‘Freeek!’ — George Michael’s Huge 2002 Comeback Gamble
It’s 2002, and global pop star George Michael is preparing for a comeback.
Patience, his fifth solo album, is nearly complete.
George’s last original album, Older, was released six years earlier and was packed with hits, including Fastlove and Jesus To A Child. A jazzy covers album that followed in 1999 (Songs From the Last Century) was widely regarded as a mere stopgap.
By spring 2002, George had written the lead single for Patience, entitled “Freeek!” Its big-budget music video is backed by campaign ads hailing the return of the “artist of the century.”
What could possibly go wrong?
With a gloriously filthy baseline, the digital funk epic Freeek! was written by George Michael and a mysterious team of songwriters known as the Moogymen: James Jackman, Niall Flynn, and Ruadhri Cushnan.
A year earlier, electro pioneers Daft Punk had offered George the chance to work with them on their Human After All album. That collaboration never materialised but George retained a keen interest in electronica, as heard on Freeek!
Enhanced by samples from Aaliyah (Try Again), Q-Tip (Breathe and Stop) and Kool & the Gang (NT), Freeek! nails the sleazy electro that sounded ready to burst out from the electroclash scene in the early 2000s.
Freeeks assemble
Acclaimed comic book artist Stephen Platt (Moon Knight, Prophet, Soul Saga) was hired to create an eye-popping cyberpunk look for Freeek!
His hypersexual costume designs appeared in its music video and became the single’s cover art.
The Freeek! music video was directed by Joseph Kahn, who was in high demand. By 2002 Kahn had made videos for Enrique Iglesias (Hero), the Backstreet Boys (Larger Than Life, casting them as cyborgs) and Britney Spears (Stronger). Kahn would go on to direct Britney again in Toxic, arguably the heaviest of his heavy-rotation epics.
Made for a reported £1m, the Freeek! music video casts George as the twisted ringmaster of a near-future mega-city. Every inch of the pulsating city is either selling sex or encouraging its near-naked citizens to grind up on it.
In this fetish fever dream, George is pumped up and padded in rubber and leather, he’s a bespectacled businessman, a cyborg, a cowboy car dealer, a dentist, football player and VR beefcake.
The video is studded with spikes, claws, and body modification, including one scene where George transforms four dogs into four women, still held tight in his grip, with a whip of his leash.
“I did two things in the 80’s: watch MTV, and watch Blade Runner. So this video is a combination of both, but with lots of dildos.”
Joseph Kahn on Vimeo
Freeek’s final shot depicts a baby in the womb surrounded by bots.
Strong silent type
George initially refused to take part in any interviews to promote Freeek!
He wanted the song to speak for itself, backed up by its ambitious video. This approach had worked well for his past releases Jesus To A Child and Fastlove, both of which entered the UK chart at number one.
It also suited the low public profile that George preferred. This had been evident since 1990, when he refused to appear in music videos for any of the singles on his album Listen Without Prejudice Vol 1. It didn’t prevent Praying For Time or Freedom! 90 from becoming sizeable UK hits — although this approach did kickstart a long-running dispute with his music label Sony.
When Listen Without Prejudice sold fewer copies than hoped in the US, George claimed this was because Sony had not promoted the album sufficiently. He argued in court that his recording contract with Sony constituted an unreasonable restraint of trade, but George lost the case in 1994.
Perhaps burned by that experience, in 2002, George signed an unusual single-only contract with the music label Universal/Polydor. If Freeek! did well, George would enable Universal to release his album Patience in November that year. If not, he would be free to sign to a different label.
It was a ballsy move for George, but clearly he and Universal were confident Freeek! would be a big comeback hit.
Ahead of its UK single release on 18 March 2002, Channel 4 screened the world premiere of the Freeek! music video on 27 February. It was given an 11.15pm slot, directly after one of the highest rating TV shows at that time: Sex and the City.
Backlash
Unsurprisingly, the overheated Freeek! video sparked a number of complaints from viewers.
The BBC’s Top of the Pops screened just two minutes of the video in its early evening slot, but it still led to 68 complaints being made to the Broadcasting Standards Commission. It upheld those complaints, saying the video’s “scenes of bondage, erotic images, and suggestive movements” should never have been broadcast before the 9 pm watershed.
Pop stars will no doubt weigh the benefits of feedback like this when they commission attention-grabbing videos that test the boundaries of public taste. Hey, a little notoriety never hurt Madonna.
