7 December 1985
Stubble! This is the start of George Michael’s Beard Years, an altogether more serious and adult proposition. To that end, the video for ‘I’m Your Man’ was shot at a rock venue (the Marquee Club in London, now gone) in black-and-white, and with a film countdown that at one point slips in ‘SEX’ for ‘SIX’.
This is still another of those flyweight Wham! tracks about randiness, though. Being later Wham!, ‘I’m Your Man’ is superannuated with macho sexual bullying: “Wanna take you, wanna make you / But they tell me it’s a crime” and “where we’re going baby, ain’t no such word as no” are pretty despicable lyrics, no matter how bouncily they’re delivered. Serious, stubbly George would—with a noble exception in the stark, pained ‘A Different Corner’ in 1986—continue peddling this aggressive misogyny into his early solo years. Knowing he could write far better songs than this, and that he was a kind and sensitive soul in real life, only makes ‘I’m Your Man’ all the more irritating, like beard rash.
