Sathnam Sanghera on George Michael: Iraq, Wham!, Empire, Fandom, and The Best Hit Rate in Chart History

0:00In this edition of the Drain and Sound podcast, we're talking about someone who, Helena, who is, what does he specialise in? So he specialises in the British Empire. He's a historian. He's a journalist. He talks about racism. He talks about our deeply entrenched histories. And he also talks about George Michael. yeah we are talking to the author of empire land and the author of a new book called tonight the music seems so loud the meaning of george michael by satan sangara so you might know his work talking about the british empire you might have heard him on various different podcasts talking about that but in this edition of the podcast as you'd expect from drowning sound we talk about fandom a lot um i really like that we've just recorded the interview so we're recording this intro afterwards and um i really like that he really talked so nerdily and i can't believe that i started the podcast getting a name of a wham song wrong a song i absolutely love as well i think what was so funny was that yes so satan has written this book about george michael but the interview wasn't really about george michael it goes into so many different areas it's as you mentioned fandom it's also about activism it's also about where's the line between an artist and an activist and is there even a line and obviously one of your specialist topics the state of the media oh of course the toxicity of the press hounding him and trying to out him and like so i think it's i mean if you're british george michael is such a huge huge cultural figure but not necessarily someone that's got the same love as he mentions in the book as prince and bowie and the cure and the beatles the beatles and all these like he sold so many records at one point i think he had three singles like all that could have been christmas number one around the same time is band-aid and last christmas and like last christmas i think is like the 16th biggest selling song of all time someone will fact check me and tell me i'm wrong but i should have wrote notes only for the introduction um but yeah i I think it's a really interesting chat.

2:13We're now to figure out what the companion playlist is going to be. Hopefully, by the time you listen to this in the show notes, or if you go to dranninsound.org's forward slash playlists, we will have a playlist that's bound to have some George Michael on it. We might pepper in some of the other artists we discuss in this episode of the Dranninsound podcast, which is brought to you in partnership with Kobuz, who are the slightly more ethical than the rest music streaming platform who have really high quality music. And if you go to dranninsound.org forward slash playlist not only is there a playlist but companions for each episode where you can get a 30-day free trial so shall we jump over to us chai let's do it

3:03welcome to drowned in sound satan sangera how are you i'm all right thank you for the aircon You're so welcome. It's freezing in here and we are so happy about it.

3:15Sean, you were excited about this interview. Yes. And I started reading your book. I haven't finished it. I can't spoiler the book for anyone. But there's one question I want to start with. You started talking about Last Christmas and you skimmed over All That She Wants, which I think is one of the greatest songs of all time. Everything She Wants She Wants. Everything She Wants. I was going to make a mistake. Sorry, George Michael nerd. Adrenaline starting interview. Does it get a decent section in the book? Because you glossed over it. You didn't even give it an adjective. No, no, I go into everything she wants.

3:51Very interesting and very similar to Last Christmas because it's one of the records that George Michael produced, sang on, composed, arranged entirely by himself. Both very similar on keepers. And you can hear how he did it. and also both he wrote quite quickly like literally I think in an afternoon or evening so incredible I mean Last Christmas one of the biggest pop songs of all time I think it's been covered more than 400 times Everything You Want hasn't really been covered No I felt like I mentioned it to you and you were like you weren't sure like I always played I manage an artist called The Anchoress and Catherine played it to me once and she was like I love The Anchoress and Catherine was like I think you'd really like this and I was like how have I never heard this?

4:35Like, or considering it's the double A side to last Christmas as well. It's not even the B side. I think it's sort of one of those songs, which like it's got, it sort of feels like a kind of muscly version of what Phil Collins was doing at the time and like quite glistening and cool. And, but it also could fill in place on like a Phoenix album or like, I don't know, M83 or all those kinds of artists that started picking up synths in the mid 2000s. So there's like a magic to it, but George Michael's favorite wham track. Is it? Oh, it's the one he carried on playing, even when he didn't want to remember Wham.

5:09Wow. That is, and, but it's a solo track as well. And I think one of the things which struck me at the start of the book, you talked about him being a producer. And I think he suffers from that thing that some people with incredible voices have, is we always think about their voice and not about who they are as an artist. And so I guess the first question really is like, what did you learn about him beyond the like the obvious stuff and the things that maybe you already knew as a super fan i guess on the artistic level was just how much in control he was and his perfectionism you know he spent 12 hours doing the vocal on kissing a fool spent six months producing and recording fast love there were gaps of up to five years between albums he was such an insane perfectionist But at the same time, some songs came very quickly.

