Older at 25
Here are 25 points about the magnificence of George Michael’s Older:
1. Older spent longer on the charts than any other George Michael studio album with 116 weeks to Faith’s 92 and Listen Without Prejudice’s 74. Fancy that!
2. Songs about dead lovers are ten-a-penny, but not so many of them were seven-minute glacial moods about a boyfriend dying of AIDs which shot into №1 on its first week.
3. And George hadn’t even technically ‘come out’ yet. His line of answering such questions were along the line of this in Big Issue: “Even though my sexuality hasn’t always been completely clear to me, it was never a moral question. I’ve never thought of my sexuality as being right or wrong. I’ve wondered what my sexuality might be but I’ve never wondered whether it was acceptable or not. To me it’s always been about finding the right person. The only moral involved in sex is whether it’s consenting or not. Anyway, who really cares whether I’m gay or straight? Do they think they’ve got a serious chance of shagging me or something?” Yet, he also said “To my fans and the people that were really listening, I felt like I was trying to come out with them.” So there you go. If you knew, you knew. Call it a gaydar, maybe. One of the best transactions in life is to find something or someone that you can identify with, and when art speaks to you, and reflects your experience, it enhances existence and lifts the spirit.
4. Older is the only George album to be launched with a №1 single. Faith’s I Want Your Sex fizzled at №3 and Praying For Time did №6. Phfft.
5. Older has a brace of the strongest chart positions for the singles off a George album, with two №1s (Jesus To A Child, Fastlove), three №2s (Spinning The Wheel, Star People, You Have Been Loved), and a №3 (Older).
6. For an album so celebrated and huge, that the ‘George Michael Estate’ continues to faff about with inaccurately reissuing other stuff and posting about having a Friday Feeling with a 4K restoration of the Wake Me Up Before You Go Go video is pretty much the very opposite of ‘what he would have wanted’.
7. And don’t start me on their inability to have reissued Older on vinyl to coincide with this anniversary. Fuck me. Hello, are you aware of how much a vinyl copy of this is going on Discogs? You think there may be some demand for it? Sheesh.
8. Anyway *calms down*
9. Look, I guess my main point here is that Older is SUCH an iconic album, and a genuinely brilliant reflection of what gay life is like for the slightly older gay man — too old for tween, too young to be a Daddy.
10. (I’m aware that there are some youngsters calling themselves ‘Master’ or ‘Daddy’ and barely even 25. Oh honey. No.)
11. Let’s look at the evidence. For many years the whole nature, the classic form, of pop music has been driven as a young scene. Pop music for people who might have been deemed to have grown out of it really took its time to get going to be honest. Pop music for maturing gays even more so. Managing to navigate a respectable career while growing up and maintaining a level of success without having to throw a ‘ft. Doja Cat’ or time-stamped EDM mix is a tricky business. Some people do it magnificently, others not so. That the entire career of Wham! could have happened in the gap between LWP and Older helped somewhat, but George wasn’t exactly being slack during that period either, as Too Funky, Don’t Let The Sun and that Queen EP showed.
12. Look at Spinning The Wheel. It’s basically about an open relationship and the paranoia that can evolve when two people have agreed to let each other ‘do their own thing’ and one of them is maybe a little too enthusiastic about doing their own thing. You’ve decided you want to spend your life with someone who also enjoys having NSA anonymous encounters, and it’s eating into your mental health a bit because what is the point? That’s going to cause issues eventually, yeah?
13. In Fastlove — the most performed/ played song in the UK in 1996, so eat it, Wannabe — George himself is the one going out for NSA anonymous bunk-ups and enjoying outdoor knob-touch or going off to sleaze about in a club. There’s no coat-check up Hampstead Heath’s fuck tree, and, well, some people quite enjoy the feel of foliage on their genitals. What a telling line ‘in the absence of security’ is too. There really is no way of sugar-coating this, but there’s nothing like the rush and illicit thrill of going to a sex club, wandering around and checking out the other patrons of the sex club, because those patrons, like yourself, are there at the sex club because they want sex. Same goes for saunas. Oh pur-lease, you’re not there for the health benefits.
