The Beatles albums George Michael never connected with: “Doesn’t really have that magic”

Posted On October 19, 2025October 19, 2025

The music of George Michael always needed to have passion in it to be any good. 

As much as his ear was touched by a musical God in many respects, was anybody going to really be listening to a tune like ‘Father Figure’ if he didn’t have the passion in his voice? That all came from a love of R&B, and that was the kind of musical gift that not everyone was going to get listening to the British invasion.

Because when you look at many of Michael’s heroes, they are virtually all the biggest names in Motown. Aretha Franklin and Smokey Robinson were much more than your standard musical stars to him. These were artists that you spoke about with a certain hushed reverence every single time their songs came on the radio, and while a lot of the early WHAM! music was a lot more sophomoric than what it became, you could still hear Michael trying desperately to sound like his idols.

But his music was always a healthy mix of different styles. It’s easy to listen to his voice and draw influences from everyone from Stevie Wonder to Freddie Mercury, but the best part of Michael was how you could pick out subtle influences in everything he did. That meant that he could make a soulful rockabilly number like ‘Faith’ or manage to pay tribute to Elton John on his version of ‘Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’.

And for any kid growing up in England at the time, all roads led back to The Beatles. The Fab Four had taken the idea of what a rock and roll star could be and given everyone four different frontmen trapped in one group. What they did for music in general is beyond compare, but Michael was always looking for a little something more when he went back through their later catalogue.

If you really wanted to call The Beatles a ‘boy band’, their early days is where a lot of those comparisons start. They were a teenybopper band in many respects, and while they did manage to help their friends like The Rolling Stones get their feet off the ground, it’s not like Michael was going to leap and down to celebrate a tune like ‘It Won’t Be Long’ the same way that he did listening to ‘Hey Jude’.

Since he already knew who the Fab Four were cribbing from, Michael couldn’t help but be a little bit disappointed listening to their early records, saying, “What they were trying to do at the beginning was their own version of Motown. They had no understanding of R&B whatsoever. That’s what makes them stand out so differently. I can’t really get much out of the early Beatles stuff. The way they mixed cultures at the end was wonderful. The beginning doesn’t really have that magic for me.”

For what it’s worth, Michael does have a great point. Anyone that tried to listen to The Beatles to get a basic understanding of R&B wasn’t going to get very far, and while you can hear those influences absolutely spilling out of tunes like ‘Ask Me Why’ or ‘All I’ve Got To Do’, it’s not like there weren’t other groups like The Miracles that weren’t doing exactly the same thing but ten times better.

Then again, The Beatles could only be themselves, and their ability to internalise that music and eventually use it to make their own masterpieces was about more than stealing someone else’s musical homework. They wanted to make the best music they could, and that usually meant throwing everything they could at the wall and seeing what was left over for them to work with at the end.

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