1987 · Behind the Songs
The loudest, angriest track on the biggest album of 1987 — and the one nobody talks about.
Faith was the sound of George Michael taking total control. Released on 30 October 1987 in the United States and 2 November 1987 in Britain, it was his first solo studio album, and he wrote and produced every note of it himself. The results were historic: twelve weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, fifty-one weeks in the top ten, more than twenty-five million copies sold worldwide, a Diamond certification from the RIAA in 1996, and the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1989. It even became the first album by a white solo artist to top Billboard’s Top Black Albums chart, and it spun off four American No. 1 singles — “Faith,” “Father Figure,” “One More Try,” and “Monkey.” Amid all that polish, “Hand to Mouth” stands apart. At four minutes and thirty-six seconds, it is the album’s rock-leaning track with a social conscience, the moment the pop perfectionist let his anger show.
The album was built slowly, between August 1986 and September 1987, at Puk Studios in Gjerlev, Denmark and Sarm West in London. Michael constructed the tracks from drum-machine foundations, then layered synthesizers, guitars, and his own stacked vocals over the top. On “Hand to Mouth” the credits tell the story of a one-man studio band: Michael sings, programs the LinnDrum, and plays keyboards, with guitarist Hugh Burns — who also colors “Faith,” “Father Figure,” and “Kissing a Fool” — supplying the track’s electric bite, and percussionist Andy Duncan adding texture. Engineer Chris Porter, who had worked with Michael since the Wham! days, kept the sound huge but disciplined. Where the title track famously rides a Bo Diddley-inspired LinnDrum pattern, “Hand to Mouth” drives on a straighter, harder groove, closer to rock than to R&B.
The title is an old idiom for living in poverty — earning just enough to eat — and the song turns that phrase into a four-and-a-half-minute indictment. Where most of Faith concerns desire, devotion, and heartbreak, “Hand to Mouth” looks outward, at people ground down by neglect and at a system that barely notices. It belongs to a small family of protest-leaning tracks on the record: “Hard Day” pushes a funk-inspired toughness, and “Look at Your Hands,” co-written with David Austin, takes a folkier approach to a different kind of plea. But “Hand to Mouth” is the bluntest of them, the one that trades seduction for confrontation.
That bluntness makes sense in the album’s sequence. Faith opens its campaign with swagger — “I Want Your Sex,” the controversial lead single of the summer of 1987, then the title track’s rockabilly snap — and spends its middle stretch proving Michael could do tenderness as well as anyone alive. “Hand to Mouth” arrives as the conscience of the record, the track that says this singer wants to be heard, not just loved. It is the clearest early evidence of the seriousness that would later produce “Praying for Time,” the song that announced Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1. Michael the pop star could fill arenas; Michael the writer of “Hand to Mouth” wanted to fill them with something to think about.
Sonically, the track shows off the two musicians who mattered most to the Faith sessions besides Michael himself. Burns, a session veteran, gives “Hand to Mouth” its guitar snarl, the same controlled fire he brings to the album’s other guitar-forward moments. Michael’s own LinnDrum programming — the instrument he had essentially learned to play like a drummer — gives the song its relentless pulse. The combination is leaner than the album’s famous ballads and meaner than its dance tracks. Nothing is wasted: the keyboards stab rather than shimmer, the percussion pushes rather than decorates, and Michael’s vocal, usually an instrument of seduction, turns urgent and accusatory.
The Faith world tour carried the album’s deeper cuts to enormous audiences, opening in February 1988 at the Budokan in Tokyo before crossing Australia, Europe, and North America. On stage, “Hand to Mouth” translated into the set’s jolt of electricity — the song where the lights went harder and the band leaned in. It was never released as a single and never troubled the charts on its own, which is precisely why it stayed a fan’s discovery rather than a radio memory. The 2011 remaster of Faith, which added extended versions and demos to the original album, gave the deep cuts a fresh hearing, and “Hand to Mouth” emerged as one of the set’s revelations: the hit machine with its guard down and its fists up.
What to listen for: the LinnDrum pattern, programmed by Michael himself, which hits with a drummer’s instinct for space; Burns’s guitar, which answers the vocal like an argument; and the way Michael’s voice shifts register between the verses’ reportage and the chorus’s release. The production, for all its eighties size, leaves air around the instruments — Porter’s engineering lets you hear the room. And beneath the polish, the song’s dynamic tells the whole story of the album in miniature: a perfectionist who could have coasted on beauty, choosing instead to spend four minutes on the people the beauty business leaves behind.
The album’s singles run remains one of the great campaigns in pop history: “I Want Your Sex” kicked down the door in the summer of 1987, and then came the title track, “Father Figure,” “One More Try,” and “Monkey” — four consecutive No. 1 hits on the Hot 100. “Hand to Mouth” watched all of it from the album’s second side, the conscience the campaign couldn’t quite commodify. That is the paradox of Faith: the most controlled pop album of its era, engineered hit by hit, with its rawest nerve left exactly where the deep-cut listeners would find it. The hits made Michael a superstar; the album track reminded him why he wanted the control in the first place.
“Hand to Mouth” never became a hit, and in the long shadow of Faith’s singles it rarely gets named. But it is the track that proves the album’s reputation for control was about more than sound. George Michael controlled this record so he could say exactly what he wanted — and what he wanted, in the middle of the biggest pop album of 1987, was to sing about the people living hand to mouth. The anger was real, the craft was absolute, and the combination is why the song still lands.