GeorgeMichael scored a No.1 on the US Albums Chart on 16 January 1988 with his debut solo LP Faith. The record would stay inside the US Top 10 for 51 non-consecutive weeks, including 12 weeks at the summit. It reached No.1 in the UK as well, but bizarrely just for one week. Still, it remains one of the best-selling albums of all time, having shifted more than 25 million copies worldwide, and was certified Diamond by the Recording Industry Association Of America in 1996. It was also an awards hoover, scooping Album of the Year at the 31st Grammys and Favourite Soul/R&B Album at the 1989 American Music Awards. And this wasn’t a case where the public and critics were of opposing opinions with even the usually sniffy Rolling Stone magazine praising Michael as “one of pop music’s leading artisans, a painstaking craftsman who combines a graceful knack for vocal hooks with an uncanny ability to ransack the past for musical ideas and still sound fresh,” and dubbing the singer the “Elton John of the 1980s.”
Reflecting on the album in an interview with Mark Goodier in 2010, Michael said: “I absolutely wanted to be in the same stratosphere as [Michael Jackson and Prince], definitely. I’d gone from, a couple of years before, being perfectly happy with being on Top Of The Pops, to thinking, ‘I can do what Michael Jackson can do.’ I mean, he’d just done Thriller for fuck’s sake! I wouldn’t have the guts now. I wanted to be in that vein but, mostly, I wanted to make music as good as theirs.”