6:00So last Christmas came in, I think, an afternoon while Andrew Ridgely was watching Match of the Day downstairs. And Everything She Wants came in an evening and in a morning. And Wait Me Up Before You Go Go was pretty much put down in two days. But yeah, I don't think people realize how totally in control he was. Wham wasn't really a band. It was George Michael, really. I mean, also how young he was. he wrote Careless Whisper when he was 17 I don't know what you were doing when you were 17 I was working in Burger King I was struggling to make eye contact with the opposite sex but he was writing Careless Whisper which is a meme now on TikTok and he's still one of the most played artists on radio he has the highest hit rate in the history of the Hot 100 in America 19 entries, 8 number ones no one else has done that and yet he's not really celebrated not in the way Bowie, Prince even Taylor Swift is there's almost no serious books about his cultural legacy so hence my book Can I just go back a bit because you guys have got real specific real quick which is great but I want to know why George Michael what takes you from being a fan of his work to wanting to write a book about him.

7:27Yeah, I mean, also I've been writing about colonialism for about seven years. There is a connection, though, because Andrew Ridgely and George Michael would not have happened if it wasn't for the British Empire. You know, Andrew's dad came from Egypt during the Suez Crisis caused by the British. George's dad came from Cyprus, which was part of the British Empire. So there is a connection there. But I've just always been a fan, quite weird to be a fan, a straight male fan in the 90s. No one around me was a fan of George Michael. Also, I was into quite fashionable stuff. I was really into Prince.

8:00I was really into Massive Attack. But I made George Michael my thing. The mockery was constant. And he has been constant throughout my life. But I've got to say, it's declining. Every year, it's a bit less. And I feel like people are rediscovering him. And now, at the age of 49, I'm proud of it. I think it's dated well compared to my friends at the time who were into the Wonder Stuff and Ned's Atomic Dustbin. I remember having a stand-up fight with a friend about why Mariah Carey was better than the Wonder Stuff. And I stand by that. I think I was right. But I would have similar arguments about George Michael.

8:39And was it just you that was into him or was it your family as well? No, it's pretty much me. I inherited the fandom from my sisters, who are fans in the 80s of Wham. But then they abandoned George. And when I got into him around 1990 with Listen Without Prejudice, they'd moved on to other things. So it's me, basically. Strange. um your previous books i guess you could class them in the politics section i'm guessing they get filed in the bookshops and it might surprise people that you've chosen to write a book about george michael next i don't think it will to anyone that's read your first novel because i think you talk about george michael in there i found an interview with the quietest where you talked about being a bit about being a bit embarrassed about being a george michael fan at one point um what was it that kind of drew you to to kind of writing the book and in the way you had And I know when I've skimmed through the book, there's bits about politics in there as well, because he was obviously a very unique political figure at a time when he was speaking about topics, which obviously AIDS was an incredibly top political topic.

9:45And probably I can't imagine what the culture war type vibe would have been of that at the time. Obviously, homophobia was such a big topic. and when he spoke about the Iraq war, I don't think there were a lot of people, even though there's a million people on the street, I don't think there were many big names speaking up like he did. What was it like? Is that part of the reason why? Because he was a political figure? Yeah, I mean, you can understand the age we've lived through through George Michael. I mean, he was around for a long time. There's a lot of things I found, issues found really interesting to analyse through the prism of him.

10:22Yeah, the Iraq war, he was one of the first, way before the marches, way before Damon Albans and everyone else got onto that bandwagon. He was pilluried. You know, he was on the front page of the Sun, outed as a coward by Simon Cowell, and, you know, cancelled in America. He was one of the first people to speak out, and people thought he'd gone mad. I thought he'd gone mad, because I stupidly believed Tony Blair at the time. It's dated very well, his activism on Iraq. Similarly, his activism on AIDS dated very well, and he was campaigning on AIDS when he was constantly being harassed by the press about his sexuality.

10:58Every time he campaigned on AIDS, it would restart the question of whether he was, to use the language at the time, a puff. He was asked that in every interview, but he campaigned on AIDS anyway, and I think that was very brave. And he basically split up WAM over the issue of apartheid. People forgot this, but the WAM's management got involved with the South African company and he couldn't stand it. So he broke up wham over it. And his activism is dated really well. But more than that, he's a really interesting person to examine our changing attitudes towards race, cultural appropriation and black music and also obviously homosexuality.

