30 April 1988
Was the teacher in the lyrics an actual teacher or just someone metaphorically teaching George Michael a lesson? For Pink Floyd and Sting it would have been the former, but we can assume that George means the latter. Either way, at the time my school-hating small child brain found all this teacher talk a bit uncomfortable, and today my slightly bigger adult brain finds the chorus of “because it ain’t no joy / for an uptown boy / whose teacher has told him goodbye” pretty naff.
It clears the fairly low bar of being better than ‘I Want Your Sex’ and the final couple of Wham! singles, but that’s as far as I can go in praise of the bland coffee-table soul of ‘One More Try’. The video (below) was directed by Tony Scott, so at least that’s something interesting.
