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There has always been something surreal about Wham!’s 1985 trip to China. George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley looked like alien visitors on the streets of Beijing, their bouffant hair and flamboyant outfits setting them apart from the Mao jackets and drab uniforms of the Chinese people they encountered.
Now the full strangeness of the duo’s brief trip, which made them the first western pop act to play in the country, is explored in a fascinating documentary film, Wham! 10 Days in China. Using previously unseen archive footage and featuring new interviews with many of the people involved in the tour, it shows the extraordinary impact Wham!’s two concerts had on their Chinese audience, as well as providing a snapshot of a country on the brink of great change.
Yet for Michael and Ridgeley, the tour was less about expanding cultural horizons and more about hardheaded commercial logic: as masterminded by their manager, Simon Napier-Bell, it was designed to create such an international sensation that they would be catapulted to top-tier status in the US without having to undergo the slog of a 90-date arena tour that might have put Michael’s voice at risk.
“And it worked,” says Ridgeley, now 63 and white-haired, looking athletic in a long-sleeved top and shorts – a kind of Club Tropicana smart casual – when we meet on a warm summer’s day in central London.
“When the idea was originally proposed to George and myself, I thought it didn’t stand a cat’s chance in hell. I wasn’t a fan, but George was pretty immovable on not touring in the States to the extent to which we would have to. It was a bit of a Hobson’s choice – China or bust. Reluctantly, I agreed to it. But it did ultimately achieve our aim. We were on national news in the States, we were in the newspapers.”
The film shows Wham! performing their hits in Beijing and Guangzhou, as well as dealing with the many other demands placed on them – having to make polite speeches at a banquet with Chinese officials, for example. Michael clearly found it hard to put up with a reception at the British embassy – “that was just not something that he cared for at all: the formality, the small talk, the artificial nature of the meeting”, Ridgeley says – and later went missing after chatting awkwardly to fans at a shop. For his part, Ridgeley bridled at the demands of the press, who were there to provide the publicity the band needed: we see him refusing to take his sunglasses off at a photoshoot on the Great Wall and unable to contain his disdain for journalists at a press conference.
“There was a fair bit of pressure, which wouldn’t have been there in usual circumstances – it was very different from a usual tour,” Ridgeley recalls. “We went there to achieve a goal, it was constructed to achieve a purpose, and so the context was very different.” He remembers having chaperones and feeling “slightly restricted” in Beijing.
There was certainly a strange atmosphere at the Beijing concert: the audience, who had little idea of what to expect or how to react, had been told to stay in their seats, and the band walked out to silence; while some people did get up to dance, one man was taken away by the police for getting too exuberant. Even playing their song Freedom could have been construed as a political act.
But for some Chinese fans, the tour provided revelatory exposure to western music. The film captures the excitement and confusion felt by Chinese audiences and includes interviews with musicians who were directly affected. “I think it counts as a historical event,” says Cheng Fangyuan, the singer who performed Chinese-language versions of Wham!’s songs on the tapes handed out to ticket holders. “It was like opening a window.”
The reason there is so much original footage of the tour is because Wham!’s management had arranged for a documentary to be made about it. In one of the most peculiar hirings in film history, the man they chose to oversee the film was Lindsay Anderson, the high-minded director of This Sporting Life and O Lucky Man!, who was then 61 and at a low ebb in his career.
The partnership proved to be an unhappy one: Anderson and Wham! did not take to each other, and the director was fired six months later, when the band rejected the film he presented to them.
The story of this ill-starred collaboration is an important strand in the new film. Anderson’s name was first put forward by the producer Martin Lewis, while Wham!’s co-manager, Jazz Summers (who died in 2015), is widely thought to have played a key role in the hiring.
“I thought it was bloody ludicrous,” says Ridgeley. “Someone like him, with his provenance and cinematic pedigree in the genre that he worked in, was just not the right fit for Wham! He only did it for the money – his letters on the subject make it very clear. He didn’t like us at all – he didn’t like Wham!, he didn’t like the idea of Wham!”
To make matters worse, Anderson twisted his knee at the Great Wall, on only the second day of the trip, reducing his involvement in the shoot, which was largely left to his five cinematographers.
Anderson himself appears on camera in footage used for the new film. Asked what it is he does, he replies, “Well, I’ve been wondering about that for the last couple of weeks. If anybody’s got any idea, I’d be happy to know.”
There is an excruciatingly revealing moment later on when Anderson, walking with a stick, approaches Michael from behind and claps him on the shoulder, while the star is holding court; Michael very conspicuously fails to turn round to acknowledge him.
Ridgeley remembers being appalled when he viewed Anderson’s cut. “It was as dull as dishwater and just not what we wanted as a record of the tour there, so it was just not fit for purpose,” he says. “It was a pretty straightforward and uncomplicated brief, to record Wham! in China. Lindsay evidently was extremely conflicted and would rather have made a film that Wham! weren’t in or wasn’t about Wham!”
He tried watching Anderson’s cut again last year: “I couldn’t make it all the way through – it was so dull.”
Wham! hired video director Andy Morahan to make a reworked version of Anderson’s film, which was given the title Wham! in China: Foreign Skies and shown to 72,000 fans at the band’s final concert at Wembley Stadium in June 1986.
The raw footage that Anderson’s crew had shot lay in storage for decades. No one had reopened the 100-plus cans containing the original reels of Super 16 film until director Mike Christie started work in September 2024. He and his team discovered more than 20 hours of footage, although the reels had been extensively cut to stitch together Anderson’s film and Foreign Skies.
As they could not find the film copy of Anderson’s original documentary, they used completely different footage to make the new film (some concert footage was borrowed from Foreign Skies).
Anderson kept a taped copy of his rejected cut, entitled If You Were There …, which is held in his archives at the University of Stirling. Michael prevented the film from being shown publicly, although it could be viewed by researchers on appointment. Following Michael’s death in 2016, it was finally screened to an audience as part of the BFI’s 2024 Anderson season, with the blessing of Ridgeley and Michael’s estate.
But Anderson’s admirers will be disappointed to hear that any official release of the film remains unlikely. “It won’t happen because George was very much against it ever seeing the light of day,” Ridgeley says. “If it was down to me, I don’t think I would have any particular problem with it.” He once even mooted the idea of the three films that have now been made about the China tour being collected as a box set.
Wham! 10 Days in China is the third documentary about the band in recent years, following Netflix’s Wham! (2023) and the BBC’s Wham!: Last Christmas Unwrapped (2024). The idea of looking back on the band’s legacy was a consequence of Michael’s untimely death, Ridgeley says. “Prior to that, George wasn’t going to be developing a Wham! legacy when he was pursuing his own career – that was understood by all.”
Ridgeley hopes there can be further projects to keep Wham!’s music alive. “It’s about developing new audiences and it is about trying to keep Wham! there or thereabouts in the musical consciousness. Fortunately we’ve got a really great catalogue of songs that assist us in that. All good music transcends generations and Wham!’s is no exception.”
English (US) ·