Unabashed pop groups with fervid teenage followings tend to get trivialized, at least in the media.
They’re dismissed as being slick and calculated and superficial.
But there’s a story in “Wham!,” the new Netflix documentary about the quintessential pop duo of the 1980s, that testifies to what a chancy and audacious artist George Michael was even back in his teen-idol days.The year is 1983.
Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, coming off their first album, “Fantastic”, have established Wham! as an effective lightweight pop machine, with its two young stars prancing around the stage in sexy sportswear.
The time has come to record “Careless Whisper,” a song they’ve had in their back pocket for several years (we hear the super-early demo version of it that they recorded in 1981 in Ridgeley’s living room on a Teac 4-track Portastudio).
Michael has become enough of a powerhouse to hook up with Jerry Wexler,…
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