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Pop Rock Nation

Author: Pop Rock Nation

  • Infatueighties: The Spawn of Wham: Pepsi and Shirlie and Deon Estus

    George Michael is known as many things nowadays. World-class singer and songwriter. King of Stubble (and he’s worked that look for two decades plus now), Public Restroom Inhabitant. But did you know that when George first stepped on the scene with his Wham! partner Andrew Ridgeley, he was…

    …a rapper?

    I’m sure if anyone were to show this 1983 performance to George these days, he would look for the nearest hole to crawl under. However, I (one of maybe 10 people in the U.S. who knew who Wham! was before “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go”) find this performance to be quite energetic and charming. I still can’t figure out what the hell Andrew Ridgeley did, though.

    Anyway, the song, “Young Guns (Go For It)” appeared on Wham!’s debut album “Fantastic” (actually, for their first album, they were named Wham! U.K. here in The States). A year later, they were global superstars, and a year or so after that, George Michael had officially gone solo. But what of the two fetching young ladies who danced with George & Andrew in that television performance (and whom you might also remember from the “Go-Go” video)? Well…

    Their names were Pepsi and Shirlie, and they had a minor U.S. hit in the fall of ’87 with “Heartache”, a pulsing bit of mid-tempo pop that was helmed (as was just about everything else in the late 80s in Britain) by the Stock/Aitken/Waterman team. The production team kept busy with artists like Kylie Minogue, Donna Summer, Rick Astley and Bananarama…one member of whom went on to marry…you guessed it, Andrew Ridgeley. See how everything folds into itself? You gotta love it. Anyway, “Heartache” wasn’t a huge single, but I remember it getting enough airplay in New York that I still remember the chorus after not hearing the song for two decades, and it’s a much better song than you’d expect a duo of background singers to come up with.

    Around the same time “Heartache” came out, George Michael went nuclear with the “Faith” album and it’s attendant singles. No matter what radio station you turned on, whether it was the Lite station, the Top 40 station or the R&B station, George was impossible to avoid, and with good reason. “Faith” still stands as one of the 80s’ most irresistible pop albums.

    By the spring of ’89, George could sneeze on a record and it would become a hit. This is probably the reason Deon Estus’s “Heaven Help Me” cruised into the pop & R&B Top 5 around that time. Estus (who looked like a cross between Soul II Soul’s Jazzie B, a member of Milli Vanilli and the black dude from Color Me Badd) had previously been best-known (if at all) as George & Wham!’s bassist, with some prominent facetime in the “I’m Your Man” and “Monkey” videos.

    “Heaven Help Me” doesn’t have a particularly ingenious bassline, but what it does have is George Michael. LOTS of George Michael. George wrote and produced the song, sang background vocals and handles the chorus damn near on his own. In addition, Deon’s voice is enough of a dead ringer for George’s that you’d be forgiven if you’ve thought for all these years that this is a George Michael record. Estus’ album, called “Spell”, was otherwise George-free and that’s probably the reason it bombed. However, this song is damn good-as good as most of the material on “Faith”. And the video is one of those “so bad it’s good” deals.

    While Andrew sits at home and counts checks (and I won’t scare you by putting the video for “Shake” on here), Shirlie from Pepsi & Shirlie is now married to one of Spandau Ballet’s Kemp brothers (man, are all British 80s pop stars married to each other?), Pepsi has settled into civilian , and Deon Estus continues to tour as a support bassist. George Michael seems perfectly content to rake in money re-releasing greatest hits compilations and getting arrested every so often, but at least he’s contributed to some of the Eighties’ most indelible musical moments.

  • Her Name Might Be Nicole, But She’s A Pussycat Doll

    One of the “it” girls in music over the last few years has been former Eden’s Crush member and current Pussycat Dolls lead singer Nicole Scherzinger. She was featured everywhere from magazine covers to award shows and seemed to be the next breakout star. After helping Diddy get his groove back with his biggest solo hit in years Come To Me, it seemed like a done deal. With an exotic look, a decent enough voice to make it in music today, and with Pussycat Dolls’ hits in her back pocket, it seemed that the world was ready for Nicole.

    But something happened on the way to super stardom. The album, titled Her Name Is Nicole, was finished and singles had been released including Whatever U Like and Baby Love. But both failed to spark the necessary fire that Interscope and Scherzinger wanted and the album was delayed.

