits, the US version of Smash Hits) when I could find it.)
When I began to realize the mixture of voices in the UK music media I was charmed and baffled and a little overwhelmed – I could barely understand how so many people could exist in what my guts told me was a very small space and have such different opinions. That The Smiths were great was pretty much agreed upon by everyone (save the Soulboys, who must have at least admired Morrissey’s flair for clothes) and beyond that it was out-and-out head-desking despair – the indie crowd vs. the goths vs. those who enjoyed strangeness (not long after I began reading the UK media I discovered The Fall) and those who solidly believed that if it was popular it was good, and vice versa. What kept me reading was the sheer enthusiasm I could find from various writers, and a depth of feeling unimaginable at, say, Rolling Stone.
By the way, I went all the way to Toronto to get the first Smiths album on cassette and stayed faithfully with them as they negotiated their highwire way through the decade. And Johnny Marr remains one of my favorite guitarists; to me he seemed androgynous on the guitar, if that makes any sense.
I also have to add that The Queen Is Dead remains (for me) their best album; Strangeways Here We Come I always associate with my father’s deterioration and eventual death. I watched him go and I watched The Smiths go and it was a very sad time indeed. But I feel I’m getting ahead of myself here – “Panic” was THE song of the year and I got the NME with him on the cover and nothing else, of course!
Hi Lena. Your comment about Johnny Marr makes a lot of sense.
I think a lot of people who don’t generally go in for ” gutiar heroes ” admire Johnny Marr. In The Smiths he always seemed to be expressing himself through the gutiar whereas too many other gutiarists are merely expressing what their gutiar/amp/fx pedals are capable of.
For the record, this was number one when Chernobyl went critical: perhaps the single most significant event of the 1980s.
Me, I was travelling around Wales at the time. It rained. And rained, and rained, and rained. There was, allegedly, lots of fallout in the rain, enough to make the local sheep suspect for many years afterwards.
I’m doomed, doomed I tell you! Although 26 years on I show no ill-effects that can’t be accounted for by aging.
I actually had a package trip planned to what was still called the Soviet Union when Chernobyl came along and knackered it. I think my lost holiday was probably fairly low down on the list of that terrible disaster’s victims.
Rosie – so you survived being rained on in the days of fallout, which is good. Then you moved just down the road from Sellafield, which is pushing your luck a bit!
Back to poor old George Michael, since about two of the last hundred posts have been about him and this record – a beautiful piece of music, a fine vocal and yes, sadly underrated. It seems to have fallen into the void that Marcello often refers to where there’s only room for one song of any given type by any given artist on oldies radio – and since this isn’t “Careless Whisper” (and maybe because of its sparse production) this one loses out. Certainly one of the more unjustly obscure 80s number ones.
Anyway, back to the Smiths, the rest of you. I didn’t follow them avidly at the time aside from enjoying their singles (my girlfriend and I used to sing at each other in mocking Morrissey tones “but I’m still fond of yeeeewwww, whoa-hooooo”) and I’ve come to enjoy their albums since, but I’ll leave this discussion to the experts. (Tom, someone should compile a guide to the unlikely tangents we go off on…)
I’d mistakenly thought ‘Faith’ had been his big comeback single after this and am a bit baffled that ‘I Want Your Sex’ actually preceded it (tho I do vaguely recall the controversy surrounding it that Summer), because it seems that ‘Faith’ would’ve stood a much better chance of being Michael’s third consecutive #1 and put him up there with Gerry and Frankie on that record (Wham! efforts notwithstanding).
Would say the two singles after those are actually stronger (‘One More Try’ is not one I remembered at all when I saw its title but as soon as I heard it I was ‘oh its THAT one’) which also seems unusual.
Re 114 etc, in this month’s Mojo, Alicia Keys says that YouTube clips of Keith Emerson circa 1971 are her favourite musical discovery of the year.
re 131 bizarrely there was a picture in one of the antique roadshow music mags recently of Keith Emerson all smiles with John Lydon
blimey, this thread has got off topic…er George Michael what was with the mullet and where had it gone by the time of the next Wham video?
This is now the most commented on FT post of 2009. Well done all!
Looking forward to Alicia Keys’ triple concept album!