11:35You know, you look back and people often say, you know, why was he in the closet so long? People attack him for that. Noel Gallagher famously did. Said, how dare you talk about the Iraq war when you hid who you were from us for so long? And you go back to the 80s and you go, you look at the press, you know, like no one was out. Almost no one was out. Almost the people we see as intrinsically always out weren't. So Kenny Everett was married. Elton John was married. Freddie Mercury had a girlfriend. Neil Tennant wasn't out. Boy George said he was bi. And that was basically because you could not be in the public eye and gay.

12:14you would be mocked ridiculed people wouldn't buy your records and George was so young he was like a teenager when he became famous he was still working things out and it's so cruel that he had that had to face that choice and it's cruel that people then judged him yeah you described him there as an activist his activism how different or similar is the way activist artists are treated now to then do you think it's a bit of a paradox because in a way artists now the big ones are more accessible and real quote marks than ever right you can message them on instagram they are taylor swift feels like a very normal person-ish, you know?

13:03And George Michael's of the era of kind of Prince, Madonna, these global pop stars who were out of reach on a castle on hell. And yet paradoxically, he feels more real to me than Taylor or Ed Sheeran. Because you know anything they say on politics or anything else has gone through probably five people and a focus group. Yeah, and there's probably not even them managing their channels. Exactly. that's the thing you see a lot of artists and it's like their outlet to the world is run by some 22 year old working at a social media agency they're not even got the kind of ability to post to their own channels a lot of the time exactly there's a few exceptions but George despite his mega fame was so real it was real and also you could actually just go and stand outside his house his front door was like a few meters away if you stood out long enough you'd see him and I find that incredible and it says something about him There's a few exceptions.

14:00I think Dua Lipa has got a Georgie spirit. She does what she wants. She's very intelligent. She says what she wants. I really admire her and she's got that similar vibe. Also, there's a difference between the activism back in the day and the activism now because sometimes artists, for example, might say free Palestine on stage and there's a big furore about it. Everybody's talking about it on social media and they may be like, okay, my activism's done. But if you compare that to the real activism and charity work and philanthropic work that George Michael did, it's not even really comparable, right?

14:40Yeah, he basically paid a heavy price for lots of his activism. Amongst that activism, I would include the court case against Sony, where he basically took out three or four years, actually five years out of his career, spent millions and millions of pounds on a point of principle. And that wasn't just for himself. It was for artists. And he was going through a lot at the time and maybe he had writing block and whatever. But it was an incredible thing to do. I just think people don't do that. What was that court case? Well, he famously, at the height of his career, after Listen Without Prejudice, basically sued his own record label for restraint of trade and tried to get the artist's contract challenged and changed in general for all artists.

15:29They kind of deprioritized his releases, didn't they? And didn't give them, I mean, allegedly, reportedly. Yeah, I mean, famously, he refused to promote Listener Without Prejudice, which didn't help and their relationship broke down. But it was an incredible thing to do. And also people forget that he also took on his record label during Wham! Inner Vision. He took them to court. famously it was a very bad record like record contract i think he was getting they were getting four percent royalties on international sales yeah uh they had to make a record every year for five years they had a number one album and they were getting 40 pounds a week in pocket money they were getting zero royalties from 12 inches i mean they were screwed they signed it under duress as teenagers and then they were locked in that for decades potentially and at one point George hid his masters in his mum's house.

16:25But he took them to court and won. You know, they got a new contract. Didn't win, but it was settled and they got a better contract. But that's the kind of guy he was. And again, at a very young age. Because I was picturing if he was around today, there's been lots of work around trying to change how the industry works. But with things like Spotify and like Live Nation and those kind of big corporations, like only artists at that scale and level and those deep pockets would have been able to do it. I think one of the reasons activism feels slightly different now is Dua Lipa was probably not as wealthy as George Michael became out of his music.

17:01And just because of the global scale of the kind of numbers, the things that he did. And I just wonder if that, there's a section of your book where I think a few pages, you just kind of list the different organizations he was supporting with millions. And I can't think of artists now that even have, like obviously Nod and Liam Gallagher, do i think they've made something like 50 million quid from the reformation shows don't have like noel can slag off george michael in interviews but i don't ever really hear him digging into his pockets to to do great things maybe he does it quietly maybe he's not a performative person but i think that activism at the time when he was doing it was both financially he was able to but on the flip side like helena we were discussing kind of the media coverage at the time and And like, obviously, the media is still pretty toxic now.

