Here is a documentary that has a very important story to tell, maybe more important than it feels comfortable admitting. It’s about two separate subjects – or maybe three: Wham!, China and film-maker Lindsay Anderson. A superpower nervously edging towards western-style openness, a pop band nervously doing what needed to be done to make it big in the US, and a great film director, needing the money, taking on a project he didn’t really believe in.
In 1985, Wham!’s beetle-browed manager Simon Napier-Bell had a cunning plan for how George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley could break the US: Wham! would be the first ever western pop band to perform in mainland China. They would play where the Beatles, the Stones and Elvis had never played, and the resulting global publicity would launch them into the US. (He was right – it did.) In our modern age, the movie and music businesses routinely consider China as the key element of the all-important Asian market, but in 1985, Michael and Ridgeley were the Kirk and Spock of the charts, going where no pop act had gone before.
After months of patient negotiation with Communist party officials, Napier-Bell pulled off this brilliant coup; he got his boys two sensational, historic gigs in Beijing and then in Guangzhou, with photo-opportunities at the Great Wall. This would be a tough 10-day tour in which, like a royal or presidential visit, they had to tolerate the press in the embedded presence of the hated British red-top tabloids whose coverage they needed. For the same reasons, they also accepted film producer Martin Lewis’s proposal for a fly-on-the-wall documentary, and also his idea for a classy, prestigious director: Lindsay Anderson. But Anderson kept on pushing for a challenging culture-clash theme to the film and the music people just wanted a glorified promo reel, so Anderson was summarily fired after the tour, having been grumpy and disillusioned the entire time, and making no secret of his dislike for Wham!’s music. (Perhaps Anderson thought he could do something like Antonioni’s 1972 immersive TV documentary about China, Chung Kuo: Cina.)
A bland PR film was shown a year later, but now the amazing footage has been re-edited, with new talking-head interviews with surviving participants, most prominently Ridgeley – though it brings the film no closer to what Anderson wanted. We see how unbearably tense he and Michael were, and yet how courageous. They were in their early 20s, yet they were expected to make official speeches that might daunt professional diplomats, and had to handle hostile press questioning about the Chinese police cracking down on people dancing at their Beijing concert. (The authorities were, it was suggested, particularly annoyed by the song Freedom, although how much they understood of the English lyrics is an open question.) In Beijing, the audience was glacial, for whom Wham! were creatures from another planet, while in Guangzhou, having had access to Hong Kong pop, the crowd were more enthusiastic.
But the point was that Wham! triggered something that could not be untriggered: they gave the Chinese a taste of liberty. Four years later was the Tiananmen Square massacre. Was the Wham! Chinese tour therefore a world-historical event, the butterfly wingbeat that caused an earthquake? Maybe. But it’s not a possibility explored here. It would be nice to conclude that George and Andrew, having been essentially uninterested in China other than as a stepping stone to US glory, were overcome by a great love for that country. (There is incidentally also the question of their views on communism and the left, having played a benefit for striking miners the year before. Did that help get them the gig?)
Well … they never returned, although Ridgeley is shown in the present day thoughtfully looking out from the wall. 1985 was their annus mirabilis, the year of the giant US breakthrough and George appearing on stage with Elton John at Live Aid. Maybe the Chinese achievement only fully dawned on them much later. It’s a strange and riveting moment in pop and political history.
• Wham! 10 Days in China is in cinemas from 28 July.
