On June 28, 1986, 72,000 people packed Wembley Stadium to say goodbye to Wham!, and George Michael stood onstage knowing he was the only one in the building with a plan for what came next. The farewell concert, billed as The Final, closed a chapter that had made him a teen idol and, in his own estimation, a problem to be solved. The five years of Wham! had given him hits, a global fanbase, and a reputation he couldn't shake: teenybopper, lightweight, a pretty face fronting a pop act built for fourteen-year-olds. Faith, released October 30, 1987 on Columbia Records in the US and Epic Records in the UK, was his answer to that reputation, written and produced almost entirely by himself, and the argument it made was total.
The conditions Michael set for the record were unusual and, in retrospect, essential. He wrote and produced every track himself, with the sole exception of "Look at Your Hands," co-written with his longtime friend David Austin. Rather than assembling a conventional band, he overdubbed each part individually, building tracks in two- and four-bar increments with engineer Chris Porter at the controls. Recording split between Puk Studios near Randers, Denmark — chosen specifically because the remoteness kept the press away — and Sarm West Studios in Notting Hill, London. The musicians who did appear were brought in for specific contributions: guitarist Hugh Burns on the title track and a handful of others, bassist Deon Estus on four tracks, keyboardist Chris Cameron providing the cathedral organ sound on "Faith" via a DX7 preset, drummer Ian Thomas, and a seven-piece brass section including trumpeters Paul Spong and Steve Sidwell on the three-part "I Want Your Sex." On "I Want Your Sex" Part 1, "Hard Day," and most of "Monkey," Michael played every instrument himself. The control was not incidental. It was the whole point.
The album's emotional engine was a personal reckoning as much as a professional one. The previous year had delivered the worst kind of private pain: the end of a significant relationship that, by his own account, had fundamentally altered his sense of what he was doing and why. "I was finding it increasingly difficult to write for the group image," he admitted. "I was writing much more personal lyrics, and it felt increasingly strange for me to be singing those lyrics as head of this two-man group." The breakup of that relationship, combined with the liberation of leaving Wham!, produced a songwriter willing to put real exposure into the grooves. He had also set himself a specific competitive target. Michael Jackson and Prince went head-to-head in 1987 with Bad and Sign O' the Times, and Michael watched both records with the focused attention of someone who had decided to be in that conversation. His inspirations were explicit: Marvin Gaye's sensuality, Stevie Wonder's melodic depth, and the sheer self-sufficiency of Prince's studio practice.
The title track encodes the whole project in three and a half minutes. It opens with Chris Cameron's organ playing the melody from Wham!'s "Freedom" — a deliberate farewell gesture — before clicking into a Bo Diddley shuffle, Hugh Burns' acoustic guitar recorded through a Neumann KM84 and double-tracked by Porter, with Deon Estus on bass and Michael humming the guitar melody to Burns because he couldn't play it himself. Publisher Dick Leahy had suggested Michael try a rock and roll pastiche, and the result is a song that manages to be both knowing and completely sincere. The guitar solo, played by Burns on a Giffin custom Stratocaster, was constructed bar by bar over four hours at Sarm West on September 1, 1987, with Michael singing a bebop riff to demonstrate what he wanted. Porter used quarter-inch tape delay into a plate reverb to get the Sun Records warmth Michael was after. It sounds effortless. It took all day.
The album's cultural flashpoint arrived before the album did. "I Want Your Sex," released as the lead single in May 1987, landed in the middle of the AIDS crisis at peak anxiety, and radio stations in the US and UK banned or restricted it on sight. Michael's defense — that the song celebrated monogamy, not promiscuity — was entirely accurate, and entirely beside the point. The controversy broadened his audience beyond the Wham! fanbase while simultaneously proving that he was operating in a different register now. The song peaked at number three in the UK and number two in the US, costing him a chart-topper but earning him something more durable: the attention of listeners who had never taken him seriously before. By the time "Faith" itself went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 on December 12, 1987, and held that position for four weeks, the record's trajectory was set.
Faith won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1989. It produced four consecutive US number ones — "Faith," "Father Figure," "One More Try," and "Monkey" — making Michael the only British male solo artist to achieve that from a single album. It topped Billboard's R&B chart, the first album by a white solo artist to do so, carried there by the funk and soul grammar running through "Father Figure," "One More Try," and "I Want Your Sex." It sold over a million copies in its first week in the US alone. The statistics are genuinely staggering, but the more interesting fact is the one underneath them: a 24-year-old who had been dismissed as a pop confection sat in two studios in Denmark and London, played most of the instruments himself, and built one of the most complete albums of the decade. The question Faith was answering turned out to be the right one to ask.
