{"id":716865,"date":"2026-07-29T07:32:30","date_gmt":"2026-07-29T07:32:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/716865\/"},"modified":"2026-07-29T07:32:30","modified_gmt":"2026-07-29T07:32:30","slug":"inside-story-of-whams-wild-china-tour-andrew-ridgeley-explains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/716865\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside story of Wham!’s wild China tour, Andrew Ridgeley explains"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1985, Wham!<\/a> became the first Western pop act to play Communist China, and British New Wave filmmaker Lindsay Anderson came along to capture George Michael<\/a> and Andrew Ridgeley<\/a>\u2019s historic expedition. However, Anderson\u2019s resulting $1.5 million documentary, If You Were There\u2026, was scrapped, because both Michael and Wham! manager Simon Napier-Bell were displeased that Anderson had focused more on China than on the actual band and had utilized far too little concert footage.<\/p>\n

\u201cI’m not surprised that Lindsay’s cut was scrapped,\u201d muses Mike Christie, director of a new and very different documentary, Wham! 10 Days in China, now playing in limited release. \u201cIt didn’t really have a vision. It’s a nice, interesting kind of film, but it didn’t have a drive. It’s quite ambient. It’s certainly not a pop documentary.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"WHAM!\"<\/a> \"Willie<\/a> <\/p>\n

Christie\u2019s film is actually a third cinematic attempt to document Wham\u2019s Chinese trip. In 1986, just 14 months after their concerts in Beijing and Canton (now Guangzhou), the U.K. pop duo played their farewell show much closer to home, at London\u2019s Wembley Stadium, where a drastic recut of Anderson\u2019s film, edited by music video director Andy Morahan and retitled Foreign Skies, was screened for a Guinness World Record-setting 72,000 fans \u2014 including Christie\u2019s own sister. (Anderson\u2019s If You Were There\u2026 didn\u2019t get a public screening until 2024, due to it being blocked by Michael and his estate.) <\/p>\n

Four decades later, Christie gained access to \u201cnearly 21 hours of film rushes; that’s like a hundred cans of film\u201d \u2014 none of which, remarkably, was actually utilized by either Anderson or Morahan \u2014 to create Wham! 10 Days in China, which finally tells the full and fascinating story of the band\u2019s journey to the East.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cWe didn’t know this was even going to be possible, to be honest,\u201d marvels Christie, known for his work with Suede, Nick Cave, Pet Shop Boys, New Order, and Bono. \u201cWhen we first started talking about this project with the Wham! collective including Andrew, weirdly, the [Anderson] footage was kind of in cans in a warehouse. I don’t even know where the warehouse was! But no one was in a hurry to dig this footage up. \u2026 It took something like seven or eight months for all the footage to arrive; we were getting in dribs and drabs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Once Christie was able to go through all of 21 hours of footage, however, he was \u201cleft slack-jawed\u201d by many unseen, unscreened moments \u2014 including a scene of near-naked heartthrob Michael getting a massage while venting to the cameras about, ironically, the pressures of being constantly followed by cameras. (\u201cHe\u2019s not wearing any clothes! He’s wearing a towel!\u201d laughs Christie.) But the filmmaker also was fascinated by the more serious moments, like a tense Beijing press conference and a harrowing airplane emergency involving a touring band member (more on those incidents later). \u201cWhat began to emerge, especially through body language, was a lot of the narrative stuff became really, really apparent,\u201d Christie explains. \u201cYou were seeing discomfort, unhappiness, [along with] moments of joy, moments of fun.\u201d<\/p>\n

