Wham! - The Final (1986) [EAC-FLAC] [RePoPo]

*******************************************************************************
Wham! - The Final (1986) [EAC-FLAC] [RePoPo]
*******************************************************************************

01. Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do) 06:41
02. Young Guns (Go For It) 05:11
03. Bad Boys 03:19
04. Club Tropicana 04:28
05. Wake Me Up Before You Go Go 03:50
06. Careless Whisper 05:03
07. Freedom 05:20
08. Last Christmas (Pudding Mix) 06:45
09. Everything She Wants 06:29
10. I'm Your Man 04:03
11. A Different Corner 03:58
12. Battlestations 05:30
13. Where Did Your Heart Go? 05:42
14. The Edge Of Heaven 04:34

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Album review by Iain Moffat (http://thequietus.com/articles/00486-wham)

You know what not enough greatest hits albums start with? Politicised UK hip-hop
tracks from 1982, that's what. Yet here we find 'Wham! Rap (Enjoy What You Do)'
telling the three million unemployed not to give up on the life they want while
the backing singers butchly chirp "D.H.S.S.!". Has there been a band - pop or
otherwise - since that have gone for such an enticingly bizarre opening gambit?
Alright, probably, but not exactly on an everyday basis, which is part of what
makes The Final something of a prince among its peers. To new listeners, it's
bound to be full of genuinely unaccountable surprises. For those who were fans
at the time, it's a marvellous vindication. And for those for whom Wham! were
the enemy in the 1980s, it shows them unexpectedly ripe for reassessment...

Not that they actually were seen as the enemy in the early days. In fact, the
NME wouldn't be this excited about pop rap again until the resistance-
anihilating emergence of Betty Boo almost a decade later, and the attraction is
pretty clear even now. Subsequent singles would move the band further into the
white-boy soul territory that the likes of 'No Parlez' and the early Style
Council singles would occupy to tremendous commercial and critical effect, and
their penchant for teenage kicks coupled with a sharp observational edge
(consider, for instance, 'Young Guns (Go For It)''s reference to "sleepless
nights on an HP bed") rang far truer than the fantastical farces then peddled by
the rest of the New Pop brigade. Plus, they had a keen ear for the iconic moment
(the dropped-out instrumentation at the "caution pays" point of 'Young Guns'
still delights, while Dee C Lee's cartoon purr on 'Bad Boys' is a hoot, and that
single's "wooh!wooh!"s were clearly custom-built for their ubiquity), and, while
'Club Tropicana' was roundly criticised as being too Thatcherite, hindsight
renders it an interesting snapshot of a culture in flux. 'Y Viva Espana', eleven
years earlier regarded holidays as impossilby exotic, while 'Girls And Boys',
eleven years later, would paint them as blase bacchanalia, whereas, for Wham!,
there was fun to be had in the world becoming available to all.

And didn't the world just welcome them for it? Neil Tennant's often spoken of
the Pet Shop Boys having an imperial phase in '87/'88, but, really, it had
nothing on the one illustrated here, since, frankly, few do. 'Wake Me Up Before
You Go Go', 'Careless Whisper', 'Freedom', 'Last Christmas' (included here in
its "Pudding Mix", which is essentially the familiar version with an
inexplicable hula intro) and 'Everything She Wants' all reached number two or
above in under eight months, and all remain key elements of the pop canon. It's
interesting, hearing them back-to-back, to note that all five are driven by real
or imagined infidelity (fascinatingly, in later years George Michael's 'Spinning
The Wheel' would be effectively the horrific moment at which his 'Wake Me Up...'
self actually wakes), which makes it all the more intriguing that they were so
utterly embraced, and also that there's some startlingly audacious songwriting
going on at this stage. 'Last Christmas' in particular demands a staggering
amount of conviction to sidestep the risk of cheese overload, yet George manages
to perform lines like "'Happy Christmas' / I wrapped it up and sent it / With a
note saying I loved you / I meant it" (awful written down, obviously)
unbeatably. And anyone that can tackle the Doris Day and guilty feet lyrics that
well as well has to be applauded for sheer chutzpah even if the tunes themselves
were lacking, which their enduring populist winningness would indicate is very
far indeed from the case.