    On Nicole’s website, she posted in her blog on February 12, 2008 that she’s grateful the album was pushed back.


    I know you have all been waiting patiently for the release of “Her Name Is Nicole” and I want you to know that I am actually grateful the album has been pushed back. Yes, I REALLY mean that. You see, I want to make sure this album is the best I can make it because I owe that to myself, and to all of you, to release the best music I possibly can. I hope you all continue with me on this journey because it will be worth the wait.

    In a sense, it reminded me of Claudette Ortiz who was the lead singer of a group called City High that had a hit song in 2001 called What Would You Do. Much like Scherzinger, Ortiz had breakout star written all over her. Wycle Jean featured her on his single Two Wrongs. She also joined him on a track called Dance Like This, which became more famous because Wyclef and Shakira redid it and called it Hips Don’t Lie. I’m not sure what Ortiz is doing musically today.

    As for Scherzinger, she’s back with her Pussycat Dolls sisters with an album scheduled for later in the summer. The first single is When I Grow Up, which you can listen to below.

    Will Her Name Is Nicole ever drop? If it does, expect it to be largely different than what she already recorded if history is any indication. Usually these days, artists push back albums because their tracks get leaked and aren’t received well (this happened to Usher’s album that eventually became Confessions). In Scherzinger’s case, actual singles were released and the album was delayed. Instead of waiting for the delayed solo album to drop, she’s moving on as evidenced by the new Pussycat Dolls record. The question is, if PCD doesn’t duplicate their previous success, will people still want to hear Nicole as a solo?

  • Winter Doesn’t Quite Move On: Morten Harket Feels My Pain


    Here in Wisconsin, we have a sort of love/hate thing about winter. Back in college, I remember walking to work in bitter cold, with icicles forming in my facial hair and the inner workings of my Walkman freezing to a crawl so that my mix tape sounded like a 45 played at 33. Those mornings are too sad to contemplate further, but as miserable as I was, it also gave me an opportunity to feel all stoic and rugged and butch. For us Midwesterners, the quiet endurance of an extreme winter season is both a burden and a source of pride. Suffice to say that even as May heads into June, there have been frost advisories in America’s Dairyland. Wednesday night, I mowed my lawn in a winter coat. So when they start opening the garden centers at the Home Depots and Shopkos and Wal-Marts, we flock to them like mosquitoes to bug zappers, ravenous for the color green – ravenous for color at all.

    Of course, it could be worse. We could be in Norway. (Actually, many of us are Norwegian.) And the Norwegian trio a-ha captured the poetically fleeting nature of a northern summer gloriously in the video for their 2000 reunion single “Summer Moved On” (which they debuted at the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize Concert). The band will always be best known for their 1985 hit “Take On Me” (and its video), but, even though it wasn’t a hit on these shores, “Summer Moved On” successfully re-established the band as an international pop force, and may, in fact, prove to be just as enduring and classic as their first hit. Both lyrically and musically the opposite of their signature hit, “Summer Moved On” is a languorous contemplation of a relationship’s final days which culminates with cascading strings and Morten Harket’s dramatic falsetto plea to “Stay… don’t just walk away” – how does that man hold his notes? – the song is accompanied by a video depicting a rocky ocean beach strewn with light-starved people waiting for the dawn of what proves to be an excruciatingly brief day.

    Since their reunion, and in between the members’ various side projects – primary songwriter Pal Waaktaar and his wife Lauren Savoy record together under the name Savoy and in 2004 Magne “Mags” Furuholmen recorded a solo album with members of Coldplay – a-ha have released four very good albums (available in the U.S. only as imports) including the double-live set How Can I Sleep With Your Voice In My Head, with a new as-yet-untitled record scheduled to come out this fall. In the meantime, Morten Harket has revived his solo career with a brand new studio album called Letter From Egypt, his first full-length, English-language studio album since 1995’s lovely Wild Seed. The album’s advance single is a typically sweeping ballad called “Movies” (a cover of fellow Norskies the Locomotives’ “My Woman”) which was a top 10 hit in Norway earlier this year. Check out Morten (as hunky as ever) performing the song at last year’s Nobel Peace Prize Concert to an audience which included Al Gore. The album’s second single, the slightly more upbeat and far less engrossing “Darkside” was released in Europe in May.

    http://www.myspace.com/harketmorten

    -P. Lorentz