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But to fully understand and appreciate the context of 10 Days in China, one must look at the whopping 18 months that led up to those 10 days \u2014 when Napier-Bell, author of the memoir I’m Coming to Take You to Lunch: A Fantastic Tale of Boys, Booze and How Wham! Were Sold to China, wined and dined more than 140 Chinese government officials to make Michael\u2019s dreams of superstardom and world domination come true.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe very first meeting [with Michael and Ridgeley], we went to dinner with them and said, \u2018Right, let’s discuss what we’re going to do.\u2019 And George said, \u2018We want to be the No. 1 group in a year. And that’s all you’ve got,\u2019\u201d recalls Napier-Bell, who took on Wham! as a client after witnessing their \u201csensational\u201d breakout performance on Britain\u2019s Top of the Pops. \u201cI just laughed and said, \u2018That’s impossible. The No. 1 group has to be the No. 1 group in America, because it’s 60 percent of the world market. And you haven’t even had a record released there yet! Let’s sit down and talk about reality.\u2019 And he said, \u2018Nope. No. You’ve got a year.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe both had the desire to succeed. It was what drove us,\u201d says Ridgeley. \u201cIt was essential for us that Wham! was a success \u2014 and a success for George, personally. He was discovering himself. He hadn’t found the person, or at least he hadn’t been able to reveal to himself or bring out the person that he was. But he was very strongly opinioned, and he had great belief in his talent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Napier-Bell\u2019s business partner, Jazz Summers, responded to Michael\u2019s bold challenge by equally audaciously suggesting, as Napier-Bell remembers: \u201c\u2018Maybe we could make you the first Western pop group ever to play in China, and that would get on the news all over the world. And that would rush things a bit.\u2019 And George said, \u2018Yeah, I like that! Go and do that.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

One week later, Napier-Bell found himself in China. \u201cI was sitting in a hotel room alone, in this big, bleak country\u2026 thinking, \u2018What have I got myself into? Who could actually say yes?\u2019 And of course, the answer was [premier of the People’s Republic of China] Zhao Ziyang, probably the second- or third-most powerful person in the entire world. How was I going get from this hotel room to him and persuade him? That’s what I spent the next 18 months doing \u2014 and did.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Brokering the deal for Wham!\u2019s two China performances took Napier-Bell, who appears in Christie\u2019s documentary, a bit longer than his demanding new client\u2019s one-year deadline \u2014 because at first the veteran music manager, who\u2019d worked with the Yardbirds, T. Rex, and Japan, didn\u2019t really have a strategy. Many of Napier-Bell\u2019s early days in that lonely hotel room were spent cold-calling random politicians, telemarketing-style.<\/p>\n

\u201cI got a book from my embassy, which gave me the list of all the ministries and the names of the ministers. And I sat there in that hotel room and started calling at top of the list,\u201d Napier-Bell explains. \u201cEvery time I got through to a ministry, I tried to find somebody who spoke English. Sometimes it was just a cleaning lady, or sometimes it was someone high up who knew. And I said, \u2018Could you tell them Simon Napier-Bell has come from London and would like to take the minister to lunch?\u2019 I figured that would sound quite important to them: a foreigner, a posh name, and a good lunch. After I’d gotten a 10th of the way through the book, I gave up; it had been two days and I couldn’t do it anymore. I was too miserable. So, I flew home and told everybody it was going \u2018very well.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

But a month later, Napier-Bell returned to China and \u201camazingly, when I checked in the hotel \u2014 the same hotel \u2014 they said, \u2018You’ve got a message.\u2019 And the message was from the Minister of Home Resources or something like that: \u2018Yes, I’m about to come to lunch with you.\u2019 So, I called back and [arranged] the lunch with him, and he turned up in a Chairman Mao suit \u2014 you know, those sort of blue boiler suits. He’d come on his bicycle; a minister in most countries would arrive in a Mercedes, but he was on his bicycle.\u201d<\/p>\n

