03/20/2026
We have these synths at PhillyView Studios. So come on out and make some music like this genius did in 1987!
It might have gone on to sell 25 million copies, but George Michael’s 1987 debut album, Faith, didn’t exactly start on the firmest footing.
Released in May of that same year as part of the soundtrack to Beverly Hills Cop II, first single I Want Your S*x might sound relatively tame by today’s standards, but 40 years ago, it caused quite the commotion, facing radio airplay bans and censorship.
Despite this, I Want You S*x was a big hit, reaching number 2 in the US and number 3 in the UK. Not bad for a song that Michael said was “really easy to do”.
Armed with a LinnDrum, a Roland Juno-106, a Yamaha DX7, and a Greengate DS3 sampler, Michael got to work, but he didn’t go into the studio with any specific idea of what he was going to record.
As such, it was more about creating a groove, with variations every 16 bars or so to stop it getting too repetitive.
That said, one of I Want Your S*x’s most notable pieces of ear candy occurs right at the outset – the rhythmic synth riff you hear in the intro. This wasn’t planned, though – it came about completely by accident while Michael was working with engineer Chris Porter on something completely different.
"We were working on a song, again we just had the Juno, LinnDrum and DX7, and we'd connected them all up so that we could run them off MIDI,” Porter told Sound on Sound in 2013. “After doing some programming, we returned to the studio the next afternoon, I pressed 'play' on the tape machine, the MIDI obviously wasn't right and everything started making these weird noises. The drums were triggering random sounds on the Juno and DX7, starting to make what you now hear as the intro on 'I Want Your S*x': a strange squelching, pulsing bass sound.
“We recorded a few bars of that odd squelching noise, and it then morphs into the song, at which point the bass becomes the bass part and just the Juno, LinnDrum and DX7 provide the overall soundscape,” Porter explained.
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📷 Michael Putland/Getty Images
