The night George Michael made a Beatles classic his own
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(Credits: Far Out / Spotify)
On Monday, April 20th, 1992, a tribute concert was held. It saw 72,000 people gathered at Wembley Stadium, and a further billion watched on television, each paying tribute in their own way to the dearly departed Freddie Mercury. The Queen frontman had passed away five months earlier from an Aids-related illness, and, during that concert, George Michael would absolutely steal the show.
This one-half of Wham! performed a legitimately breathtaking version of ‘Somebody to Love’. One that even the famously catty Mercury couldn’t have found fault in, wherever he was watching on from. In a long, emotionally charged evening of rock ‘n’ roll, that falsetto-led finale leading into the sound of 72,000 people hollering out the climactic “Looo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-oooove” was the moment of the night, but it’s not even close to Michael’s best.
Today, that performance is one of the man born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou’s lasting achievements. When he passed away on Christmas 2016, his performance at Wembley was one of the most shared and revered moments from a lifetime spent as a one-of-a-kind performer. A singer whose voice never lost its versatility, grace and emotional richness. With that in mind, it makes sense that seven years after that stellar performance, that voice would do it all over again at another tribute concert.
On Saturday, April 10th, 1999, 6000 people gathered at the Royal Albert Hall to pay tribute to Linda McCartney, who had passed away from cancer a year previously. The atmosphere for Linda’s concert was very different from the one for Freddie. The Wembley show had been a celebration of life. It had, after all, opened with Metallica playing ‘Enter Sandman’. Not much room for mourning when that banger kicks in.
On the other hand, Linda’s tribute show, right off the bat, was shot through with an aching, unavoidable sadness that was summed up best by Michael’s choice of song. At Wembley, George had strutted and hollered his way through a triumphant, gospel choir-backed ‘Somebody to Love’. Here, he sat on a stool, and with an open-hearted, plaintive sensitivity, he sang The Beatles’ ‘The Long and Winding Road’.
I won’t lie, it starts out strangely. Michael takes the stage to an audience that greets him like a Wham! concert in their prime, knickers thrown on stage and all. After a bit of back and forth about the underwear in question, Michael sat and negotiated a tonal three-point turn in the middle of a motorway. He explained that while he was close with Linda and had all the respect and love in the world for her, someone else was on his mind as well.
With a herculean level of poise and strength, he continued, “My mother lost the same fight, the same battle that Linda lost.” He then thanked Chrissie Hynde, the organiser of the event, for giving him the chance to sing for both Linda and his mother. Then, he went on to sing what’s, in my mind, the defining version of a song with a fairly complicated legacy.
Paul McCartney wrote the song once he realised that the dissolution of The Beatles was imminent. A period of time he’s held as one of the darkest of his existence. By 1968, he was viewing the last decade or so of his life as a “long and winding road” that had taken too much out of him and left him stranded with no end in sight.
We’ll never really know for sure who the song was originally addressing; if the song is that linear at all. One can imagine that pretty soon after its release, it became a tribute to Linda, though. The woman McCartney has credited with helping him through this low point, the one person on whose doorstep this “wild and windy night” could leave him on and have all the hardships be worth it.
Despite all this, the song has never quite been done the justice it deserves. The version on Let It Be is an overblown catastrophe due to its producer. The stripped-down Ray Charles-like song it was meant to be never quite clicked because John Lennon couldn’t hack the bass line. For decades, the song lay dormant as a beloved Beatles song, but not the classic it deserved to be.
For my money, Michael’s version gets it there. It’s a live version, so it sheds the orchestra and gospel choir that overpower the original in favour of tasteful players who truly understand the assignment. Michael’s vocals are typically flawless, unshackled by the slightly weary effect McCartney shows in the original, with an added note of strength. One that reflects what the song has become since its release.
Speaking of herculean feats of poise and strength, Paul was at the concert. He arrived at the end to pay tribute to his departed soulmate with a few songs. One hopes he was there to see the act of reclamation that Michael, another artist who’d suffered a shattering loss, enacted using one of his most powerful yet misunderstood songs.
With this performance, he made the subtext primary, turning a lament wrought from loss and painful times into a tribute for those who give us the strength to overcome and continue onwards.
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