17:51But researching the book, how did you feel like reading back some of those articles and headlines? Yeah, because it's, you know, it's our industry, isn't it? I mean, the press. So it's sobering. And the odd thing is that I didn't notice at the time. We were blind to it. I mean, one really interesting moment was when he was outed famously, you know, masturbating in a toilet in Los Angeles. a kind of a crisis in quote marks that he recovered from in an amazing bold way but the press coverage at the time oh my god this is 1998 I think and him being arrested for lewd conduct was being compared to Gary Glitter who had just been done for child porn offences they were put literally next to each other's stories it's like how and there was a presumption that he would be in hiding, that his career would be over.

18:45That would be it. Everyone just assumed it. And I really admire the way he just refused to be ashamed. And he taught me an important lesson that time, is that you can't be humiliated with something that you're not ashamed of. You choose whether you're going to be humiliated. It's your choice. And that's such a powerful lesson to all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds, especially for people I think who are struggling to come out or, you know, and who are struggling with their identity. If George was alive today, what do you think that he would make of our current hyper-polarized political landscape?

19:25Well, he would be massively against the Iranian war. He would hate Trump. I think he'd be campaigning to help artists with Spotify. I think the anti-immigrant thing is really interesting because a Wham track was played by Led by Donkeys. I don't know if you saw that video. On a far right march. And his picture on those billboards. There's one of Jure Linguers. Jeremy Della, the artist, put his picture on a billboard and it said, thank God for immigrants. And it's interesting. I've had some interesting experiences with George Michael fans who are actually anti-immigrant and pro-reform. I've seen some of that.

20:05I mean, some people don't listen to lyrics, do they? No. No. It was like, okay, you're allowed to have your opinion, but don't for a second think that George Michael would have approved of you. He raised a lot of money for refugee charities. He talked about how he identified with the immigrant experience and actually with black people as well. You can hear it in his music, in the way in which he absorbed so many different genres, and black music in particular, in a very respectful way, the way black musicians wanted to work with him. he would have loved his music being adopted by the woke he wasn't left-wing in a cliched way sometimes he fought being put in a left wing he thought he didn't want to join the red wedge which was this 80s left-wing musical association for very left-wing musicians he hated arthur scargill famously so he wasn't he wasn't a joiner in he was contrary but he was clear on certain causes and absolutely he would have been against the far right he campaigned on anti-racism platforms all the time he seems like he had a really strong sense of injustice and i wonder if some of that is also because of his background he wasn't exactly from wealth and like i think once you see the sorts of people that get a platform that are different to the others like there's quite a few famous people who have not come from wealth and they seem very different in their well i've got this platform and I should really use it.

21:33I don't actually think it was the money that made him like that. Because actually, by the time he was a teenager, his family were very wealthy. His dad became a very successful immigrant, you know, ran several restaurants, had a Rolls Royce. And, but I think what made him like that was having no self-confidence in the way he looked and coming from a very authoritarian family, having a very overbearing father, struggling with his sexuality and his looks and lacking that self-confidence and being very sensitive and then becoming wildly famous very suddenly. I think he all inside he felt like that boy who the ugly duckling inside even when he was a role model and a sex sex symbol he always felt like that kid and that's what gave him compassion I think and sensitivity for people who weren't you know who were sidelined by society did you come to that kind of sense of understanding of him from writing the book or do you think you already had that i think i had that that's what drew me to him yeah i think i was an ugly duckling and you know i had a top knot i was uh raised as a religious zeke went to a very white school felt i was very very shy and then i went into a creative direction even though I didn't have that in my family and became very confident and I felt like I went on a similar journey to him but the thing that drew me to him was his sensitive lyrics you know and there were no men in my life who were in touch with their emotions I came from a very macho culture and to have a like a man who spoke and sang in such a beautiful way about his feelings that's what drew me to him much more than actually Morrissey and these and the Goths and the Cure who were depressed and wrote beautiful songs but George was in a different emotional milieu right?

23:35It's almost a complete antithesis of Andrew Tate or someone isn't it? Yeah like in a way that's like masculinity is such a there are very few male role models that you'd look to and kind of go oh I was right about them and like we're both Spurs fans and I think I was lucky that Gary Lineker was such, has consistently been kind of on the right side of history. Yeah. And I think that there aren't that many men when you start to look across society where you're like, oh, okay, that's someone who's on a path. And like, and I think it's interesting when you talk about him in the book, you can, he feels like quite an anchoring force.

