George Michael + Andrew Ridgeley = Wham! ('Woo! Woo!')

I've only ever made a point of buying one disc (or cassette single as it was then) and that was Waiting For That Day. Prior to hearing it, my main awareness of George Michael/Wham was 1) seeing Wham on The Tube TV show and 2) the video for Faith. Otherwise it was snippets that unavoidably popped up on radio and TV and to which I paid little attention.

But something about - or rather the whole thing about - Waiting For That Day grabbed me immediately I first heard it. I believe it was released during a dispute with Sony after the release of the Faith long player and he decided not to appear in the videos from the album Listen Without Prejudice Vol 1, hiring a number of supermodels to appear in one of the videos, Freedom or Freedom 1990 (?) 

With or without him singing it in a video, it was for me a revelation, and for the first time I saw Michael as an astute and mature songsmith. I was late to the realization party, perhaps, and no doubt he had previously released songs to much acclaim, but it was this one that drew my attention.

There's an ache in there, in the lyrics, the instrumentation, and the vocals. Listen to it deeply enough and, if you're in a certain mood, it might move you to tears. And I say that without any sentimentality. The line that goes 'Something I just can't explain, Something in me needs this pain' gets you so you can't help but think back and apply it to some of the incidents in his life which I don't feel the need to go into here, but most of which occurred later, after the song's release. Or maybe some incidents in your own life. The closing refrain of 'You can't always get what you want...' was an inspired example of sampling, or borrowing, or whatever it's called. Also borrowed for the song are aspects of James Brown and Procol Harum, the use of which Michael describes in this brief explanation of Waiting For That Day's composition.