Demons and Angels

Lyrics : Douglas Hunter

Music : Peter Nuttall

Date Written : 3rd November 1995

Album : Intermezzo (Released November 1995)

When Andrew Ridgeley released his solo album, five years after Wham! split up, the music press panned it. They said he'd tried to write a Rock and Roll album but all the songs still sounded like manufactured pop. That's the problem with the music industry - in fact, the problem since the charts began. It showed the best selling songs - and therefore, the most commercial. Commercial songs aren't always good songs - they're just catchy or memorable or have some kind of repeated mantra as a chorus. Writing a good song doesn't guarantee chart success. George Michael, who was a kind of God to me when I was 10 years old, was maturing into somewhat of a brilliant song writer. He managed Careless Whisper on a bus, he managed Last Christmas upstairs at Andrew's house on a 4 track portastudio after being inspired watching a football match. There was something formulaic about Wham!'s music but it in no way to me ever sounded manufactured the way Stock, Aitken and Waterman's music did. Their songs, around the end of the 80s, all has the same drum machine, same tempo and rhythms - most had the same lyrical themes. Any one of the puppets they used could have been interchanged between Kylie, Sonia, Jason, Big Fun and even the Reynolds Girls. I'm not saying that some of that music wasn't entertaining (Hand on your Heart is one of the all time classics) but it's manufactured - in a factory - probably why they called their studio 'The Hit Factory'.

This opens a debate about popular music - specifically music written to sell units versus music which has actual soul and spirit attached, which usually isn't so catchy. 'Everything she Wants' is a brilliant song - catchy and soulful. Some of the melodies on the final Wham! album seem to have come from somewhere ethereal. You don't sit and write those, they just come out. This was the genius of Wham!

And so, we get to Demons and Angels. I never wanted Urban Fox to sound generic. It was difficult to sound like anything other than the PSS-790 as that was what we had used on the first 6 albums and the next 6. But this song felt different. I had a synth which played sound effects and I'd started layering with the four-track mixing desk I'd bought. It was one of the first songs on which we'd started experimenting with sound. In the song itself though, there was a melody - an actual hummable melody. Usually, when I wrote songs back then, they'd be recorded and forgotten about. This stayed with me though and got another recording on the next album when I realised there was another vocal line hiding above the main one. This was done with overdubbing and was called the 'Harmonic Version'.

It's probably the track that I was most proud of in 1995 being as it was, one of about 90 songs written and recorded that year (our most prolific). It's probably been re-recorded as many times too but in the Re-imagined album (Volume 2) we've finally got it sounding like it's supposed to sound!