As it turned out, the minister had mixed up his Rolodex contacts and mistaken Napier-Bell for a coal buyer he\u2019d done business with. But that didn\u2019t matter to Napier-Bell, who seized the opportunity. \u201cI had my first minister!\u201d he laughs. \u201cAnd from then on I went back every month and bought lunch for him, and each month he invited more ministers, because I did good lunches. I paid for good lunches, and they didn’t get good lunches because they didn’t have nice big expense accounts. And bit by bit by bit, I got more and more people to come and have lunch with him. And each time, I went a little further in talking about the benefits of youth culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Once Napier-Bell had successfully wooed enough government officials, the dates were set for April 7, 1985, at the 12,000-capacity Workers\u2019 Gymnasium (the biggest stadium in Beijing at that time) and April 10 at Canton\u2019s 5,000-capacity Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. Napier-Bell then returned home to London to work on lining up the international film crews that would give Wham! all the publicity that Michael craved. But the China announcement befuddled the European media.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll the press said, \u2018Why Wham! \u2014 why not a nice left-wing [artist] like [British protest singer] Billy Bragg, someone who’s very sort of anti-capitalist? That’s what the Communists would like.\u2019 And I said, \u2018No, no, you don’t understand. What the government wants is a group who are not political, who don’t upset the status quo, who just are happy to get on the stage and play. They don’t want someone coming there and getting into politics,\u2019\u201d Napier-Bell explains. \u201cSo, to [Chinese officials], Wham! were the sort of the nice kids who did as they were meant to do by their government.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were a pop band. We weren’t encumbered by any kind of weight of youthful social consciousness. We were just really the essence of what we were, which was two young men having the time of their life,\u201d shrugs Ridgeley.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Amusingly, another U.K. band wanted to be the first Western music act to play China, but Napier-Bell was determined to stop them. \u201cFamously, Simon Napier-Bell sabotaged Queen’s attempt,\u201d Christie chuckles. \u201cQueen’s management were vying to take Queen there, so what he did was he made up \u2014 we call it a \u2018deck\u2019 now \u2014 a deck of Queen and a deck of Wham! Basically, he had pictures of Freddie Mercury in leather, Freddie Mercury shooting the [\u201cI Want to Break Free\u201d] video in drag with the Hoover [vacuum] And then he had a deck of Wham! looking like perfect teenagers. He effectively went to China and said, \u2018So, would you really like Queen?\u2019 \u2014 with all these rampantly clich\u00e9d sorts of homosexual presentation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ironically, Wham!\u2019s early look, for their 1983 debut album Fantastic, had been somewhat leather-daddy-coded, and by 1987, Michael \u2014 who, like Mercury, was secretly gay himself \u2014 would launch his solo career with a racy single called \u201cI Want Your Sex.\u201d (Christie notes with a laugh, \u201cAnd what about [Michael\u2019s controversial solo single] \u2018Outside\u2019? Can you imagine what they would’ve said about the \u2018Outside\u2019 video, the disco toilet?\u201d) But in 1985, the Wham! boys\u2019 wholesome and unthreatening image suitably impressed Chinese authorities. However, even after the success of their prophetically titled sophomore album Make It Big, Wham! weren\u2019t nearly as big as Queen, so Napier-Bell came up with another marketing scheme to impress doubting reporters.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe problem we had is when the foreign press and the British press asked why [Wham! were playing these shows] was I said, \u2018Because Wham! are huge in China and everybody loves them and knows their records!\u2019 And of course, that was a complete lie. No one there had ever heard of Wham!,\u201d Napier-Bell laughs. \u201cAnd so we had the problem that dozens of foreign journalists were going to come to the gig and realize straight away that nobody knew the songs at all. \u2026 So, I flew back to China and I found a Chinese Mandarin-language singer [Cheng Fangyuan, of Oriental Dance and Song Troupe], and we recorded Wham! songs in Mandarin and made a cassette, which was the Chinese singer singing on one side and Wham! singing on the other side.\u201d On the tape\u2019s Chinese-translated version of Wham!\u2019s biggest pop hit at the time, \u201cWake Me Up Before You Go Go,\u201d Fangyuan added some \u201cCommunist flair,\u201d singing: \u201cWake me up before you go go\/Men fight to be first to reach the peak\/Wake me up before you go go\/Women are on the same journey and will not fall behind.\u201d<\/p>\n