24:13Like rather than as much as the music, I kind of got a sense that there's something more about him that you really connected with. Yeah, I did. I don't know I was so drawn to him and it's odd that you know at one point you know during the faith years I just saw him as the ultimate glamorous person he was like an alien I couldn't think of anyone more glamorous than George Michael and the surprising thing has been over the last two years to learn that actually we were very very similar not only from immigrant backgrounds and also his mom grandmother was Jewish but also you know his on his mother's side severe mental illness you know a history of suicide and he clearly struggled with depression and I have schizophrenia in my family and I never realised oh my god actually we have weird parallel lives and but there's quite a few artists like that Freddie Mercury I feel like that too you know he was literally Indian he's Parsi like me oh is he you're Parsi and yeah it's weird odd isn't it yeah when people so I've been on a it's often the other way around that you identify with someone and they turn out to be very different.

25:21But I feel the other way around with George. Talking about immigrant families as well. Like I know, for example, in my family, my dad wouldn't really listen to popular music, right? He would listen to, I don't know, Hindi music or Bollywood music maybe, but he wouldn't listen to your typical popular music. But he would know every single George Michael song and every single Wham song. and he would like them. And do you think that George Michael's music is something that cut through to immigrant families? Oh, yeah. I mean, there's so many Asian fans. You're both younger than me. But in the 80s, there were so many Asian George Michael's, and actually lots of Asian men in the Midlands had hair like him and put the highlights in and were swarthy.

26:08And actually Greek men and Asian men look quite similar. Absolutely. and also the way George talked about his own ethnic background was exactly the same. So, you know, he would say that how much he hated Greek music that his father played, you know, but then it influenced him anyway. And I was speaking to some of the musicians who worked with him and one of them was saying they were in a Greek restaurant once and they heard this song and it reminded them exactly of Careless Whisper. and they're like oh you can definitely hear greek influences in that song and he was probably absorbing it without realizing it the other real parallel as well as the fact that he was sent on these horrible boring language language lessons on saturdays you probably had those did you i actually avoided them but i was probably the only person in my family that managed to avoid them the other real thing i noticed is that you know the photo shoots i drew the faith look was very much like his father dressed in the 50s and also how my father and our uncles dressed.

27:16And people look back at the Wham videos and the faith and they go, how did we not realize he was gay? It's like, actually, sometimes, often Andrew was doing the styling. What you're looking at is not a repressed gay man. You're looking at a child of immigrants trying to be stylish. It just comes across as quite camp. And I look back at our family photographs and we all look a bit camp. because we've slightly overdressed. And it's that immigrant thing where there's no one around to tell you what's tasteful. So you just go for it. It's all quite flamboyant. And also who'd have had money for the first time.

27:47So who'd have been experimenting with like, and I think like culturally, I suspect there's different things you wanted to present and represent and try and set like new standards for fashion and things. And stylists and people probably like handing them stuff that when he tried it on, he probably thought it looked good. And it's like. But as Andrew, who did most of the styling especially early Wham and he's as straight as you come and the Club Tropic Honor video which now looks so gay but Andrew was the was the mind behind that you know were you tempted to go blonde for the book tour? you know what at one point I grew a big moustache because I really didn't want to have stubble and for people to think oh George Sandlam because I don't think I want to come across well in that comparison but I look so ridiculous my wife made me shave it off

28:42hi there it's emma here i'm gay crashing the podcast to quickly tell you about the drowned in sound newsletter every wednesday i invite myself into your inbox with permission of course to share opinion writing and resources tell you about cool things that you should be involved in within the world of music activism etc i also bring track of the week and a little bit of hopeful news for you because we all know that the news cycle can be grim at the best of times. Drowned in Sound newsletter every Wednesday in your inbox. Sign up now.

29:26Do you think George Michael getting outed and the way that he responded to that was a turning point for media homophobia? Or do you think it took a long time or we still have a long way to go? Both, basically. It was a turning point. I mean, literally, I think a year later, Stephen Gailey was sort of outed, but the press were quite friendly to him. I think there was a helpline set up for the fans. But no one rang. Everyone was just really happy for him. And I think he had a hit. and you know he but it was a bit of time when the media were outing people yeah and that continued a bit still yeah and Will Young in the noughties was being given shit still for sounding too gay and whatever but George Michael did puncture the purience of the tabloids and that kind that kind of outing just didn't happen hasn't really happened again and that I mean what a legacy but it's still I still think it's hard to be gay or LGBT LGBTQ in the entertainment industry today.

