Wham! Ten Days in China: ‘riveting moment in pop and political history’

In 1985, Wham!’s manager Simon Napier-Bell came up with a “cunning plan”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. To help George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley break America, without them having to embark on a lengthy US tour, he’d send them to China, to become the first Western pop act to perform on the mainland. This, he calculated correctly, would create a blizzard of publicity that would propel the duo to fame in the States.

After months of delicate negotiations, Napier-Bell confirmed concerts in Beijing and Guangzhou as part of a 10-day tour. Veteran director Lindsay Anderson was hired to make a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the trip but Michael and Ridgeley didn’t like him or his film, and it was shelved. Now, his footage has been re-edited, and spliced with interviews with Ridgeley and others, to give a glimpse of a “strange and riveting moment in pop and political history”.