As the band felt they had "screwed up" the video, further footage of Michael singing the song onstage was later shot at the Lyceum Theatre, London.
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With 'Careless Whisper' I remember EXACTLY where it first came to me, where I came up with the sax line. I can remember very vaguely where I was when I wrote things after Wham! got off the ground, but with 'Careless Whisper' I remember exactly the time and place.
The music video follows George playing a man showing guilt over an affair, and his acknowledgement that his partner (played by Lisa Stahl) is going to find out.
After Wexler booked the top saxophone player from Los Angeles to do the famous solo: "He arrived at eleven and should have been gone by twelve," said Wham! manager Simon Napier-Bell. "Instead, after two hours, he was still there while everyone in the studio shuddered with embarrassment.
He said in 1991 that it "was not an integral part of my emotional development...it disappoints me that you can write a lyric very flippantly—and not a particularly good lyric—and it can mean so much to so many people. That's disillusioning for a writer."
Steve waited and then discovered that the solo wasn’t that easy to play in the written key, as his old Selmer Mark VI tenor didn’t have a top F# key. So, the engineer slowed the tape down so that Steve could record the solo a semitone lower than intended.
The key line, “I’m never gonna dance again, guilty feet have got no rhythm,” conveys the pain and shame of making a mistake that cannot be undone.
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"Once the tape was put back to the normal speed, a 'unnatural' saxophone sound was created that sounded a bit like an Alto in the Paul Desmond vibe, but lacking a bit more depth and darkness to the sound.
Jazz musician Dan Forshaw later revealed that saxophonist Steve Gregory had got a call to re-record the song's sax solo, and he was the 11th saxophone player to record the solo as George wanted to get the sound he hoped for.
He just couldn't play the opening riff the way George wanted it, the way it had been on the demo. But that had been made two years earlier by a friend of George's who lived round the corner and played sax for fun in the pub."
I didn't have a proper note on my saxophone, I had what we call a fake fingering I had to do to play it. So it didn't really sound that smooth. It didn't sound that great. And so having been around for a while, having had a bit of experience, I suggested to him, I said, 'look, if you took it down by a semitone, a very small amount, I'd have all the proper notes on my horn and we could see how it sounds. So that's what he did, he sort of did his calculations and took it down a semitone, so I went out again and I played it in a lower key and when after I finished it I went back into the control room and he played it back and he put it back up to the proper speed, and as he was playing it back, George walked into the studio, and he said 'Oh, I think we got it!' Then he pointed at me and said, 'You are number 9!'"
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Although George Michael co-wrote the song with his Wham! partner Andrew Ridgeley when they were just 17, it stands out as a much more mature and introspective piece than their earlier pop hits.