Wham! – Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go

todaySeptember 9, 2018 2201 7 2

Oldies '80s

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Wham! – Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go. This single charted #1 in US and UK.

Album: Make It Big
Released: 14 May 1984
Songwriter: George Michael

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Michael’s inspiration for the song was a scribbled note that his Wham! partner Andrew Ridgeley had left for his parents, intended to read “wake me up before you go” but with “up” accidentally written twice, so Ridgeley wrote “go” twice on purpose.

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Wham! - Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go

A “go-go” is a dance club, and dancing is the theme of this song, which tells the story of a guy who is head over heels for his girl, and bummed when he finds out she went dancing while he slept. He asks that in the future, she wake him up before she goes.

This isn’t the first “go-go” hit; Smokey Robinson’s group The Miracles scored in 1965 with “Going To A Go-Go.” Dobie Gray had a minor hit that same year with “See You At The Go-Go,” and Lee Dorsey charted in 1967 with “Go-Go Girl,” which was written by Allen Toussaint. Around the time of this song’s release, the all-girl American group The go-go’s were big.

George Michael was born Georgios Panayiotou.

Wham!What have the artist said about the song?

I just wanted to make a really energetic pop record that had all the best elements of Fifties and Sixties records, combined with our attitude and our approach, which is obviously more uptempo and a lot younger than some of those records. It’s one of those tracks that gets rid of a lot of your own personal influences; it reminds me of so many different records that I couldn’t actually nail them down. I’d done a demo at home that just had a bass line and a vocal on it. Usually, I write the record in my head; I know what all the parts are going to be and I sing them to all our musicians. And it was great. … We actually did it as a rehearsal. We used a Linn drum because the drummer was late, and it was such a good track that we kept it.

–George Michael to Rollingstone, 1984

Wham! - Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go

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