This reminded me of how when Wham went to China in the 1980s (first western band allowed to perform in the post-Mao era), they released a tape where one side was Cheng Fangyuan singing the songs in Chinese. pic.twitter.com\/nyN8ilkBAb<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 pan blurray (@panblurray) June 17, 2021<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWe gave the cassette away with every ticket which was sold, so that everyone who came to the concert would’ve heard the songs, and heard them in Chinese, and hopefully would sing along with one or two songs. Actually, we gave away two cassettes with each ticket,\u201d says Napier-Bell. \u201cI figured [fans could] keep one, and they could sell the other one and make back the money back from the ticket. And so a week before Wham! turned up, I saw in the local market that these cassettes were changing hands. It was good marketing, as it did set things off.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the sense of familiarity fostered by those traded tapes, Wham!\u2019s gigs, which featured Michael and Ridgeley accompanied by an 11-piece band and several backup dancers, were a culture shock to many curious young attendees. A breakdancer hired to warm up the audience before the Beijing event only confused concertgoers. (Napier-Bell acknowledges that this was a mistake, saying it \u201ckilled the atmosphere\u201d when the breaker ventured into the crowd and \u201chorrified\u201d venue personnel; the breakdancing footage in 10 Days in China is in fact quite surreal.) Then audience members were warned by security guards not to dance themselves, or even clap along to the music, despite Michael enthusiastically urging them to do so. A grumpy Michael and even grumpier Ridgeley were later confronted by reporters about this during their above-mentioned awkward Beijing press conference, footage of which now provides one of 10 Days in China\u2019s pivotal scenes.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was quite a complex argument [for the press] to try and make. There’s a feedback loop in there somewhere: \u2018How dare you do the thing you came here to do?\u2019\u201d says Christie, who could not believe the press conference footage even existed. \u201cIt kind of blew my mind. I had this really weird thing when we’d done the rough cut of the whole film \u2014 I was really nervous about how Andrew was coming across. I found myself slightly apologizing for how he came across [in the press conference scene]. I thought he’d be uncomfortable, because it’s quite uncomfortable to watch. But he was like, \u2018No, it’s fine.\u2019 Because we were trying to make a film that was authentic.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The other uncomfortable but definitely authentic 10 Days scene, which Christie had to work in thoughtfully and carefully, centered on an incident involving touring Wham! musician Raul D’Oliveira. The trumpet player suffered a severe psychotic episode while flying from Beijing to Canton \u2014 stabbing himself with a pen-knife and attempting to invade the cockpit, thus forcing the pilot to make an emergency landing back in Beijing so that D’Oliveira could be hospitalized for psychiatric treatment. The incident was not caught on camera, and Michael and Ridgeley were not actually aboard the plane because they were still in Beijing doing a television interview, but the existing reaction footage that Christie had to work with was almost more powerful.<\/p>\n

\u201cI’m a very instinctive filmmaker, even if sometimes it\u2019s not obvious at first. We always were going, \u2018What are we going to see when the plane incident is happening? What are we going to show?\u2019\u201d says Christie. \u201cAnd then narratively, we discovered that George and Andrew weren’t there, that they\u2019d stayed behind, so I said, \u2018Well, that’s what we’ll cut the plane with. We’ll cut the plane [scene] with them doing this. Because that’s what’s happening at the same time.\u2019 And we made that call before we saw the bit of footage of them being told [about D’Oliveira\u2019s breakdown]. Suddenly we see this moment where Simon Napier-Bell comes in and goes, \u2018The plane’s on its way back!\u2019 And they’re really shocked \u2014 I mean, they’re really, really, really shocked. And I think that odd juxtaposition, and the fact that that’s happening real time, is sort of startling. It’s amazing that the cameras were just running.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite any setbacks that occurred in China, Michael and Napier-Bell ultimately accomplished what they\u2019d set out to do: Wham! did become, if only for a very brief time, the No. 1 group in the world. \u201cThe musical performances just blew me away,\u201d Christie raves, and those vivacious concerts (footage of which Anderson bizarrely mostly left out of If You Were There\u2026, but Christie uses to great effect in 10 Days in China) won over Eastern audiences \u2014 including a young Cui Jian, the legendary musician now known as \u201cthe godfather of Chinese rock,\u201d who appears in 10 Days telling Christie that attending Wham!\u2019s Beijing show changed his life.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cI would hope that essentially people understand and get that Wham! was all about life and vivacity and joy. \u2026 That happiness and sense of optimism and life was what Wham! was about, and if people get that, then it will enhance their experience of life a wee bit,\u201d says Ridgeley.<\/p>\n

