8February
Before the recent ignoring of Iron Maiden, we have to go back almost twenty years to find the last top 5 single never played on the Radio 1 Top 40. It came from an unlikely source.
George Michael had risen to fame with Andrew Ridgeley in the group Wham!. They first hit the top 10 in late 1982, on a contract with Interscope that paid them about one new penny for each album they sold. It took until 1984 to get themselves out of that one. From the group's first release on EMI - Wake me up before you go-go
to their last - The edge of heaven
, every Wham! single would either be a UK number one, or sell a million copies. The same was true for George Michael's two solo releases, in 1984 and 1986. Eventually, there were no more frontiers for Wham! to crack - they'd conquered the states, they'd played in Red China. Just about the only thing they hadn't done was topple the xilkband Zorgon on the planet Pxyri, and that was only because Simon Napier Bell had yet to invent cold fusion rocket travel.
So, shorn of Andrew, what was George's next solo challenge? The Faith
album, a bridge between the candy pop of his early career and the serious singer-songwriter that George wanted to be. Perhaps the best way to break out of the lightweight image would be to release a single that Radio 1 would fall over itself to ban. So, step forward June 1987's I want your sex
. Here was a pretty decent funk groove, with Yog shouting about how good it was to have sex as part of a loving relationship.
Of course, the biggest pop star on the planet suggesting that there was something more racy in life than a cup of milky cocoa was sufficient to rouse the immoral majority to action. Mrs. Mary Whitewash voiced her disapproval, Anthony Beaumont-Dark had an opinion, and Radio 1's controller Johnny Beergut decided that his station wouldn't play the record before 9pm. So, no plays on the Top 40, a show that resolutely finished at 7pm.
However, this all happened so long ago that Radio 1 was still playing music on a Saturday evening. Remember that as a concept? The Saturday DJ was a hip young swinger, who was happy to set aside his own moral stance in order to play the record that he couldn't normally play. And, a year or so later, he and producer Ric Blaxill would cut out the rubbish parts, take the good bits of the record, and use it as a bed for his On This Day In History
segment. Whatever happened to that Simon Mayo chap, anyway?
