The Second Coming of George Michael

The singer’s face is barely visible in the inky darkness of the vocal booth, but the voice that fills the adjacent control room at SARM West Studios in London is very familiar. The song is one of irony and loss — “Ma ma ma babe/Look at your hands/You’ve got two fat children and a drunken man/Betcha don’t like your life/Betcha don’t like it.” There is, however, an unmistakable virile quality to the singer’s emphatic delivery, a sensual self-confidence that meshes perfectly with the taut erotic bounce of the guitars underneath. His occasional bursts of lusty falsetto — “Whooo!” — are also a dead giveaway.

“Ma ma ma babe,” he continues, leaning harder into the song’s heartbreak scenario. “Look at your hands/You should have been my woman when you had the chance/Betcha don’t like your life/Betcha don’t like it/Betcha don’t like your life now.” Then the voice in the booth calmly announces, “Cut.” The singer takes off his headphones and purposefully walks back into the control room.

Stroking the heavy five o’clock shadow that covers the bottom half of his handsome Mediterranean features, George Michael sits in his mission-control chair at the center of the recording console and swivels around to face the three musicians seated across from him. “I need more push in that riff,” he says. “Give it more push in that second go-round.” Known to millions of teenage girls around the globe as the hunky singing half of the English bedroom-pinup duo Wham!, Michael is engrossed in the very serious business of making a hit record. Aside from looking like God’s gift to MTV’s under-eighteen female viewers, it is, in fact, what George Michael does best.

Yesterday, “Betcha Don’t Like It” (the song’s working title) was just an idea, with a sketchy chorus by Michael and a riff by David Austin, an old friend of Michael’s who is one of the guitarists in the studio. But on this overcast September afternoon, the song appears to be just a few hours away from completion, lacking only a couple of verses, overdubs and a tighter lead vocal. Ironically, “Betcha Don’t Like It” is not even a George Michael record. He’s producing and co-writing the song for David Austin, who will lay down the final vocal.

“You can see he keeps it all fairly under control himself,” notes Chris Porter, Michael’s regular engineer since he worked on Wham!’s 1984 breakthrough hit, “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.” “Quite often he’ll start a song with a verse or a chorus and nothing else. And he’ll build that up day by day.” For example, Porter explains, “Everything She Wants” started off as a minute and a half of music on a demo Michael recorded at home. “He elaborated on it over about four days until it became a complete song” — and Wham!’s third straight Number One hit in America.

“If he had been producing this song for himself,” Porter says of “Betcha Don’t Like It.” “George would have moved a lot faster. He would have been more confident.”

Michael seems so self-assured in the studio that it’s hard to imagine that he is a mere 23 years old. Already a music-business veteran, Michael has five years’ worth of best-selling records, sold-out tours and screaming teenage fillies behind him. But in the merry-go-round world of Top 40 pop, image is nearly everything, and today, nine months after the announcement that he and boyhood pal Andrew Ridgely were dissolving Wham!, George Michael is perceived by many Americans as, in his own words, a “sex symbol to thousands of virgins.” That Michael is also an unquestionably gifted songwriter in a field of otherwise dismal hacks is an opinion that seems to come in a distant second.

“I totally threw away my personal credibility for a year and a half in order to make sure my music got into so many people’s homes,” Michael says of Wham!’s peak teenybopper years of 1984 and ’85, when songs like “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” “Freedom” and “Careless Whisper” dominated U.S. and U.K. airwaves in almost supersonic rotation. “It was a calculated risk, and I knew I would have to fight my way back from it. I did it out of choice.”

Even Michael could not have anticipated how well his risk would pay off. The first two Wham! albums, Fantastic and Make It Big, have sold over 6 million copies internationally. Make It Big racked up 4 million sales in the U.S. alone and was the first album of this decade to spawn three Number One hits in America — “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” “Careless Whisper” and “Everything She Wants.” Subsequent singles, including the recent ballad “A Different Corner” (actually issued as a George Michael solo single), have all gone Top 10. If the current Wham! single — a cover of the Was (Not Was) song “Where Did Your Heart Go?” — also goes Top 10, that will make eight in a row. With numbers like that, and with his indisputable command of mainstream-pop technique, it’s no wonder that Michael has been widely touted as the Elton John of the Eighties.