Of course, like everyone else involved in Band Aid (with the notable exception
of U2), their momentum would dissolve immediately thereafter, and reinventing
themselves in 1985 as the All-New, All-Different SexWham! really didn't help.
After all, 'I'm Your Man' might still work on some terms, and can thankfully
blot out all memory of the Alfie Moon version when listened to now, but the
truth is that, for reasons that are rather clearer now, George couldn't really
do sex all that well at that point (in retrospect, this makes 'Fastlove and
'Outside' even greater achievements), but by then their work was pretty much
done anyway. He sounds far more at home in balladeering mode on 'A Different
Corner', which cemented his Terribly Serious reputation in spite of the fact
that the shuttlecocks-in-shorts era really wasn't that distant a memory by then,
and 'The Final Single', all of which appears here bar the re-done 'Wham! Rap',
is a decent enough coda to the pair's career: 'The Edge Of Heaven' is, by their
own standards, marginally by-numbers, although 'Battlestations', with its
remarkable breathiness and oddly Soft Cell-reaclling synthesised brass, is this
album's real curio, and the cover of Was (Not Was)'s 'Where Did Your Heart Go'
proves to be a soaring fusion of their soulful roots and the grown-up pop
instincts that George was keen to hone.

And then there was no more, and, in fairness, there really doesn't need to be.
Afterwards, Andrew Ridgeley tried an ill-advised solo album before realising he
could retire cheerfully to the south coast and live as Mr One Of Bananarama,
while George, occasional troubles notwithstanding, put the whole of music
royalty in his rolodex, met the man of his dreams, and carried on selling
kajillions of records, which must count as happy endings all round. Even after
22 years, the Wham! story remains an incredibly useful one for new bands, given
that they managed to never outstay their welcome, never squander an ounce of
goodwill, and never descend into acrimony, and, as an accompanying textbook to
just what pop can do in the right hands, The Final still feels like a sizeable
success today.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Exact Audio Copy V0.99 prebeta 4 from 23. January 2008

EAC extraction logfile from 14. April 2009, 9:05

Wham! / The Final

Used drive : HL-DT-STDVD-RAM GSA-H55N Adapter: 3 ID: 1

Read mode : Secure
Utilize accurate stream : Yes
Defeat audio cache : No
Make use of C2 pointers : No

Read offset correction : 102
Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out : No
Fill up missing offset samples with silence : Yes
Delete leading and trailing silent blocks : No
Null samples used in CRC calculations : No
Used interface : Native Win32 interface for Win NT
& 2000
Gap handling : Not detected, thus appended to
previous track

Used output format : User Defined Encoder
Selected bitrate : 1024 kBit/s
Quality : High
Add ID3 tag : Yes
Command line compressor : F:Archivos de programaExact Audio
CopyFLACFLAC.EXE
Additional command line options : -6 -V -T "ARTIST=%a" -T "TITLE=%t" -T
"ALBUM=%g" -T "DATE=%y" -T "TRACKNUMBER=%n" -T "GENRE=%m" -T "COMMENT=%e" %s -o
%d


TOC of the extracted CD

Track | Start | Length | Start sector | End sector
---------------------------------------------------------
1 | 0:00.00 | 6:41.72 | 0 | 30146
2 | 6:41.72 | 5:11.50 | 30147 | 53521
3 | 11:53.47 | 3:19.55 | 53522 | 68501
4 | 15:13.27 | 4:28.33 | 68502 | 88634
5 | 19:41.60 | 3:50.50 | 88635 | 105934
6 | 23:32.35 | 5:03.17 | 105935 | 128676
7 | 28:35.52 | 5:20.10 | 128677 | 152686
8 | 33:55.62 | 6:45.63 | 152687 | 183124
9 | 40:41.50 | 6:29.55 | 183125 | 212354
10 | 47:11.30 | 4:03.55 | 212355 | 230634
11 | 51:15.10 | 3:58.20 | 230635 | 248504
12 | 55:13.30 | 5:30.35 | 248505 | 273289
13 | 60:43.65 | 5:42.50 | 273290 | 298989
14 | 66:26.40 | 4:34.65 | 298990 | 319604

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------