However, success came at a price. A little more than a year after the China concerts, with the groundwork now fully laid for Michael\u2019s even more world-dominating solo career, Wham! played their final concert at Wembley, and Michael and Ridgeley went their separate ways. \u201cI knew, and he knew, that his future lay outside of Wham!,\u201d says Ridgeley. \u201cWe were growing into men and adults, and it was very evident to both of us that that George’s songwriting was going to shape where he was going to go. \u2026 We necessarily couldn’t go on in life as Wham!, because we were changing and Wham! was that snapshot of our youthful years. It became evident that we’d have to bring it to a close.\u201d But Michael, who tragically died in 2016 at age 53, struggled with solo fame.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cNobody really likes not being able to just walk down the street or go for a walk with a dog or jogging or walking into a supermarket. You don’t have a private life ever again, and that goes with the territory [of being a pop star],\u201d says Napier-Bell. \u201cBut you know, right at the beginning when you manage an artist, you explain where they’re going. And they’re not going somewhere nice. It’s not going to be fun. Andrew understood that, which is why he was quite happy to withdraw. He’d had his fun. He left before he suffered any of that. George couldn’t. It was in his soul, in his being. He had to go on being what he was. And yes, once Wham! were over and he was a solo artist, he did begin to hate it. But that was also very much linked to knowing he was gay and not knowing what he should come out, or how to come out \u2014 and being afraid of the press, as much as he disliked them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI don’t think he ever regretted [going solo] but I think he probably missed the support that the context of Wham! lent,\u201d Ridgeley reflects. \u201cHe was out on his own. And he was quite capable of fending for himself, but at times it was really tough. \u2026 I think he probably at times felt that it was much harder than he’d bargained for.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Christie picked up on Michael\u2019s internal conflict, as the cameras trailed the photogenic singer and the media hounded him, while editing a \u201cvery quietly important\u201d 10 Days scene. \u201cGeorge and Andrew are in the Forbidden City, in Beijing, and the interviews at that point are really careful. And they are very much about George’s struggle with privacy versus success. I think he wanted success, but he wanted privacy \u2014 and that’s irreconcilable, really. I thought long and hard about his sexuality at that point. He was out to Andrew, he was out to [Wham! background singer] Shirlie, so he’d begun to come out, and he was still trying to rationalize the difficulty of that. Remember how well evil the press were about all aspects of queerness, whatever it was. Also, it was the height of AIDS and the moral panic of AIDS, so that was a pressure itself.\u201d <\/p>\n

Christie says the first person he screened his documentary for was his longtime friend and collaborator, Suede frontman Brett Anderson, and he ponders, \u201cBrett uses this fantastic expression, which I really love and we’ve talked about a lot, which is \u2018person and persona.\u2019 And I don’t think there’s any stronger example of that that I’ve come across than George Michael. You begin to get hints of the kind of person behind the persona, and there’s a kind of chasm. The mask is extraordinary. So, I think that played more of a role.\u201d<\/p>\n

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There are many layers to 10 Days in China \u2014 Michael and Ridgeley\u2019s core friendship, Michael\u2019s inner turmoil, the political significance and ramifications of a Western pop band playing a Communist country, the behind-the-scenes negotiations that made such a tour possible, even the whole meta movie-within-a-movie angle (some 10 Days footage actually shows the growing conflict between Wham! and Lindsay Anderson\u2019s film crew). And Christie has managed to explore all of these angles, all these years later.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was no guarantee anything like this would ever be made of this film. I think the stars aligned, so I’m really glad it’s getting attention,\u201d Christie grins. \u201cI did find the solitary moments really telling \u2014 George’s expressions, the little moments. There’s a moment in the garden party at the ambassador’s residence where the camera is pointing and George is on the edge of frame, and he stops. He starts playing with the camera. George’s body language, that kind of cuteness in a way, those kind of slight Princess Diana eyes \u2014 I found all of that really quite moving. The intimacy being backstage with them and all that stuff. It was quite a privilege having that access to that footage and being able to share that.\u201d<\/p>\n