1996 kicks off in the most understated way imaginable – with a slow, slinky, seven-minute bossa nova from George Michael.

Jesus to a Child, by George Michael (his 6^th of seven solo #1s)

1 week, from 14^th – 21^st January 1996

I listen to it, properly, for the first time ever I think, and try to pinpoint the musical reason for this making number one. It’s not catchy – there’s no identifiable chorus – it meanders, weaves its smooth spell, then eventually departs. My thoughts are cast back a decade, to Michael’s similarly understated ‘A Different Corner’. He has a knack for taking unlikely songs to the top. But ‘Jesus to a Child’ makes ‘A Different Corner’ sound like the most instant, bubble-gum pop.

The reasons for it making #1 may have been largely to do with the power of the name. It was his first release for three years, since the ‘Five Live E.P.’, or for four if we only count original material. It was the lead single from ‘Older’ – his first studio album in nearly six years – though he had been performing the song live for over a year. You have to admire the sheer disregard for commercial success he showed in picking this as the first single.

The reasons for George Michael wanting to release this are now well-known, and very sad. ‘Jesus to a Child’ was written as a tribute to his late boyfriend, Anselmo Feleppa, who had died in 1993 after an AIDS-related brain haemorrhage. Michael had been unable to write anything for eighteen months after Feleppa’s death, until he wrote this elegy in under an hour. He set it to a bossa nova beat as a tribute to his lover’s Brazilian heritage.

The lyrics are beautiful: Sadness, In my eyes, No one guessed, Or no one tried, You smiled at me, Like Jesus to a child… and it sounds churlish to call this song ‘boring’. I imagine writing it was powerfully cathartic, and so perhaps we should view it as a poem, or a reading at a funeral. One that just happened to become a chart-topping hit, thanks to the enormous star power of its singer.

What is worth noting that is that even though the song is so clearly about a lost lover – The lover I still miss, Is Jesus to a child… – Michael couldn’t mention anything explicitly. There was rumour, and innuendo, like Freddie Mercury before him; but it would be another two years before he would come out (or be brutally outed, let’s be honest). 1996 is within my living memory, but the idea that a pop star nowadays wouldn’t reveal that a song was about their gay lover seems thankfully unlikely.

In my previous posts on George Michael, I’ve admitted that I don’t quite get the adoration for his music. A lot of it is good; but a lot of it is a bit too glossy, a bit too smooth, for me. Like this, even though many sources class it among his very best work. If this had been his last UK #1, I’d had to have written it of as a bit of a flat ending. Luckily, he has one more chart topper to come very soon, his 7^th, and it’s probably my favourite of the lot. What’s not in doubt about George is that he seems to have been an incredibly warm and generous person – it was revealed after his death that all the royalties from this single had been donated to the charity ChildLine, a fact kept secret at his insistence.