It's a hilarious contrast to the song's lyrics, "Young guns having some fun, crazy ladies keep 'em on the run", when it seems like nothing can get them up and running. Wham in China – Foreign Skies (1986) AKA Lindsay Anderson's If You Were There". Archived from the original on 5 March 2016 . Retrieved 11 December 2015. That's the persona they carried through during their first album, 1983's Fantastic, which featured huge singles such as 'Young Guns (Go For It)', 'Wham! Rap', 'Bad Boys', and ' Club Tropicana'.

Wham! were just outside the top 40 threshold of the UK Singles Chart at the time they were invited to perform on Top of the Pops, which meant they had not climbed high enough in normal circumstances to get on the show, but they were recruited nonetheless as the highest-placed artists still climbing the charts from outside the top 40. Wham! (briefly known in the US as Wham! UK) were an English pop duo formed in Bushey in 1981. [3] [4] The duo consisted of George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley. They became one of the most commercially successful pop acts of the 1980s, selling more than 30 million certified records worldwide from 1982 to 1986. [5] George wrote the song about a teenage lad's worry that his best friend was getting too committed to a girl when he should have been enjoying his youth and the single life. It featured a middle eight aside in which the girl conversely tried to get her boyfriend to ditch the best friend, prompting a vocal battle, akin to a tug of war, between the girlfriend and the best friend which prompted the "go for it!" aspect of the song, as featured in the title. In 1986, Wham! broke up. Michael was keen to create music targeted at a more sophisticated adult market rather than the duo's primarily teenage audience. Before going their separate ways, a farewell single " The Edge of Heaven", and a greatest-hits album titled The Final would be forthcoming, along with a farewell concert entitled The Final.

Why George Michael's Wham! period is in need of a reappraisal". CBC Music. 28 December 2018 . Retrieved 3 August 2018. No mean feat for a couple of lads from Bushey, Hertfordshire who started off just having a laugh writing songs together. George Michael wrote the song about a teenage boy's worry that his best friend was getting too committed to a girl when he should have been enjoying his youth and the single life. It featured a middle eight aside in which the girl conversely tried to get her boyfriend to ditch the best friend, prompting a vocal battle, akin to a tug of war, between the girlfriend and the best friend, which prompted the 'go for it' aspect of the song, as featured in the title. Davis, S. (2012). 80s Chart-Toppers: Every Chart-Topper Tells a Story. Mainstream Publishing. p.264. ISBN 978-1-78057-411-0 . Retrieved 17 June 2019. Rettenmund, Matthew (15 October 1996). Totally awesome 80s. St. Martin's Press. pp.60–. ISBN 978-0-312-14436-4 . Retrieved 6 May 2011.

In the final stages of editing, Anderson was dismissed [30] by Wham!'s management, the editing team quit, and the film was re-edited, renamed and released as Wham! in China: Foreign Skies. According to a 2006 interview with The Independent, [31] Andy Stephens, manager for Michael, said that the film [Anderson's version] was simply not good enough to be shown in public: "It's a dreadful film... It's 20 years old and it's rubbish. Why on earth should we allow it to be shown?", although after viewing it in 2008 critic and journalist John Harris described it as "a rich, poetic, panoramic portrait of China's strangeness to the eyes of outsiders". [32] Live Aid (1985) [ edit ] Begrudgingly finding a job to make money and dealing with impending adulthood, whilst figuring out how to get girls. That was the secret to Wham!'s early songwriting formula. And it worked. The next single was " Freedom" and was simply promoted as a Wham! single. Wham! used a video edited together from footage of their tour in China for "Freedom"'s single release in the US, which was in July 1985. Their second album, Make It Big, climbed to No. 1 on the album charts and the band set off on an arena tour at the end of 1984. [24] Sibbles, Emma (18 June 2009). "Get it off your chest: The slogan T-shirt has a noble history". The Guardian . Retrieved 17 June 2019.Zombie" is about the ethno-political conflict in Ireland. This is obvious if you know anything of the singer (Dolores O'Riordan)'s Irish heritage and understood the "1916" Easter Rising reference. When George Michael performed with Wham! for the last time and said it was ‘most important day of my life’ Ridgeley explained that the name originated from a need for "something that captured the essence of what set us apart—our energy and our friendship—and then it came to us: Wham! Wham! was snappy, immediate, fun and boisterous too." [10] British graphic design studio Stylorouge was credited with adding the exclamation mark to the name of the band. [11]