Fact #67455

Simon Napier-Bell (Manager, Wham!) : When we sat down and planned Wham’s three year trip to the top of the music business, we realised the problem with America. There’s no national press and therefore they’re not susceptible to image-building in the English sense. A Top 10 hit depends on music and endless touring. At least three sixty day tours is the quickest anybody’s done it, whether you’re talking about Madonna, Billy Idol or anyone else, going back to The Beatles. In fact, only The Beatles did it nationally without touring.

Nowadays, touring requires doing interviews every single day, having photographs taken and talking to local radio stations. And George wouldn’t do it. He wanted to be top, but not as much as he didn’t want to do all that. Which is fair enough. It’s his decision, and I can understand. With that kind of schedule you have to have a personality that likes promotion, or at least doesn’t mind.

So we had to sit down and decide how to dodge that three years of slogging around America

So the China trip started literally as an idea over dinner. Let’s do this trip as a way to break into America without having to do five years of touring. It took me eighteen months and I think I went to China thirteen times before I got it sorted out. I talked to the Chinese government at the highest level.

I told them ‘It’s two concerts, it’s one week, it’s one pop group. You don’t have to open the floodgates. We can show the press around the world. It will do you a lot of good.’ And they said, ‘Great! What a good idea, but there will be no publicity in China. None.’ That was the deal. I said, ‘Fine.’

CBS financed the trip. They were fantastic, unbelievable, cut through all the red tape and came up with $500,000 in twenty-four hours.

The whole thing was corrupt from beginning to end. I got them in via an endless chain of corrupt officials taking bribes and trips to Japan and visits to brothels…

When I told George and Andrew, ‘You’re going to perform in China,’ they loved that idea, but when George realised it was going to be a beanfest of photographers, he said, ‘I want to make a few rules.’ The first of which was ‘No photographers.’

I said we were going to make a movie of it, and he very much liked the idea of a movie, but he had to be persuaded about the photographers.

As it got nearer to becoming a reality I became more interested into making it some kind of political event.

I called the Foreign Office and told them it must be considered as a cultural exchange, which was a load of crap, really, but on the level that it was the first thing since the Hong Kong Settlement, and they allowed me to get in touch with the ambassador. So I went out to Beijing again and convinced the ambassador to come to the concert. Once he had agreed to come, they had to send a politbureau member of equal status, which meant one of the top sixteen, and that’s how we got the minister of culture there.

So then, I had turned it into a cultural event. We told all the press in England that Wham! was the biggest group in China, which was a total fabrication. Nobody had heard of them in China. We were in China because the Chinese had been persuaded by me that doing a show like this would convince the west that they were opening up, and bring in lots of investment. They didn’t really want anyone in China to know we were there.

George Michael : What was basically going on was that the Chinese government was trying to encourage the Western world to accept Chinese products. They were saying, ’Look, we have our arms open. We are going to accept Western music.’ That was total bollocks. They used us. We were a propaganda item.

Simon Napier-Bell : So I then began to think subversively. I had a cassette recording made very quickly with a Chinese vocalist in Hong Kong, of Wham’s top fifteen songs done in Chinese. On the b-side were the Wham! originals. I thought that if we gave that away with every ticket, in the ten days before the show, the audience would get to know all the songs.

Then I had a better idea. We’ll give two away with every ticket so they can give one to a friend, or sell it on the black market. So subversiveness was taking over and, a week before the show, it had been pirated thousands of times and was the number one cassette on the black market all over Beijing.

In strict financial terms, it was going to be out of pocket about £500,000, and CBS said they would only provide that amount if we filmed it which, of course, we did. Once that was sorted out, CBS were very good. They came up with the money in 24 hours. I think the whole thing cost coming up to a million and a half dollars.

Of course, it was recouped eventually, because the video of Wham! In China probably only had to sell 500,000 copies to recoup that, which it easily did.

The whole point of the exercise was that it changed Wham! from being a group with one hit record in America to being the biggest group in America. That’s really what it was all about. That’s why we did it in the first place.

Jonathan Morrish (Head of Press, CBS) : I went along as the CBS representative, and my role was largely liaison with the 20-strong party of journalists. It was pretty much a life-changing event for all of us. The then-MD of CBS, Paul Russell, was very supportive, and he asked me to check out the record stores in China, to see what was on sale there, and report back. Ultimately, that led to Sony starting up in China.

Simon Napier-Bell : It was a huge touring party, about 140, but that included a lot of friends and a lot of journalists. It just got hugely out of hand, but in quite an enjoyable sort of way.

Mostly we flew on regular scheduled flights, but we had to rent a 747 for cargo from Hong Kong into Beijing, because we didn’t trust Beijing to have anything, so we hired all the equipment out of Hong Kong and Tokyo.

There was an incident in Hong Kong, when John Blake of The Mirror sent a very negative report back about something George was involved in. He cooked something up and it was very negative about George. He was fed a story, I’m not certain by whom.

Jonathan Morrish : It was a completely untrue story about George being ill, but the papers had paid a lot of money to send their people on this trip – none of them were being paid for by CBS – so they felt they had to get their money’s worth, and that meant they had to have a juicy story every single day.

Simon Napier-Bell : They ran it front page in The Mirror, and we happened to have our lawyer with us, Tony Russell, who was travelling with his wife, so we had a top level meeting where we got Maxwell on the phone and we said it was outrageous, it was the most important cultural exchange between East and West since the Hong Kong Settlement and George was representing England, just as the Prime Minister did, and we made Maxwell absolutely furious with John Blake, but he didn’t get sent back. He was there right through. But he was severely warned and did look very glum that day on the plane.

George Michael : The basic reason for going to China was to introduce our wonderful culture. It was to do something … Just for once, it was nice that you were the first and quite possibly the last. There is a certain privilege attached to that. But, once we got there, I just thought the whole thing was a shambles.

Lindsay Anderson (film director) : When we got to China we had a meeting with one of the Chinese ministers who spoke of Paul Robeson’s visit. George and Andy said, ‘We don’t know about him,’ and that was it. What was interesting was that they didn’t want to know about Paul Robeson. Normally you’d show a little interest. After all, Robeson was an interesting man and a superb artist, but it didn’t need to go any further than George and Andy had never heard of him. It defines the limit of their interest.

Andrew Ridgeley : I can’t think why they needed to build the wall. Who’d want to get in here?

Simon Napier-Bell : Andrew made these remarks, but you never knew whether he was completely devoid of historical knowledge or whether he was being funny. He had a very good dry sense of humour, and he knew how to wind people up.

It was really interesting on the tour that George, who really hated the idea of photographers, did understand that if they’re there, you behave well towards them and, as a result, you get good photographs. Andrew didn’t understand that. He was continually turning his back or putting his dark glasses on, so the shots of Andrew from China are much worse than the ones of George. It was usually the other way round.

Jonathan Morrish : I didn’t envy Wham! the position they were in with the press. After all, they were just two very young men, and they were thrust into the middle of this very intense political spotlight. It wasn’t easy for them to handle.

Andrew Ridgeley : We were so controlled in what we did and what we saw, it was difficult to see what the place was really like. It just seemed really oppressive. And the people seemed really lazy. Chinese people outside China always do really well for themselves and work really hard. But there, there isn’t any incentive. All the joys of life we take for granted, they’ve simply been taken from them. And the Chinese authorities, for all this talk of socialism, were the biggest bunch of capitalists and mercenaries we’ve ever come across.

Simon Napier-Bell : It was a shambles. Ridiculous … any film-maker could have made a great film from it but Lindsay Anderson fucked it up completely.
(Eye Witness feature by Johnny Black, first published in Q magazine)