He was also one of the four singers on “ That’s What Friends Are For,” Dionne Warwick’s all-star AIDS-fundraiser single that topped the Hot 100 early in 1986. He also headlined arenas around the world and played for 400,000 people in Central Park in 1980. He married and divorced a woman, the sound engineer Renate Blauel. Over the course of the ’80s, John struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction and eating disorders. After a few years in the pop-chart wilderness, John got back to cranking out big songs, becoming an inescapable MTV presence and adjusting to a more synth-heavy era. It’s a 7.) Elton John hadn’t even fully come out of the closet, but that one interview came perilously close to ending his career.īut Elton John didn’t go away, and he didn’t stop making hits. (John’s Thom Bell-produced Philly soul pastiche “ Mama Can’t Buy You Love” peaked at #9 in 1979. After that Rolling Stone interview, John didn’t even get back into the top 10 for a few more years. Earlier in 1976, John’s Kiki Dee duet “ Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” had spent a month at #1. Walter Cronkite reported on Elton John’s sexuality, and John’s career didn’t fully recover for years. In 1976, when a pop star came out publicly, it was a big deal. It’s not a bad thing to be.” He was right, of course, but the world wasn’t ready to hear that. I think everybody’s bisexual to a certain degree. Then, in 1976, Elton John told Rolling Stone that he was bisexual: “There’s nothing wrong with going to bed with somebody of your own sex. Between 19, six of Elton John’s songs made it to #1, and that’s not even counting the times when he helped take friends like John Lennon and Neil Sedaka to the top. Two of his albums debuted at #1 on the Billboard albums chart, back in the pre-SoundScan era when that never happened. In the mid-’70s, John was arguably the single biggest pop star in the world. When George Michael was just a child, Elton John brought his own imperial phase to an end, though that ending presumably wasn’t intentional. Unexpectedly, that exercise also led to George Michael scoring his final #1 hit and, in the process, bringing one of his idols back to pop-chart prominence. There is some kind of release for me in the middle of a performance to actually stop singing me and just say, ‘Right, this is an instrument, and this is using it to the best of my ability.'” For someone who’d been writing and producing his own songs for as long as he’d been famous, this represented a kind of escape. At the time, Michael said, “One of the main attractions of a song written by someone else is that there’s nothing personal about it. He took on songs from artists like Stevie Wonder and David Bowie and the Doobie Brothers, and he also covered contemporaries like Seal and Soul II Soul.įor George Michael, a tour like that was a way to challenge himself and to reconnect with what he loved about music. Instead, this tour would be George Michael’s chance to sing a bunch of older songs that he loved. Michael insisted that this tour was not in support of Listen Without Prejudice, even if he did sing some of his own hits at those shows. In January of 1991, when Listen Without Prejudice was still fresh, Michael embarked on the first leg of his global Cover To Cover tour. So when you’ve successfully ended your own run of pop glory, then what? At a strange career crossroads, George Michael figured that maybe he should go out on the road and sing some other people’s songs. George Michael moved away from the music industry, and the music industry moved away from him. Soon afterwards, Michael got into a court battle with his label, and the planned second volume of Listen Without Prejudice never came out. (It’s a 10.) The album sold two million copies - about a fifth of what Faith had moved. “ Praying For Time,” the album’s absolute masterpiece of a first single, managed to eke its way to #1, but “ Freedom ’90,” another masterpiece, stalled out at #8. After that album, he never returned to the center of the pop conversation, at least in the United States. 1 was the end of George Michael’s imperial run. For that album, Michael refused to tour, to film music videos, or to allow his record label to put his pretty face on the album cover. George Michael essentially ended his own imperial period, following up the insane monster smash Faith with 1990’s conscious step back Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. When that happens, artists generally get more and more desperate, using every gimmick at their disposal to keep themselves in the public eye. It doesn’t matter how huge an artist is at some point, the hits inevitably dry up. Usually, imperial-level pop stars have to be dragged out of the spotlight kicking and screaming. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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