30:31So it's not linear, is it? It goes backwards and forwards. And in America, they've gone way back. Well, we're living in an era of overcorrection as well, I think that there's kind of Christian fundamentalists essentially, isn't it, setting a lot of the agenda. And I think Rupert Murdoch's kind of media organizations are always trying to set kind of this is what conservative America or conservative Britain wants. And I think George talked a bit about Murdoch as being quite an evil force, I think is the phrase. Yeah, I've got to be frank and say, I do work for a Murdoch organisation. But George is contradictory.

31:08So yeah, he did go on about Murdoch being evil. But equally, he signed a book contract with Murdoch, with HarperCollins. And he was contradictory like that. He sued Sony, then he signed with Sony. I think that's life. I think that's surviving life is to be contradictory. Yeah, it's nuanced. but I feel like that's not what people want now I don't know if you watched the Michael Jackson film no I haven't let's just say it's un-nuanced yeah and I feel like people want and the same thing happened with the Prince documentary I don't know if you've heard a very it got shelved because of this date where like they give you access and you can have a very un-nuanced version instead and that's kind of what the fans want and I sense that with George too you know people want the myths people want a Marvel comic character yeah People want to believe he was a saint.

31:57And he was incredibly generous. He gave tens of millions of pounds secretly. But also, he was a member of tax avoidance schemes. And he died as a very rich man. One of the quotes that I thought was interesting is he talks about avoiding tax. He didn't want it to go to the Thatcher government. Yeah. Which I could kind of, as a comms kind of line, that's a really good comms line. Yeah, I could see that. but equally he went on beyond that beyond the thatcher government yeah and he liked he liked he was a charter immigrant man he liked a mercedes and a ranger over and a and several massive houses you know i mean one of the things obviously you worked at the ft and you studied the music industry a bit and one of the stats i think from 1988 to 1992 he earned 3.5 million but sony made 52.45 million like that's that's like an extreme difference of like you can see why he was taking legal action i mean obviously he's made seven million which at the time i'm guessing was it two or three times that now what it would be worth like it's yeah but also you gotta remember the costs that sony have you know they've got not just making the record but they've got to market it they've got a hundred thousand of employees and music videos at the time would have cost like 100 grand to make and yeah and actually george had a pretty good contract he it wasn't as good as michael jackson's yeah and that's the way in which opposite things can be true he had a good point about artists being shafted but equally he was also motivated by the fact that michael jackson was getting even more yeah you know um so yeah and this is the i guess the one thing that unites all my books hopefully is that the idea that opposite things can be true at the same time but I feel like we're in a world where people don't want that yeah I couldn't agree more that's also you know a lot about what MediaStorm is about is finding nuance in a hyper polarized world we are so bad as a society and the media reflects that of holding two truths at one time yeah completely yeah and I'm already getting fans saying I hope you're going to focus on his achievements only and it's like well I'm a historian and journalist and no you know for me the fact that he was complicated makes him more appealing it gives gravity to the songs yeah if someone's only floating and they don't have the emotional resonance and I think you can hear in even how he uses his voice like he's got that range that like he is not just singing at one register like he is a complicated complex person You've got to the essence of him, I think.

34:39His voice was everything. It was the main thing about him. And, you know, people talk about how the Beatles, they had contrasting moods in their songs and their performances because of Paul's personality and John's. But George did it alone. You think about any one of his songs, then they're very rarely purely happy or purely sad. So last Christmas, very cheerful tune, cheerful sentiment. I found someone special. All the covers fail to get the complexity because what George actually is saying through the way he sings it is the opposite. That he's heartbroken about the person he's lost. That's why it's such a great song.

35:19And that's why Taylor Swift can't cover it properly because he doesn't understand that. It's why it has that feeling of Christmas. It's the empty chair. That's what we all feel. And the nostalgia for the person that we thought we were going to become, the childhood that we had or didn't have. All of those things are all mixed in. And it's a really complex emotion he's describing, right? Or conveying. And it's the same as a song like Fast Love, just straightforward dance floor 90s banger, right? Except there's a whole verse where he's talking about grief, you know, how he's lost his lover. And almost none of his songs, even Jesus to a Child, very, very sad song, but moments of real celebration and happiness being conveyed in it.