Songfacts®:

• "Bad Boys" was the third single from Wham!, the English duo of George Michael and Andrew Ridgely. Their first two singles, "Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do?)" and "Young Guns (Go For It!)," were hits in the UK and established Wham! as a voice of young Britain, adeptly addressing teenage concerns with a mix of encouragement and defiance. "Bad Boys" follows along these lines. It's structured as a conversation between a teenager and his parents, with the youngster asserting his independence and the parents warning that he's in danger of falling into the wrong crowd and becoming a "bad boy."
  
  George Michael wrote the song, and quickly disowned it. In the Netflix documentary Wham! there's footage of him saying, "I just didn't know what to do, and I just wrote to formula. Adding, "I absolutely hated that single."
• It took George Michael about five months to complete the song, which was a long time in the world of pop music. He felt a lot of pressure to make it a viable follow-up single to the Wham! song "Young Guns," but also didn't want to just rewrite that song. It bogged him down.
  
  "I just got totally confused and through that confusion I had to write parts for all the various things I hadn't done yet," he told NME.
• Wham! recorded the song using an array of studio musicians, with Andrew Ridgely on guitar. It was released as the first single from their debut album, Fantastic, and it connected with their UK fans, going all the way to #2 and helping the album rise to #1. It was also their first chart hit in America, where it went to #60.
  
  Wham! followed it up with the single "Club Tropicana," which went to #4 in the UK. Their next album, Make It Big, was released in 1984 and did indeed make them big - huge, in fact. The lead single, "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go," went to #1 in many countries, including America, where they were embraced by MTV and experienced the same kind hysteria they had already fomented in the UK. "Careless Whisper," the next single, was another international #1 and with a much more mature sound, formed a bridge to George Michael's solo career.
• George Michael was indeed 19 when he wrote this song, bringing veracity to these lines:
  
  Dear Mommy, dear Daddy, now I'm 19, as you see
  I'm handsome, tall and strong
• Directed by Mike Brady, the music video is your chance to see George Michael leading a group dance sequence, which happens near the end after various scenes of him beefing with his fictional parents. Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video made these sequences almost compulsory in pop videos of the time.