14. Actually, while we’re on the subject of sweaty men, it was around this period that a newly post-Take That Gary Barlow was being touted as the new George Michael. Lol.
15. The title track itself is a perfect ‘hey we were good once but I’ve lost a bit of weight, learned a few things and yeah, NOW you inform me you’ve always had a thing for me’. At least in my mind anyway.
16. Older sounds great on drugs, incidentally. George’s ‘I smoked 17 spliffs a day’ revelation had me thinking they were either really weak or his constitution was somewhat more robust than mine. I considered this to be a challenge so I thought I’d give it a go. I had a really horrible headache once I got into double figures, that sort of ‘requires four paras and two pints of lemon squash to sort’ type migraine-lite vibe. I can laugh about it now but the curtains in my uni loft flat had taken to speaking in Urdu at me.
17. You Have Been Loved has the ability to make a brick cry. It’s impossible to get through it with a dry eye. It’s almost a challenge to be worthy of having that played at your funeral. Otherwise you just get My Way, which is the ‘I may’ve been an absolute cunt but I did it my way’ get-out clause. No, you have to EARN You Have Been Loved. Incidentally, it was quite fortuitous to have been released in late 1997 as a post-dead-Diana mood. It was kept off the top by Elton John’s Candle in the Wind reswizzle because SadPop was what the nation turned to in order to heal.
18. Star People is basically The Met Bar, isn’t it? That it was doofed up by Jeremy Healy for release, is the most 1997 thing imaginable. While a comment of the frivol of fame, and how those desperate for it must be a bit mental, that this came out while most of the 90’s new stars were hitting hard drugs because the fame they’d wanted wasn’t the right type of fame they’d envisaged and so heroin got a bit yum, is spot on. Or something.
19. Also, Older was recorded before during and after illnesses and deaths of both George’s fella Anselmo and his mum. You’d be on double-figure spliff usage yourself to cope with that, and a record company no doubt thrilled you were onboard but secretly hoping you’d deliver on time for that quarter might have started breathing down your neck.
20. So, to go back to my original findings. Older works magnificently as an album for lovers of all the spectrum, yet somehow manages to tap that area of the pink pound that was increasingly ‘We bought this house together but split up, oh no it’s fine we still get on — that’s his Depeche Mode and Star Trek Next Gen DVD collection — he uses the playroom on Wednesday-to-Saturday etc’ or ‘honry pics m8, got a face?’ onset of online dating.
21. Just dawned on me that my view of what Older means could differ somewhat from other people who thought it was a concept album about shelving or meringues or something.
22. So yeah. Older is a masterpiece. You look at Faith, LWP and Older as a trio of albums and that’s basically a decade of magnificence. The trajectory of “I’m a serious solo musician actually, and holding this guitar because America, even if I haven’t the foggiest idea of what you do with it” through to “Look, I bloody sent myself to the edge of my sanity on that last album, just bloody listen to this one. I can’t be arsed touring, and, oh, hold on… Epic are on the other line.” And completed with “I’ve loved, I’ve lost, I’ve smoked shitloads and am quietly content to be an enigmatic huge star on my own terms, helping charities and occasionally doing some bum dungeon drugs with a fisty builder.”
23. That’s about the dimensions of my findings and thoughts and feelings about Older. The idea that George Michael isn’t with us anymore is just horrible, sad and wrong.
24. And also the idea that he was some tortured being all through this era is trounced by the revelation that Bananarama used to regularly pop round and get drunk and play Scrabble with him. It is genuinely impossible to be a moodlin’ gloomy sort if Bananarama are your mates. Although another revelation about him microwaving his tea when it went cold venns slightly into the mindset of a murderer, but we’ll overlook that for now.
25. Happy birthday Older. You were brilliant initially and have managed to get even better with age. Hurrah Older!