A compelling new 90 minute documentary, WHAM! 10 Days in China, released in cinemas next month, shows unseen footage of the band’s 10 day trip behind the iron curtain.
In a rare interview, their ex-manager Simon Napier-Bell, reveals the truth about his plan to make George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley international stars. Simon, who managed WHAM! from 1983 to 1985, says: “I started looking after WHAM! after seeing them on Top of the Pops singing Young Guns, their first hit.
“They didn’t have a record deal and didn’t have a proper manager. Their lawyer was looking after them. We went to dinner at the Bombay Brasserie in London. I said, ‘right, let’s discuss what we’re going to do,’ to which George replied ‘we want to be the number one group in a year.’ I just burst out laughing.
“I said, ‘it’s completely impossible. No-one’s ever been the biggest group in the world in one year. You have to be the biggest group in America too. It’s 60% of the world market. And that takes four or five years. Even The Beatles took five years. So you can’t do it.’ George said, ‘well, you’ve got one year’.
“My business partner Jazz Summers jumped in saying, ‘maybe we could make you the first Western pop group to play in China. That would get on the news all over the world and would rush things a bit.’ George said, ‘yeah, I like that. Go and do that.’”
A week later, record producer Simon was sitting alone in a hotel in China, wondering how to deliver his promise. He says: “I was in China, without permission, without a word of Chinese, without even any Chinese money. I was so unprepared. I was so stupid.
“I sat there thinking ‘who in China could invite us?’ They didn’t want their own youth culture to flourish, let alone a Western one. I was sitting at the Holiday Inn in Beijing thinking, ‘what have I got into?’ I wondered who could say yes and, of course, my answer was the president, Deng Xiaoping. But how was I going to persuade him?”
Thinking on his feet, Simon trawled through a British Embassy phone book, cold calling any Chinese minister he could think of. He says: “That is what I spent the next 18 months doing. Every time I got through to a ministry, I tried to find somebody who spoke English. Sometimes it was just a cleaning lady.
“I said, ‘could you tell them Simon Napier-Bell has come from London and would like to take the minister to lunch?’ I figured that would sound quite important, a foreigner, posh name, and a good lunch.”
Disheartened, Simon went back to London – returning to China a month later, determined to make WHAM! global stars. He says: “Amazingly, when I checked back into the same hotel they said, ‘you’ve got a message’.”
A minister agreed to have lunch. Simon says: “He turned up in a Chairman Mao suit and was riding a bicycle. He said ‘very nice to meet you, very nice to talk about buying coal from Jiangxi’. He was the Minister for Energy and muddled me up with somebody else.”
But Simon was on a roll. Other ministers followed – eager to discover more about the mystery lunches. He says: “Each month more and more ministers came because I paid for good food. Over the lunches, I said ‘if you invite WHAM! or any group like that to come to China and the world sees that you’re open to having foreign youth culture come in, they’ll think you’ve really opened up’.
“It worked! After the first month, I had three ministers. By the 13th month I was entertaining 15 or 16 ministers and their translators. They ate a lot!”
Simon, 87, who now lives in Thailand, honed his sales technique door-to-door selling in his youth.He laughs: “I never told them why I was there. Maybe I said, ‘I manage a band in England’, but no more than that.
“Later on I told them, ‘If one day there was an exchange of youth culture, it’d be lovely if it was my band’. After the last lunch, one minister said, ’I want you to come with me.’ He had a red phone on his desk. He said ‘the red phone goes right to the top.’ He picked it up, spoke in Chinese, turned to me and said, ‘yes, you’re invited to China’”.
WHAM! Were invited to play two historic concerts – the first to 12,000 fans at the Workers’ Gymnasium in Beijing on April 7, 1985, followed by a show to an audience of 5,000 three days later at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Guangzhou.
On landing, George and Andrew were given a VIP tour of the Great Wall of China, as well as guest spots at umpteen banquets at the British Embassy. But George Michael was almost paralysed with nerves.
Simon says: “George was never nervous. But when he went on stage in Beijing on the first night he got stage fright. The band played the intro, he opened his mouth and nothing came out. He danced all around the stage again, clapping and tried again, it still didn’t come out. By the third time, finally a little bit of voice came out.”
Tough authoritarian organisers also instructed fans not to clap when WHAM! came on stage. Simon says: “When George clapped on the offbeat to try to get them to clap along, they thought he wanted applause. They all very politely clapped for about five seconds.”
But the opening night in Beijing was captured by 90 news crews from around the world, who all reported how a squeaky clean band from Britain, known for their hits Wake Me Up Before You Go Go and Freedom, had conquered China.
Simon says: “The following morning WHAM! were on ABC, NBC, and CBS News in America. It was 24/7, every hour on the hour, the top thing on the news TV for a week was WHAM! By the end of that week, they were a household name.”
WHAM! didn’t make much money from their 10 day tour, but the publicity was priceless. Simon says: “I told the Chinese ‘all we care about is that there are foreign TV crews to broadcast the shows to the rest of the world. That will get you foreign investment, and you can keep it from your own people.’
“That was the deal. So when WHAM! went to China, nobody in China knew they were there, but the whole of the rest of the world knew it. In the next 10 years, billions and billions of dollars flowed in, and modern Beijing was built, really, from that money.”
The new documentary includes restored newly digitised footage of the visit, seen through the eyes of the band and Chinese audiences. Simon, who has worked on the project for 18 months, says people will also learn the behind the scenes story.
He says: “I found a Chinese language singer and we recorded a cassette with WHAM! songs in Mandarin on one side and the originals on the other. We gave two cassettes away with every ticket sold, so that everyone who came to the concert would have heard the originals and in Chinese too.”
Still proud of his masterplan, Simon says: “People always asked ‘why WHAM!? Why not someone like Billy Bragg who is anti-capitalist?’ But WHAM! were the nice kids who did as they were meant to do. We told the British press that WHAM! were huge in China. Of course it was a complete lie. But when they started playing, the foreign journalists were wide-eyed with amazement.”
The WHAM! movie comes ahead of the 10th anniversary of George Michael’s death this year, aged 53, at his home in Goring-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, on Christmas Day, 2016, from natural causes related to heart and liver failure. Simon treasures his memories of working with George. He says: “He was a brilliant songwriter. He had a magical voice.”
*WHAM! 10 Days in China is in cinemas from July 28. Tickets go on sale June 24. For details visit www.wham10daysinchina.com; Simon Napier-Bell’s book, I’m Coming to Take You to Lunch, is out now.
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