“Wham!,” directed by the ace documentarian Chris Smith (“Fyre,” “Jim and Andy: The Great Beyond”), presents itself as a light and lively scrapbook of an irresistible pop moment (the movie literally uses the 30-volume scrapbook of Wham!’s career compiled by Andrew Ridgeley’s mother as an organizing diary). That’s what the Wexler version was too staid to give life to, and it’s what George Michael, as a recording artist, breathed into it. “Careless Whisper,” of course, is a lovely song, but what makes it indelible is the swing, the lilt, the invisible surge beneath the melancholy. That’s how much he knew what he was searching for. By the time Michael settled on Steve Gregory to play what became the song’s iconic saxophone solo, he’d already tried out the riff with 10 different sax players. So he decided to redo the track and produce it himself. George Michael didn’t like how the song sounded (neither, it turns out, did Wexler). What more could a 20-year-old budding pop star want?īut we hear the version that Wexler produced, and despite a certain craftsmanly elegance it’s weirdly cut-and-dried. He heads down to Muscle Shoals Sound Studio to record the track, with Wexler producing. Michael has become enough of a powerhouse to hook up with Jerry Wexler, the legendary producer of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. 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 and Andrew Ridgeley, coming off their first album, “Fantastic” (which had a few hits, though none of them were great), have established Wham! as an effective lightweight pop machine, with its two young stars prancing around the stage in sexy sportswear. 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. They’re dismissed as being slick and calculated and superficial. Unabashed pop groups with fervid teenage followings tend to get trivialized, at least in the media.
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