But complaints about the lyrical content of Freeek! led George to break his silence and rise to its defence.
Warning not celebration
Since releasing I Want Your Sex in 1987, George was recognised as a defiantly sex-positive artist. So on the surface, Freeek! appears to be a celebration of online sex, in the same way that Fastlove celebrates NSA (no strings attached) sex and Outside celebrates sex outdoors with whoever you want.
That’s how the Irish Independent saw Freeek! when they praised it as a “superego lust-fest untethered,” and it’s how many listeners still view the song today.
But George intended Freeek! to be a warning rather than a celebration.
In a last-minute interview on its release day, George explained to Radio 1’s Jo Whiley that he wrote Freeek! after being disturbed by how much explicit material was now accessible by young people on TV and online.
“In the last 5 or 10 years since the de-regulation of TV, we’ve had this huge throwing off of inhibition. Which I think is good for adults. But what we’re totally ignoring is the average child has a TV in their bedroom from the age of 10 or 11,” he said.
“To be shown areas of fetishism and extremes of sex when you are young naturally means as you get older your ideas of extreme are going to be more extreme.”
George Michael
George intended Freeek! to warn that early exposure to porn could be deeply problematic. To convey that, he took the unusual (for him) step of writing its lyrics from a different perspective.
“Just replace the voice of George Michael with the voice of the internet and commerce,” he said.
“I wanted it to represent the victory of commerce and certain types of commerce around sex over all of us. In other words, there’s so much money involved, I wanted Freeek! to sound like this kind of steamroller of sex that you couldn’t get out of its way.”
Sadly Freeek! was wide open to misinterpretation, especially when paired with a sexually unrestrained video that had been screened before the watershed.
“I’m being accused of the degradation of women,” George told Radio 1, adding that some listeners had also taken exception to the song’s closing lyrics:
“Come on kids, don’t be scared,
It’s a tits and ass world,
You gotta be prepared.”
George said: “I’m being attacked for doing something that’s not aimed at kids, when everything that is aimed at kids is directly subversive.”
He added: “Believe me, I do not think kids should be rushing towards the internet.”
Pop Idol
Freeek! faced an even bigger challenge than censorship: a 17-year-old from Bradford called Gareth Gates.
Gareth was the runner-up in the first series of the ITV talent show Pop Idol. The series was a ratings smash, and although Will Young was crowned the winner, Gareth still earned an impressive 4.1 million public votes.
His debut single — a cover of Unchained Melody — was due to be released on the same day as Freeek!
Tabloids billed it as “one of the most exciting chart battles for years.” Pop Idol judge Simon Cowell stoked an imagined rivalry between pop newcomer Gareth and established pop icon George, who declined to change Freeek’s release date.
“It didn’t occur to me that there would be this massive record at the end of it and that I should get out the way.”
George Michael
Before the chart placings were announced, George conceded that Gareth would win and sent him a congratulatory bottle of champagne.
Freeeked out
After its big-budget video, chart battle, and lyrical controversy, Freeek! entered the UK singles chart at a disappointing number 7.
Gareth Gates went straight into the top slot, with fellow Pop Idol Will Young at number 2.
George tried to warn us about the “steamroller of sex” heading our way — but for the next few years, the UK charts would be well and truly flattened by TV talent show wannabes.
Freeek! dropped out of the top 10 the following week and soon exited the top 40. They just couldn’t keep it up.
The single was never released in the US, where George’s music had struggled to get a fair hearing following his arrest for cruising in 1998.
Nevertheless Freeek! became a significant hit across mainland Europe and Australia.
Aftermath
Undefeated, George followed Freeek! with a single that would prove even more controversial: Shoot The Dog.
But that’s a story for another time.
George’s fans needed a little more, ahem, Patience before his album was finally released in March 2004 — by Sony Music.
Despite its troubled upbringing, Freeek! made it onto the album as the remastered Freeek! ‘04. The song remains a firm fan favourite, ripe for rediscovery.
A few months after the single’s release, George reflected on Capital FM: “There’s no point bringing an issue into the mainstream and then doing it with a left-of- field record like Freeek!”
In 2006 he added: “Freeek! was my way of saying: this is the world we’re moving towards, where everything about sexuality is extreme and consumerised.”
“I love it as a record but it stands out so much as not my normal intent. It made me understand how much people invest in who they think you are.”
George Michael
